Sensing that they were hovering on the edge of a full-tilt quarrel, I stepped outside to get some air that wasn’t swathed in cigarette smoke. I thought about Max writing away in that claustrophobic clapboard house that backed up to an alley in Riverside. I thought about Terrence down in Montgomery in his room at Reverend Cooke’s, a gooseneck lamp on his desk, pounding out prose on the Royal. I thought about Simon in Mexico City, about Jerrold Davies now safely back in Paris, working in the apartment where a golden statuette served as a humble hat rack. I thought about Jimmy in his new tract house away from the walnut groves, about Art, who, with the money Paragon was prepared to pay him, was getting ready to move out of the Quonset hut. I thought about Maurice in the Hollywood Hills listening to his mother gripe about bagels. And of course, Charlie here, reveling in glamour and applause. Who would have ever believed that I, Roxanne Granville, would connect all these disparate lives? I stood at the top of the stairs and took a deep breath. The searchlights were all turned off, and the sky overhead was its own starry expanse, with no help from the phosphorescence of Hollywood or Empire Pictures.

Chapter Twenty-eight

The night of the premiere in Los Angeles, January 30, there was a bombing in Montgomery, Alabama. While the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at a big rally, someone threw a homemade bomb into his house, where his wife and baby daughter were. Terrence was at Dr. King’s rally when he heard the news, and he ran to a nearby drugstore to call Ben Tupper, forgetting where he was and who he was, and three men yanked him out of the phone booth, which I guess was for whites only. They kicked him to the curb, and kicked him a few times after that as well. That too went into his story that ran in the Challenger.

To me he wrote more personally.