The tiny corpse had been given a send-off from the human world. Fixed onto its mouth by the funeral-home embalmers, held into place with a crescent moon shaped from metal wire, there was a broad, toothless smile.

Three days later, Chaplin began work on The Kid, about a boy abandoned by his mother, and the tramp who rescues him.

It was his first film as good as he was.

Credits

I apologize to students of truth who find themselves arguing with information contained herein. Edith Wharton, busted for historical flimflamming in The Age of Innocence, wrote that slavish accuracy “must necessarily reduce the novel to a piece of archeological pedantry instead of a living image of the times.” Which is another way of her saying, “I’m Edith Wharton, Jack—I can snap you like a twig.”

When I wrote my first novel, about a stage magician, I was reluctant to spill which parts were based in reality and which were imaginary; as I said, it was like explaining how a trick was done. Which was another way of saying, “It’s magic, Jack—I can snap you like a twig.”

On November 12, 1916, Charlie Chaplin was indeed the subject of mass hysteria. And on September 15, 1918, Leland Duncan found two puppies on the World War I battlefield and named them after finger puppets. The surviving dog was the most successful film star of the 1920s, saving Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. And in 1918, the United States sent the 339th of Detroit to North Russia for reasons that are, with the passage of years, hard to fathom. Or distressingly easy.

I got some things wrong on purpose (I know My Official Wife wasn’t a comedy) and there are probably some things you know that I don’t. But the punctuation of Waldorf=Astoria belongs exactly as much as Pierre Revel belongs in their kitchens with champagne truffles. Also, source material occasionally contradicts what we think we know—for instance, contemporary military accounts used terminology that was technically wrong or allegedly not in use at the time (i.e., “top kick,” “we’re good, sir,” “gunnery”). I’ve kept the source material vernacular where it seemed appropriate. Special salutes to”:

Chaplin: David Robinson’s Chaplin. My Life with Chaplin, by his second wife, Lita Grey Chaplin, is frequently dismissed but was very useful. The films in the DVD collections The Chaplin Review and Unknown Chaplin are an excellent introduction to his work.

Hollywood: The Story of Hollywood by Gregory Williams; Silent Echoes and Silent Traces by John Bengston; The War, the West and the Wilderness, and everything else by Kevin Brownlow; Working Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross; Pickford by Eileen Whitefield; Without Lying Down (Frances Marion’s biography) by Cari Beauchamp.