On a winter day in 1916 American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity. Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that brings together the fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America's doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications--studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, "his mother."