Around the time Lillian was taking Sam’s picture, I was cast in my first non-student production, at a theater in Silver Lake. I wouldn’t have spent the summer after my sophomore year back in Cleveland no matter what, but the play made it easier to break the news to Lillian and Grandma, who made me swear up and down that I would come home for Christmas. Silver Lake was too far to bike, so Leo taught me to drive, allowing me to conquer the Santa Monica Freeway.

With the excitement of getting my first professional acting gig and my driver’s license, I kept forgetting to refill my prescription, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was a week late. Technically, I knew that the previous five pregnancy-free years were thanks to the little white pill I’d been swallowing nightly. Then again, the unlikelihood that something the size and shape of an aspirin could prevent something so world-altering as a baby made it seem equally plausible that my body wasn’t the pregnancy type, a theory replaced by self-accusation as soon as my period didn’t come.

I called in sick to rehearsal the day of my clinic appointment. Leo gave me cab fare, since I wasn’t supposed to drive after the procedure and he was too busy to go with me. I didn’t mind. With Leo there, I might have felt compelled to share my thoughts, and I wasn’t in a sharing mood. There were few things I wanted less than a baby, but I couldn’t help doing the math: my mother was nineteen when she had me; here I was, twenty and knocked up. What I was doing at that clinic would have canceled me out had Lillian made the same choice. I wasn’t sure whether getting an abortion made me a shittier, more selfish person than my mother, or just luckier. By the time the gentle clinic doctor was done with me, I did know that because I wasn’t pregnant, I landed a play downtown after the one in Silver Lake; and after that show closed, I got a call from a casting agent, who said the director John Bradshaw had seen my performance and wanted me for his next film.

112. Pages from private journal (No 24), March 1976

The play I did after Bradshaw finished shooting was having its cast party the same night that Leo was invited to a dinner party at the home of some big-time art collector. Cast parties always went late, Leo told me; I could head there after the dinner was over. Roger Creeland didn’t buy single pieces, he bought whole series. Leo said if I cared at all about him or his career, I would come.

I figured it would be a house in the hills or on Mulholland, but Leo started driving north on 101. I squawked when I learned we were in for a three-hour drive to Santa Barbara, but Leo told me to can it. This guy was one of the biggest, richest collectors on the West Coast. When he invited you to dinner, you came.