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groaned; there was too much silence in the room and everyone had heard.
    â€œPhallic it is,” Mossy replied with the correct pronunciation, “symbol it’s not.”
    â€œOh sure, AZ,” said Darrow, obviously unaware that Mossy hated being called by his initials as if he were LB Mayer. Mossy’s temperature seemed to rise a little as he considered “AZ” and how he might discipline its user; we were seeing the studio head as padrone reproving one of his villagers. “I’ll tell you what is a phallic symbol, Marky”—“Oh god,” Sylvia whispered, “he only does that to your name if he hates you”—“when you stick your pencil in your mouth, Marky, and rotate it the way you do in story conferences so it blackens your lips and looks as if you’d really like to be sucking someone’s cock instead of yessing my every belch, that is when the pencil becomes a phallic symbol. Am I right, Mel?”
    This last was tossed over Mossy’s shoulder to the family psychoanalyst, Melvin Baron, who followed in Mossy’s train. Dr. Baron obediently nodded as fast as he could. “Yes absolutely definitely, Mossy, I couldn’t have put it … ” But Mossy slashed him with a gesture and moved on. Mark Darrow faded wordless into the burled woodwork, smiling bravely as he may have imagined Sydney Carton did on the steps to the guillotine.
    â€œSee?” Sylvia said leaning toward me. “At the next party you’ll be welcomed by all as one of the happy band of brothers and sisters present for the execution of Mark Darrow. While young Mark himself will be lucky if he ever gets invited after this to the opening of a tin can. Did you catch the glare Marky’s little wife gave him?”
    By this time Mossy had again disappeared upstairs into his library with King Vidor and Nils Matheus Maynard. There had been talk that the directors might try to form a guild as the writers were doing, and we all knew Mossy would want to head off any such insubordination. He was vaguely apolitical on the right, but many writers called him fascistic, an adjective we threw around promiscuously when discussing studio heads.
    With Mossy upstairs, Palmyra reigned. The producers fell over themselves courting her for their next pictures. She was able to fly away, a brightly feathered songbird, telling them all they were too kind.
    Teet Beale, the crier, announced midnight supper, “Ladies first, s’il vous plaît. ”
    As wives and actresses streamed past us toward the buffet table, a writer next to me began to swear. “Fuck it all, what I hate most here are the women’s perfumes,” said Poor Jim Bicker, a former hobo who sold a magazine story to Jubilee and was now on his third screenplay. He made eight hundred a week, more than twice my salary, but he still had the nickname Poor from his days riding the rails. Even tonight in his relative prosperity, he had torn cuffs, unpressed pants, and he looked as if he had just arrived from a brawl, which was a possibility. “You could use a little education,” he said to me.
    â€œWhy the perfume?” I asked.
    â€œI prefer the body stench of bathless hoboes,” Poor Jim answered more to his highball glass than to me. “Yeah, a hobo’s honest smell is better than these women with their artificial scents all swimming together like rare tropical fish in this dazzle of a tank. Like to take a pick-ax to the tank, let all the water run out. They couldn’t survive without their privilege. Their scents and the sloppy paints on their faces cost more than I saw in a month before I was bought out and became part of this vulgarity. Some say they’re Reds, can you beat that?” Poor Jim threw up his hands. “Maybe I’ll fuck me one of them later.” He sniffed, scorning and lusting after the extravagantly adorned women.
    The Canadian director of Westerns, Walter