And sure enough, after about six months, he'd have a detailed outline of the book and know what and where every number was going to be. Then it would take him another year to actually write the show. Once his outline was set he never deviated from it. “That's why I wait until I know I've got it before I start. So I don't have to waste time.”

But now, with his new, looser work schedule, it took almost twice as long as usual for Bobby to come up with a first draft of Family before he was ready to start writing. And he still didn't have his last scene sketched out. All he knew was, at the very end of the play, someone—he didn't know who—was going to sing “Carrie's Moon Song.”

He told Rose the ending would come to him, which was a very misty statement from a man who normally set his outline in concrete. But Bobby wasn't worried. He looked at Carrie, who was now almost three. “It's her show and we'll do it together,” he said.

It was also Lu's show. Bobby had asked Lu to play the grandmother and Lu had jumped at the chance, even though the musical didn't have a starring role for her and for the first time in her career, she'd be sharing billing with two other women. The truth was, Lu needed a new Bobby Manning musical even more than the investors did. Lu's career was circling the drain; she'd done three shows that hadn't made it and she was looking for a comeback.

Chapter 30 - New York 2008

“BY THE EARLY seventies, I was washed up,” Lu said. She and Carrie were still sitting at the picnic table under the grape arbor. The baked ziti was in front of them, but neither of them had eaten much. Carrie was dying to ask her grandmother what had happened to the song she'd inspired, but she didn't want to break Lu's flow.

“When I realized I was on my way to being the first question in a ‘Where Are They Now?’ quiz, it stunned me,” Lu went on. “I'd done The Lady with Bobby in 1962, and that show had given me a new rep as a serious actress—up till then I was just a cute ingénue. Then Bobby wrote another show for me called Soldiers. It was an antiwar piece—everyone was angry about Vietnam in those days—and it was totally different from The Lady. I won my second Tony for Soldiers, and after that I thought I was golden.” Lu chuckled sadly. “That was really stupid.”

“With two Tonys, I think most people would think they were golden.”