He saw the scenes as clearly as if he had already shot them. They rang in a way that throwing pies never would. Then he heard his brother’s voice telling him the world would line up at his door to take turns killing him. Dogs as soldiers—the worst idea ever. You could never make fun of the war. There could only be praise and flowers and dignity. The war was safe for all the Mary Pickfords. He put a pillow over his face and bit down. For long minutes, he listened to his hissing electrical light and wished he had someone to talk to.

2

Chaplin awoke from a shiftless sleep and strange, half-constructed dreams, and there was some Victorian fanfare as in the music halls, the sound of trumpets, violins, and guitars.

Someone below his window was playing a son jarocho, with great brassy volume. There in the purple predawn, illuminated by streetlights outside the Athletic Club, among horses and eleven mariachis, standing up in his stirrups and playing the guitar with gusto, was Douglas Fairbanks. His smile was a simple one: it informed Chaplin that there was no use sleeping when someone as delightful as Douglas Fairbanks was around.

Fairbanks was a man whom film fit like a scabbard, in that you never noticed he was handsome until he moved. Then he was what Chaplin thought of as a movie star, exuding a notion that all life should be traversed by swinging from chandelier to chandelier.

And in person? There he was, smiling and singing “My Happy Heart,” only now he had stolen one of the band members’ hats, tossed it to the ground, and he was dancing around it in what he undoubtedly felt was a vivid Mexican hat dance.

Ten minutes later, Chaplin was on a horse next to Doug on a ride to the eastern hills. There was a wide trail with switchbacks among the chaparral that led from the edge of downtown, where the coyotes sometimes howled, up a gentle slope leading to the mouth of the Chavez Ravine. They made a wagon train of eighteen horses, for, in addition to the band, Doug had brought his cooks.

The mariachis played tunes to which Doug sang the first two or three lines, allowing the band to finish them on their own, because he could never be bothered to learn anything all the way through. He had never even read a script he had filmed; it took too much time.

They arrived in a clearing among gum trees, and camp was quickly set up. Doug and Chaplin watched the sun illuminate the downtown, the hamlets and burgs beyond it, the morning haze coming in from the sea. Doug tended to the campfire, over which a frying pan heaped with rashers of bacon sizzled. It was criminally easy to imagine him as a knight, dressed in the colors of Artcraft Studios, a blue-and-gold combination, carrying a blazon showing himself.