Several months later, early summer of 1919. The daily hubbub at the sun-dappled maternity ward of Kaspare Cohn Hospital, on Whittier. Expectant fathers put their wives into wheelchairs, nurses sternly shoo them away, men pace down the lengthy hallways, men anxiously finger cigars in the lobby, and huge heaping baskets of freshly laundered pink or blue blankets are waiting to be used.

“Kaspare Cohn” was unwieldy, so it was nicknamed “Cedars of Lebanon,” which was more mellifluous. And since the name went back to Gilgamesh, it suggested that Los Angeles had anchor chains and ballast and would not just float off into the air one day.

A touring car pulls into the circular drive. It belongs to a very wealthy man, a comedian who owns his own studio, a tragedian in the making, a terrible son, an awful husband, a romantic, a brat, a dancer, a mimic, and a genius. It halts at the curb. There he is, inside the car, but it is impossible to see him, for the eternal rays of sunshine are reflecting against the window, rendering him into outline, and who could pretend to read his mind?

Today is July 7, 1919, the day Mildred Harris Chaplin gave birth to a boy, whom she named Charles Chaplin.

Chaplin had spent the long morning before the birth at Russo’s Toys for Girls and Boys, on Santa Monica Boulevard, selecting and setting aside stuffed animals.

They had closed the store for him, and he sat fitfully in the aisle with badgers and tigers and bears and skunks (skunks!), making them move across the floor, and arranging them in tableaux in which predators and prey all stood together with large, doped smiles on their faces. What was the use of stuffed animals?

He was imagining that Mildred would not birth a child but, with screams and agony, a lead-weight, bitter-smelling skull. He imagined that, wherever he saw it, wrapped in swaddling clothes that made it into a horrendous parody of all he might hold dear—a wife he actually loved, a life he actually wanted—it would grin back at him in triumph. It would reek of sulfur or phosgene or the vile chemicals in the nitrate bath, and he imagined Mildred wanly passing it to him, asking him to love it.