I offered up the stories in an appealing way, and he listened, clearly charmed, but finally, he stopped, shook his head. “Sorry, but Empire is looking for something bigger.”

“Like The Robe? It cost four million dollars to put all those Roman centurions in their cute armor up on the screen in CinemaScope. Empire is too small to do something on that scale. These are cheap. Easy to film. Easy to market. We’ve always been known for the clever comedies, the—”

“We?”

I flushed. “Force of habit. I grew up on this lot. Empire was my playground.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the stories. You and Jonathan Moore.”

“Kid stuff. We were terrors.”

“Not childhood sweethearts?”

“Oh, no.”

Elliott seemed pleased. He took the two scripts from me and leafed through them. “I’ll read them and get back to you. Actually, we have an unexpected hiatus in production right now, and something like this might suit us.”

No doubt the less-than-stellar box office of Banner Headline had Empire executives scurrying around like lemmings, but I said nothing of the sort.

“What else has Charles Frye done?”

“Well, his Return of the Cat People just sold,” I lied. I skipped the Dragnet episode altogether. “This sort of comedy is Charlie’s great forte, you know, the kind of film where you get misty at the end and walk out of the theater thinking that the world’s a better place. One of these could be the next Sabrina. Four-million-dollar box office.” I went on at length, lauding Charlie’s many gifts as a comedic writer, astonished at the ease with which these lies tripped off my tongue. Had I made a sentimental mistake with Charlie? Maybe I should have asked Maurice Allen to front for these comedies. Maurice, while a little astringent, was a more sophisticated writer, a more sophisticated person. I felt a stab of remorse, and a flutter of anxiety jelling into fear, but the scripts were literally in Elliott’s hands, and it was too late to turn back.

Chapter Twelve