“I don’t care how you sell them. Mother and Daddy don’t care. He just needs to work again. To feel as though he has some hope.”

“Sure, Susan. I understand. Leave me your phone number, and I’ll call you. But don’t come back here, all right?”

She wiped her nose. “The car is borrowed. Don’t worry.”

“So you do know what’s at stake here.”

“How could I not know what’s at stake? My parents are living in Mexico and can never come home. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t a matter of life and death. Really, Roxanne, my parents’ life or death!”

The scripts were true Simon Strassman Westerns. Full of energetic derring-do, distressed damsels, laconic, straight-laced Good Guys whose underarms never darkened with sweat, lots of horses and dust and a gunfight at the end where the Good Guy wins, and the girl looks up at him full of chaste admiration. Still, it had not escaped my attention that though the Saturday serials in theaters had vanished, the form, now known as the “adult Western,” was all over the television. These weekly serials were cheap and easy to make. Each episode could be shot in six days, max; unknown actors could be put under contract for two hundred fifty a week and made to work six days in a row while the network shot sometimes as many as thirty-nine episodes to fill up TV screens night after night. For the writers, the actors, and the crew, TV Westerns were the equivalent of chopping cotton, as Terrence said—downright servitude. But it was work, and people wanted to work no matter what. Warner Brothers Television was the main maw for TV Westerns, and I had a new contact there, none other than Ernest Todd, the guy I had met at the Banner Headline party whom Warner Brothers Television had seduced away from CBS. The next day I asked Thelma to type up two carbons of each. I called Jimmy Ashford.

“Hey, Roxanne! You’ve sold my script, haven’t you?” In the background I could hear the tinny wail of an infant.

“No, Jimmy, but I have a proposition for you. Come by the office at your convenience.”

Two hours later he walked through the door. I offered Jimmy the possibility that he might want to put Simon’s Westerns under his name and I would sell them to television. I started to explain the risks, the Reds, and the need for secrecy.

“Fuck HUAC, and fuck the FBI! Of course I’ll do it! We’ve had to move in with my folks at the walnut farm. I never want to see another walnut.”