I drove home, took off the champagne-stained skirt, threw it in the trash, got in the shower, and washed off the rage and shame from the morning. Afternoon sun still burned across the beach as I stood on the high porch overlooking what I’d come to think of as my own domain, drying my hair with a towel. Bruno, the Wilburs’ dog, jumped over the enclosure where they kept him and bounded up the steps. “What do you think, boy?” I asked, kneeling down and rubbing his ears. “What’s next for me?”

Bruno only barked in reply, and the two of us took a long run up the beach, splashing in the surf. I had quit my job. Okay. Now what? The thought of trying other agencies made me wary. I’d never before experienced the sort of thing that happened this morning, even though I had lived in the heart of the Hollywood maelstrom all my life. As Julia and Leon’s granddaughter I was protected as a child, a young girl. But now I had stepped into the adult world, the working world, and not even Leon could protect me there. If I got hired at another agency, wouldn’t there always be some man, some boss who would assume I’d be willing prey? (Is there such a thing as willing prey?) What if I went independent? Could I beat Irv and men like him at their own game? In the six months I’d worked at Rakoff/Holtz, I certainly hadn’t seen anyone do astrophysics or brain surgery. Agents brought together people with complementary needs, like Julia used to do in her salons in Paris. How hard could it be? As the surf washed over my ankles and Bruno barked happily beside me, I thought wistfully back to those Thursday evenings at the Parc Monceau apartment, smiled to think of the films and books and musical collaborations all given their first embryonic momentum there. Julia went out of her way to cultivate artistic people, not just Americans like Jerrold, but anyone who might mutually benefit one another. And they did. If the name Roxanne Granville had such panache, why shouldn’t I use it myself?

And hadn’t I learned from those story conferences in the library? Max, Simon, Nelson, Jerrold, taught me, early on, that the dramatic core of any film is characters who are being tested. Whether high drama or slapstick, High Noon or Duck Soup, the characters don’t have to be saints, they just have to be interesting, have interesting motives, and respond to unlooked-for challenges. I knew a hundred hungry writers who could write stuff like that, writers who camped out at the lunch counter of Schwab’s Pharmacy and were party regulars at Casa Fiesta.