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strives for that specious intimacy with voters, and it’s one reason Chaplin would inevitably become a political figure, an example to the world.
    He started at Keystone in 1914 at $175 a week, and his success was so rapid that in 1915 he joined Essanay for $5,000 a week. A year later he went to Mutual for $10,000 a week. He relished the money, but depended on another aspect of his contract: the right to make his movies without interference. Chaplin would never be a movie stylist, though he became expert at filming jokes, especially if they carried a kick of malice. Without years of training or hundreds of short films, Chaplin mastered simple movie storytelling and let his narcissism flow. There were many rival comics, but Charlie dared to say, it’s me! Only a few years earlier, the infant business had been taken aback when audiences asked, “Who is that girl?” on seeing a pretty girl in a bathing suit and wanting more.
    This is not to be critical of Chaplin, for his ego was natural and heartfelt. He gave himself to the camera and the world of strangers. He is the light in his own films—though those movies often have a rich sense of place and sunlight, too. This stress on light is not to be underestimated. Time and again in American film—and this is true of Chaplin in the Sierra doing The Gold Rush and of John Ford in Monument Valley making Westerns—the light is like a gift, and the movie is constantly rewarding our plea “Show me!”
    Show them something they have never seen. But beware if they ever decide they have seen everything.
    American films film the light: it is their energy, their optimism, and their happiness. So Chaplin turned the snowy locations of Truckee (standing in for the Klondike) into a realm of threatening beauty. The discovery of gold had made Northern California; it was the model gambling coup, and gold has its own bright light. Chaplin was fascinated by stories of those miners, especially the tragedy of the Donner Party—that’s why food is such an obsession in the picture. The Gold Rush (1925) is a comedy, but it was made at almost the same moment as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed , in which the light and the Death Valley desert are metaphors for mania. Charlie stays cool and humble in The Gold Rush , but his gamble grossed $6 million (on a budget of over $900,000—or nine times the cost of The Birth of a Nation ).
    Chaplin was the most transforming star of early cinema and, by the early 1920s, the best-known image in the world. But his own reaction was ambivalent. For Chaplin did not look like Charlie. In life there was no mustache; he dressed fashionably; and his hair began to go white in the 1920s. He worked hard to erase his Cockney accent and make up on his education. He liked society parties and collected meetings with wise men, political leaders, distinguished writers—and women. Just as Louis B. Mayer courted Herbert Hoover, from secretary of commerce to president, Chaplin was a social climber.
    There was some public resentment (and some amusement) that his pay was four times the combined income of the nine Supreme Court justices. He never applied for American citizenship. He took risks pursuing young women, yet many women wrote offering to take care of him. Something of the outsider remained, a need to defy the public that adored him. We love stars, for they tell us we can transform ourselves. But we envy their escape from anonymity, and with Chaplin, in time envy turned to hostility. From his point of view that split signaled a fickle, unpredictable public, a pressure that would help drive the richest tramp in the world out of America.
    His unstoppable rise soon carried him into a diminishing run of feature-length films, pictures he labored over and hesitated with. Nothing reveals Chaplin’s authority or his economic power more than his waiting for days and weeks at a time until inspiration came along—while keeping his crew on