These treks to Covina left me parched and cross; they ate up chunks of my time, and often Marian was late. I sat in the sweltering heat reading scripts, wondering if fate was punishing me for my arrogance in offering to Empire. Or perhaps I was being punished for my stupidity in asking Charlie Frye to front for a comic genius writer like Max Leslie. Charlie, for his part, guessed that Max was living in Southern California (how else could we have the pages so swiftly?), and he once asked me where, to which I replied in French, “None of your damn business.” The grueling handoff/edit/return went on for weeks, especially since the film did not wrap in the allotted thirty-six days, but went on so much longer that it could not be released at the end of 1955. Jonathan told me that when Denise heard this news on-set—in short, no hope of the Oscars for 1955—she went into a full-throttle rage, throwing things and cursing everyone, including Leon himself. She wrecked the set, and they had to rebuild it before they could shoot again. That took time, and tempers frayed all the more.

One night Marian was very late, and I didn’t leave Covina till ten. I called Charlie from a pay phone there. I told him I’d bring the rewrites to the studio the next morning, that he should leave my name with the guard at the gate. I could hear John Philip Sousa playing in the background.

I drove through the Empire gates early, but Charlie wasn’t in the Writers’ Building. Vic Hale told me he was on-set, Stage 17, adding for my benefit, “Charlie’s not much of a writer.”

“He’s better than you on his worst day, you scum-sucking toady,” I retorted.

Approaching the cavernous Stage 17, I entered quietly through a small door, and I stayed at the back in the darkness gazing at the well-lit set, Professor Bleeker’s futuristic lab. They were filming the scene where Professor Bleeker first notices what he believes to be messages from outer space. Jonathan’s comedic timing was perfect. He delivered his lines with airy efficiency as he swathed the emotional ignorance of Professor Bleeker in intellectual innocence. Unfortunately, Leon hated the scene, and he made his views known to the director, Phil Tobin, who instantly called, “Cut!”

Charlie, clutching his clipboard to his chest like a small surfboard in a big storm, joined me in the shadows so I could surreptitiously hand him the revised pages. He walked away without even reading them, and handed them to Leon. Leon told Charlie to wait in the tone of voice you’d use for a cur you ordered to sit. Leon read the revisions, and grunted, nothing more, before he called for a typist. He wanted ten copies made. He wanted to shoot the scene right after lunch. She hustled out at a run. Leon dismissed Charlie, who melted into the shadows.