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other—oh, let’s call them flirtations—I actually made it up onto the screen.” She wagged a hand back and forth, minimizing the accomplishment. “Along with a thousand other girls who’d
flirted
, in quotation marks, with the right men. But there were
ten thousand
others—this is one of the things that kept us going, dear—there were ten thousand
other
girls who’d given it up to every rake in Hollywood, some of them multiple times, and never even got through the studio gates. So we were a meritocracy of sorts, even if it was a whorish meritocracy. Am I boring you?”
    “Not even a little bit.”
    “Good. You didn’t want to get involved in this in the first place, dear, so it would be awful if you had to be bored, too. Where was I?”
    “A meritocracy. You were in the movies.”
    “I was, I was. Have you ever been in a movie?”
    “I’ve been on sets.”
    “Then you know. People who haven’t made movies think it’s glamorous, but it’s mainly getting up while it’s still dark, having makeup pasted on you and getting pinned into a costume thatsomeone else has sweated into, and then standing around for hours and hours without wrinkling your clothes until it’s time to step into the light and say your line or raise your eyebrow or whatever you’ve been hired to do. Not tremendously interesting work, but not exhausting, either. For a girl my age, it was wonderful. There were handsome men everywhere, some of them famous, and everyone looked at me, and for the first time in my life, I had enough money. And if I had to sleep with people—men and, once in a while, women—well, so what? Some of them were beautiful and some of them were rich, and some of them were both.” She smiled at me. “But none of them was neither.”
    “And Los Angeles was nice back then.”
    “It was very, very not Scranton. We had an orange tree in the yard of our apartment house. It took me a year to get over having an orange tree in the yard. I ate the damn things green, I didn’t care. And then we moved to Beverly Hills, the flats, not the fancy part, and we had
several
orange trees, plus rattlesnakes. Beverly Hills used to be infested with rattlesnakes.”
    “It still is.”
    “Yes, but back then, they warned you before they struck. So I was moving up in the world of movies, going from
Girl in Background
to
Second Chorine
to
Ellie’s Friend
and then all the way up to where I got my first character with a name. Judy, she was called, Judy, and Judy had a really good moment in a Boston Blackie movie—do you remember Boston Blackie?”
    “Not really.”
    “Budget detective series, but they had their audience. So Judy—who, you’ll recall, was me—had a good moment when her necklace got caught on Chester Morris’s bow tie and her pearls bounced all over the place but she couldn’t bend to pick them up because the necklace was still tangled in his bow tie—he was wearing a tuxedo—so they leaned down together andbumped heads and wound up in a kiss. Fade out, except that was the moment that brought letters in from the hinterlands and got me into Universe, and into movies that didn’t have Chester Morris in them. With a contract.
Regular money
. My mother was in heaven.”
    “Universe Pictures was the studio Dressler helped to run.”
    “He helped to run all of them, dear. And the banks and the racetracks and both the movie unions and the studios that hired them, although lesser people might have seen that as a conflict of interest. Nobody did anything important in Los Angeles in those days without Winnie. He was the man behind the screen, like in
The Wizard of Oz
. You know,
Do not look at the man behind the curtain
. So I met Winnie, and he took an interest in my career—all very up-and-up, because of Blanche. Winnie never fooled around on Blanche, even though he had all sorts of romantic yearnings for pretty girls—and he got Mr. Winterman to notice me, and I began to get better parts.”
    “Blanche,” I