It reminded him of all the Chaplin look-alike contests. He’d considered entering one, then heard a rumor that he had done so and had come in fifth. For some reason, for a man so much on the American mind, it was important that he should lose.

Pickford. Chaplin once mentioned in an interview that he had made his stage debut at age four. Within a month, he read Pickford saying she’d started at three. Immediately after he’d become the highest-paid person in America, at $670,000 a year, she argued to her employers that she made more films than he did, and didn’t tend to shoot ten thousand feet of film for a single reaction shot. The argument was an exaggeration, but effective—she received a million dollars. She started calling Zukor, her boss, “Pops.” When Chaplin negotiated his new contract, he noted that he at least wrote and directed his own films, and he had no choice but to ask for $1,025,000.

Lately, the war had sharpened things between them. Chaplin did not think war was a very good idea in general, and the more he knew of this one the worse it seemed, but it existed nonetheless, and he felt sympathy for the men in the trenches. He donated a hundred thousand boxes of chocolates to the Red Cross.

His feeling of benediction lasted until he saw the headline in the Los Angeles Times: Mary Pickford had become an honorary colonel in the Red Cross Corps. There was a photograph of her in a specially made uniform next to her brother, Jack, who had once had a terrible reputation (like all other Pickfords) as a layabout and a drunk, but who was newly handsome and forgiven, having signed up for the United States Naval Reserve.

Further, Mary had adopted her own brigade, the 143rd Field Artillery, attending their drills and sending each of them off with a locket that contained a photograph of her.

Was Pickford’s idea to give the men something to fight for—her? He imagined men pulped by machine guns, piles of gassed corpses, tongues bloated, skins blistered, the battlefield as greasy as a butcher’s floor, the unfazed smiling Mary Pickford on a million punctured throats.

Chaplin staged a celebrity boxing match for two thousand patrons and at the interval gave a halfhearted speech inviting men to enlist; to his dismay, twenty-five did so. At the next interval, Pickford promised an autographed photo for each new inductee, and 150 men enlisted.

One hundred fifty to his twenty-five? He was outraged. Why had she done so much better than he? Was she kept up nights, knowing that she was a siren whose song had lured 150 men to their possible deaths?