“I haven’t denied you very much in your life. Mrs. Field says I’ve spoiled you.” She held up her hand. “Let me finish.” She took in a breath. When she spoke, it was as if reciting an oath. “I don’t want you to be an actor.”

“But we haven’t really talked this through.”

“We don’t need to. It’s been obvious when I look out the window and see you on the sand dunes, pretending you’re in a movie. It was sweet at first.” She looked at her thumbs, which she’d lined up atop her hands, which nested in her lap.

Not only had his mother been watching him, she had concluded he was something of a moron. He wished she was at least angry at him. But she was attempting to discipline him, and so she was hesitant, a tack that always made him want to protect her, in this case from himself.

“You see,” she said, seeming to straighten her shoulders, cast off motherhood, and assume the mantle of sergeant, “people who perform antics for a living are, objectively, immoral.”

He had never heard her say anything like this. “But, Mom, the stories you hear about parties and all that, they’re exaggerated. You should— The article I was just reading about how to be your own press agent, let me read you—”

“No, no,” she said quietly. She had found a place to stand. “I don’t mean that. You have a good head on your shoulders, Lee. There’s a war on, and that changes everything. I have no feeling one way or the other about how actors behave, neither motion-picture nor stage nor circus nor …” She tried for reasons that will eventually become obvious to think of a performance other than “Wild West show” and could retrieve nothing, so she plowed on. “It’s neither here nor there. The profession itself is disturbing, and I don’t want you to have anything to do with it while soldiers are actually dying.”

“I don’t understand. What does one thing have to do with the other?”

“Oh, how could someone pretend to be a colonel in the army when there are real soldiers, giving their lives,” she said, and her voice cracked again.

He was baffled. “Do you mean me?” he whispered.

“I want you to do something that’s actually important in the world.”

“Acting is doing something important.”

“Acting is acting like you’re doing something important.” She shook her head. Her next words were distinct and commanding. “All right, my son. You love acting,” she said. “What else?”

He had in mind nests of young robins, otters too weak to cross streams, girls abandoned at the mouth of a silver mine, the love of friends he hadn’t made yet. But he sensed such things were the antithesis of what it took to succeed as a star—Photoplay would have told him so.