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And flying MGM Grand was a nice way to travel: nothing but first-class seats, and no one but first-class people. The studio had picked up the tab, and sent him to the airport in a Rolls limo. That was the purest luxury—going top-drawer OPM—on other people’s money. No more steerage for Sam Shields.
    It was about time, too. Money—other people’s or his own—was never a commodity Sam had much access to. Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island, in a tiny rented house that was always so damp that the wallpaper scrolled off the walls, where there was never enough money for proper clothes or a good cut of meat (but where there was always a bottle of Beefeater being poured by either his mother or his father), Sam had learned both what quality was and also how to do without it. Nice people wore Brooks Brothers, not suits from Robert Hall, so, if there wasn’t money for a quality new blue blazer, he wore the old one until his arms had pushed so far below the sleeves that it looked as if he had rolled them up. His father, a failing advertising man, had once been a golden boy at Doyle Dane, back when that was the place for a clever Yalie to be. His mother had done her two years at Smith and then donned white gloves at Katie Gibbs. Both lanky and good-looking, he fair, she dark, they met at the office and married a month later.
    What had it been like for them back in the fifties, when women wore hats and gloves, everyone drank Manhattans, and the city was a glistening pearl? Did they feel then the way he felt now, as if the world were opening up for him? He wondered if they had ever had a chance at the brass ring, and if they knew when, the exact moment, they missed it. Because for the two of them, after the first heady days of wine and roses, it was steerage all the way. Copywriting was beneath Philip, but what could he do that wasn’t? He talked about writing, but he never did it, and his wife never stopped resenting that. After a lot of time and a lot of booze, Phil couldn’t even write copy anymore. And Sam’s mother, that deb with a heart of steel, must have realized that, despite her husband’s pedigree and pretensions, she’d bet on the wrong horse. Sam’s parents reminded him of characters from a failed Fitzgerald novel: those who lived at the edge of the beautiful social world but never got to the center. Nowhere near it. And it was cold at the edge.
    Sam hated Fitzgerald novels.
    His parents had taught him to feel superior to everyone to whom he didn’t feel inferior; to look down on Jews, on Italians, and especially on the Irish. Blacks weren’t even in the picture. He was taught to revere the Whitneys (his father’s distant relations), the Harrimans, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, and all their cousins, aunts, in-laws, and dependents. And, as if he were the monied scion of a great family, he was sent to Deerfield and Yale (both on scholarship), his father’s alma maters. Then he, too, had toiled in obscurity, with the fear that he would fail as his father had failed.
    Now that had all changed. He smiled as he reached into the suitcase and lifted out his crumpled jacket. It was an old black linen one—he always wore black—and much too summery for New York in winter. But it had worked in L.A. Everything had worked in L.A. He and April had clicked, the rewrites were coming along nicely, and it looked as if they might go into production as early as May. If they were lucky with casting, it could happen.
    Ah, casting. There was the rub. Jack and Jill was a gritty play, a slice of life. He’d seen it as film noir . Well, he still did. Not that it didn’t have humor, pathos, the whole nine yards. But it was a dark story. A true story. And aren’t all true stories dark?
    Well, his was. Long Island boy moves to big city, starves, lives for the theater, writes good plays, is ignored, almost gives up, writes one more, makes good. Sam shrugged, tired of unpacking, and dumped the rest of his dirty clothes