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hopeful, most suspecting they would be better people if they did something else. Novelists, playwrights, journalists: they’d all had what they now thought of as honest, if not sufficiently gainful, toil. Now they were in harness, overpaid, feeling they were debasing themselves before illiterates prior to being replaced by another of their species who would, in turn, also be replaced. Or else they were trying to be hired to be overpaid, debased, and replaced. Self-respect was not an attribute many of them had in excess.
    A cocky thickset writer junior even to me, Mark Darrow, began babbling, perhaps from nervousness or drink. “I always start with a twist, a guy’s told he has a fatal disease, or it’s the night before a battle,” he said, “then I decide who should be in that plot point—a thief, surgeon, bunch of salesmen looking for dames.” Mark’s wife grabbed his elbow and said, “Honey, please, these men have so much more experience.” But Yeatsman said, “That’s fine, fine, but I like to start with someone I’m interested in, flawed of course, I think what’s improvable about him, then I go further and think only what’s provable. When I get to the provable I can start to write, and things will happen to him.” “No, no, no, that’s entirely wrong,” said Mark Darrow as if he were his famous uncle Clarence rebutting the prosecution in a courtroom. “You have to have the gimmick first,” he went on, “like a coat hook so you can hang everything on it and the good guys—”
    But now Yeatsman interrupted, having heard enough of Darrow’s nonsense. “You know what’s too bad?” he said. “What’s too bad is the kids of this country being brought up by our pictures to believe crime doesn’t pay or you shouldn’t have sex till you’re married, or—” And he was in turn interrupted by Sylvia Solomon, who said, “Now here’s what we could do, folks, that the Hays Office morality police in charge of protecting youth from reality couldn’t object to—we could make a picture about a hateful Hollywood executive, excuse the redundancy, who throws a party where everyone present loathes him for one reason or another and finally he is murdered while the party is still in progress—”
    Yeatsman said, “And after the cheering stops, for the rest of the movie Bill Powell and Myrna Loy have to figure out who did it, and no one wants them to solve the crime.”
    At that very moment, cued by Sylvia and Yeatsman, Amos Zangwill descended the stairs into our midst and promenaded his ballroom. “Speaking of the unholy ghost,” said Sylvia. “Cuchulain himself,” said Yeatsman.
    Decades later I still see him entering now in his dark suit with his half smile, regal, not arrogant. Where did that smile come from, an executioner’s smile but also the grinning rictus of his dispatched victim? Trim, almost small, creating a lagoon of space one could violate only at the peril of being repelled like a clumsy pirate hurled to the sharks off a galleon. A small cortege followed as Mossy nodded to his guests.
    â€œWhat a night!” Largo Buchalter bellowed as Mossy passed the directors. “We’re all having the time of our lives, Mossy!” “Glad you’ve been elected spokesman, Largo,” Mossy said as he smiled at Nils Matheus and Capra but not at Buchalter.
    Mark Darrow, drunkenly on the make, broke from the writers’ kennel. His wife tried to pull him back to safety, but he elbowed her aside. He seized what he must have felt was the main chance as Mossy passed an elaborately framed Picasso drawing. In the drawing a male abstraction was inserting part of himself into an opening in a female abstraction. “What a genius he is with a phallic symbol, isn’t he Mossy?” Darrow ventured. He pronounced it fay-lick. Yeatsman