Rakoff/Holtz had a high-rent address on Sunset, four floors overlooking the boulevard, and twenty years’ worth of cinematic history to its credit, with a dazzling roster of actors, directors, and writers. The offices were traditional as a pair of spats. Irv’s partner Sidney Holtz had died the year before, and an enormous oil portrait of him hung in the reception room. Bad art and bad taste, if you ask me, though, of course, no one did. When I have my own agency, I intend to have splashy modern art on the walls.

Far from where any Rakoff/Holtz clients might see us, we five trainees shared an undifferentiated, nearly windowless room that we called The Farm. We were the Farmhands. Each gray metal desk had a hulking typewriter, a telephone, and an address book that popped happily open when you put the arrow on a certain letter. A bulletin board across one wall listed our assignments color-coded to our names. As the only girl, the guys teased me about how badly I typed. To their gibes I would reply: Does Swifty Lazar do his own typing? No. When I have my own agency, I won’t have to type. However, I kept an empty desk drawer so the trash can would not visibly fill up with my mistakes.

Three fans hummed on low, but we were sweltering on this August morning. The guys took off their jackets the minute they arrived, loosened their ties, and rolled up their sleeves. Joe Roberts even had his shoes off and his feet up on the desk as he read the Hollywood Reporter. No such mercy for me: stockings, heels, slim skirt, and a crepe de chine blouse. Tom Willis’s desk was empty, and we all wondered if he was too hungover to come to work. He drinks more than all of us put together.

“Hey, Roxanne,” Joe called out. “It says here that over fifteen million Americans now have television sets, and by nineteen fifty-five there’ll be another fifteen million. What does Leon Greene think of that? I bet he’s trembling in his boots, isn’t he?”

“Probably crying in his beer,” offered Dave.

“Leon Greene is not trembling in his boots, nor crying in his beer,” I retorted, though in truth, since I moved to Malibu, I had seen Leon only on three public occasions honoring Julia’s gifts to the arts, galas where Denise was emphatically not present. My grandfather and I were not on the best of terms, but I wasn’t going to let these two think they could belittle him. “Leon has had thirty-five years in the film business, and that’s like a hundred and thirty-five anywhere else. He survived the talkies. He survived the formation of the unions and the strikes that followed. He survived the costs of Technicolor. He survived the War. And when the courts made the big studios divest themselves of the theaters they owned, he survived that.”