We went into my office, closed the door, and after the obligatory prelims—how wonderful our lives were going, the usual artful pretense—I had only come to the word discretion when Maurice raised a hand.

“I think I know what you’re going to ask me, Roxanne. Who is it?”

“What makes you think . . . ?”

“Because you wanted to see me in person and in private. Because fronting for blacklisted writers is the new Hollywood vice—not as pervasive as adultery or drugs, but just as wicked, and even more risky.” He blew a smoke ring.

“Nelson Hilyard.”

“Hilyard was a homo, wasn’t he? Not a Red.”

“He was a Red too,” I said.

“Great.” Maurice stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m in. I need the money. I don’t have any politics other than that.”

“Don’t you want to read them first?”

Maurice shrugged. “Give them to me, I’ll read them, but I can tell you right now, I’m happy to pick up the pen that once wrote The Ice Age, even if he was a Commie and a homo. I need the credit, Roxanne, I need the money. I need to get the hell out of Poverty Row and television. I don’t want to go back to New York as a failure.”

“Remember—you tell no one.”

Maurice rose and picked up the envelopes that held Nelson’s scripts. “I hear Charlie’s moved out of that Hollywood dump, and he’s renting a place right on the beach in Venice, and he has a new car. I suppose all his success is something on the same order.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, silence is my middle name,” said Maurice on his way out the door.

It was true that before the ink on his Empire contracts had even touched the page, in a burst of elation, Charlie had moved to a beachside apartment in Venice, bought a new custom surfboard, and put a down payment on a 1950 Buick Roadmaster station wagon to carry it in. But privately, success had had a strange, unlooked-for effect on Charlie Frye. His supreme surfer confidence withered, and his inner anxieties suddenly surfaced. I was the only one he could turn to, and though I saw less of him now (I’m pretty certain he was out impressing other women), turn to me he did. He would call me, sometimes late at night, sometimes in the middle of the workday, demanding that I drop everything and attend to him, assure him, prop up his ego, assuage his fears.