A purple sort-of-Staffordshire terrier, Buttons, enjoyed biting down on a rubber inner tube, and being taken on what Alf called “an airplane ride” by being spun in the air. He could be put to use biting the Little Fellow on the behind. Mut (with one “t”), white with a brown patch over his left ear and eye, was quite docile, and might make a sweet hero. The collie mixed with Australian shepherd was a glutton, easily tempted by treats, and the two small dogs would bark at the slightest provocation. Chaplin filmed his attempts to shush them when stepping past a cop: they were inconsolable, not even cheese would silence them. The largest, a wolfhound–Great Dane, had a high-pitched bark, but that never mattered on camera, where the curl of his lip and the sudden movement of his jaws was inspired. On Tuesday, January 15, 1918, he had Alf write it in the studio log: “Ashes the wolfhound will be a good villain.”

“This was a good day’s work,” Chaplin announced to his crew that afternoon. “Carry on,” he said, and since it was four o’clock, his touring car arrived. The cry “He’s leaving!” went up, and Kono, the chauffeur, opened the door for him, and the whole Chaplin Studios team—seamstresses, prop master, stagehands, carpenters, lighting crew, Rollie the cameraman, the payroll girl, the assistant director, the whole art department, the portrait painter, the several men whom Chaplin had rescued from disaster and whose jobs were now ill-defined except to be of good spirits all day long, and the entire company of actors, and Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terrell, men whom no one looked in the eye, men whose jobs were mysterious (they wrote ideas for factions on slips of paper and put them into a drawer in Chaplin’s desk, where they were never seen again), and Edna—lined up on either side of the gate and waved goodbye to him, and he waved back with excitement, and his car pulled out of the studio. The elderly woman in the floral-print dress who closed the gate behind him—once, she had sung in the dance halls with his father and mother— waved goodbye, sadly.

Only when the car was a block down Sunset did he realize he had just spent two weeks playing with dogs. They had shot a few thousand feet of film, not really that much, but little of it relating to dogs. Instead, he had a faction of the Tramp trying to get a job at an employment office and being muscled out of the way by larger, rougher workers. He’d done it to a metronome. It was adequate.

There were envelopes in the car, scattered across the backseat. Fan mail. He opened the first piece at hand, a gentlemanly looking envelope of granite hue. The letter inside was of matching color, folded precisely.

Hotel Drisco
Detroit, Michigan

Charles Chaplin, Esq.
Chaplin Studios
Hollywood, California

19 January 1917

Dear Mr. Chaplin: