At the Waldorf, breakfast was served. In its block-long kitchens, steam rose from copper kettles, Florida oranges rolled down pipe shafts to be cleaved for the juicer, the alchemical preparations for champagne truffles brought gourmet Pierre Revel from his usual tufted seat in the Hamilton Lounge into the kitchen for consultations on proper mincing of the negretto, a platoon of mushroom-hatted chefs from Brussels frowned as they tasted hollandaise sauce puddled on greenbrier-wood ladles, and a legion of metal whisks fluffed up sauces for the orders of eggs Benedict that Park Avenue doctors now prescribed as a morning antidote for the social side of the night before.

Then there was the sound of three chimes.

Cups froze, suspended in the air. A single chime meant a message for a guest in a room the size of a suite or smaller. Two chimes meant the message was for a guest in the Maidenhead Suite or even one of the penthouses. Conversations now began to dissolve like honey in warm water, for no one could quite remember having heard three chimes before.

A pageboy in white chinoise-silk gloves again struck the soft rubber mallet against his three-note glockenspiel. He called out, “Mr. Chaplin. Paging Charlie Chaplin.” Which, in an instant, caused a ripple. Heads craned, and then, upon realizing what their owners had done, cheeks reddened.

And then the pageboy was gone, down the speckled Bidjar runner and into the lobby, where he again struck his three tones, and called out the name of Mr. Chaplin.

In the Colorado Rockies, at the Grand Imperial Hotel, which had indeed looked imperial in its mining days, the manager uncorked the intercom tube that, in theory, addressed all public areas—in practice, it worked about as well as stretching two tin cans along a length of string—and called, in a voice whose transposition along the ether made it shimmer like a mirage, “Will Charlie Chaplin please come to the lobby?”

And in the Alexandria Hotel of Los Angeles, California, a boy in a red pillbox hat cupped his hand to his jaw and cried, “Paging Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin, please report to the concierge desk.” In a boarding house on the slopes of Butte, Montana, a landlady gingerly knocked on the door of the large bunk room, and cleared her throat so that the men in every dank cot could hear. “Is there a Charlie Chaplin here this morning?”

From the languid playpens of the Florida Gables to the great clapboard Outer Bank inns, from the flophouses of the Bowery to the pilgrims’ resorts near the Great Salt Lake, there were pages for Mr. Charlie Chaplin. According to the Boston Globe, Chaplin was sought that morning in over eight hundred hotels.

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