Mary stood, clutching her lover’s hands between her own; as the camera found her in close-up, her eyes were misty. Through mere proximity to the manliness of the 143rd, her confidence was no longer that of a tremulous schoolgirl one step less agile than a barnyard animal. She was awakened. Her beau brought into the frame a ring set with a tiny, modest diamond, whose facets cast reflections everywhere, and the audience shouted out their appreciation. Would she marry him? Her mouth pumped open and her fists went into the air as she yelled, “Yes! Yes!”

“Kiss!” The audience yelled. “Ma-ry Pick-ford! Kiss!” There were tears in Mary’s eyes as she finally brought her mouth to her man’s. A pair of women in the front row were crying, and Ironside could hear sniffling from the darker corners of the church. And he knew that, all around the world, in grottoes and houses and mudflat huts, it was the same: there were groups watching Mary Pickford find her man, they were welling up with tears in all parts of the globe, from the port of Bar in Montenegro to lean-tos on the plains of French West Africa to the darkest recesses of Indochina.

The iris of the camera blazed outward, and then drew in, a tightening circle on the happily-ever-after kiss, a goodbye kiss that brought tears in a tiny church in Russia, in New York City, in the Dutch East Indies, and as far away as the cradle of civilization itself, where young, amazed nomads in tents watched and wiped tears from their eyes, there on the desert sands of Mesopotamia.

Sing-Along

“Smile”

Interviewer: Suppose you were going to take a long vacation—then what?

Chaplin: Russia. The thought of it fascinates me.

—Picture Play Magazine
December 1916

Smile
What’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life
Is still worthwhile
If you just smile

—lyrics by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons;
music by Charlie Chaplin

So ends the larger story. But you never want to fade out on landscape alone. And so here are faces, dozens of them, chubby or gaunt, serious or pleased, all belonging to prosperous men who had dressed that morning to impress one another, men who were now shaking one another’s hands as they arrived, then asking questions, then shading their eyes and peering inside the bronze-and-leaded-glass front doors of the most magnificent hotel in Los Angeles. Which for reasons unknown was closed to them.

They were hungry.

When the Alexandria was launched in 1906, the newspapers emphasized its grandeur by—as was the style—citing its European chefs, its British concierge, its dining-room ceilings designed by Tiffany of New York City. But of late, when people discussed the Alexandria, they discussed the carpet.