There was really nothing left to say unless I said, I’m finished with you too, Leon, and I could not bring myself to do that. I rose, collected my handbag, and sailed through the door, where I found Clarence right there, listening at the keyhole like a parlor maid in a melodrama.

Chapter Thirty-five

Charlie Frye’s path to redemption (and revenge) after he was fired by Empire followed the same Shakespearean pattern that had played out in Congressional hearings beginning in 1947. However, Charlie was not called to testify and he took no oaths. No, the scandal of Roxanne Granville and her Negro lover had scarcely waned when Charlie carried the equivalent of a Repent! sign on Sunset Boulevard by abasing himself in print. In the pages of various mags and newspapers his story spooled out like this: Charles David Frye, an aspiring screenwriter and patriotic American, had been unwittingly recruited by his then-agent, Roxanne Granville, to put his name on a script written by Max Leslie—a low-down Red who had shown contempt for Congress and fled to Mexico. Charlie, insisting how truly, tremendously, and deeply he regretted his mistake, swore by the soul of Ayn Rand that there was (somewhere) Red taint, a Communist message hidden in Fly Me to the Moon, a film produced—and personally overseen—by Leon Greene, head of Empire Pictures, stalwart supporter of the Waldorf Agreement, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Asked if any other Granville Agency clients were fronting for blacklisted writers, Charlie Frye joined Vic Hale, and many other name-droppers more illustrious than he, and offered up his old comrades from the hungry days at Schwab’s, Jimmy Ashford, Maurice Allen, Art Luke, and “probably lots of others.”

The scandal with Terrence had indeed hurt my agency, but this was the end. The Granville Agency, three years of my proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, was finished. The phone ceased to ring except for people calling to cancel meetings, cancel contracts, cancel long-standing negotiations, cancel anything in the present or looming in the future. That, or the press asking if I had any comment. I did not. My writers left in such numbers that I thought of lemmings jumping off a cliff. I wished I had taken my attorney’s advice and insisted on signed contracts instead of agreements based on a handshake. But I hadn’t.