I saw Carleton from afar, and he waved. After the obligatory and totally insincere Hollywood hug, he said, “My wife wants to know if our affair ended badly.”

“Everything that ends, ends badly. I speak from experience. Please tell your wife she’s stuck with you, but I thought you were a terrific lay.”

He chuckled. “Come, let’s walk to my office.” We strolled between the massive soundstages, mostly empty this late in the day. As I’d come to expect from him, Carleton chatted obliquely: He missed New York; California has climate but no weather (a distinction, I confess, lost on me). Then, somehow without my quite knowing how, the conversation moved to “You have quite the talent for trouble, Roxanne. I guessed as much when I saw you in that red dress, but I wouldn’t have guessed you to be keeping a love nest with a Negro agitator.”

“He was a reporter, not an agitator. And please, spare me the love nest. It sounds squalid. My affair with Terrence Dexter was not squalid.”

“But it was scandalous.”

“Only because people are narrow-minded.”

“Yes, you offended the little corsets of conformity we all wear. Everyone gets along by sharing certain prejudices.”

“Well, I don’t share them.”

He got out a cigarette. “I suppose Leon was horrified.”

“Leon is not speaking to me.”

“He should have been more forgiving of your love life. His was a scandal for a long time, though people will forgive adultery—maybe not the wife,” he added, “but in this business, no one really cares if you’re faithful or not. The Motion Picture Alliance is much less likely to forgive him for producing a film by a writer he had fired, a script”—he paused—“sold to him by his own granddaughter, who must have wanted him to look foolish or hypocritical.”

I could feel the birthmark, my whole face, flushing with shame. And regret. I had nothing to say in my own defense.

“That disclaimer that Empire published in the trades, that was pretty disingenuous, don’t you think?”

I shrugged, and put on my sunglasses.

“Leon’s patriotism blinded him to a lot of things,” Carleton went on. “Leon is something of a dinosaur. Meaning no disrespect.”

“None taken.” Where was Carleton going with this?

“This is a new era.”

“Really? It feels like the same old lousy era to me.”

“The picture business makes itself afresh every ten years or so. If it didn’t, we’d still be back with silent films and Mabel Normand throwing pies in Fatty Arbuckle’s face. Every new era means you have to ask new questions. Who’s going to the movies, now, in nineteen fifty-six? Better yet, who is not going?”