I’d come to that point in life—I was forty-eight, that critical age—when I was asking myself, “Is that all there’s going to be? Is this, what I have now, it?” I set out to destroy what I found stifling and replace the predictable with the unpredictable. I courted what would be disruptive. I was more determined than ever to concentrate on my own projects and prepare my own scripts. For this program, I found an ally. When you want to hear something very much, you’ll soon find someone to tell it to you. In the last stages of work preparing A Face in the Crowd, I’d met a young actress who, many years later, was to be my second wife. I was immediately taken with her. At first our affair was nothing more than dog and bitch. There were others at the same time; neither of us expected the relationship to be anything beyond a temporary lusting. But I’d never encountered anyone like this girl, anyone who’d uncover what is generally kept discreet with such complete candor. Conceived in a field of daisies, Barbara Loden was born antirespectable; she observed none of the conventional middle-class boundaries, the perimeter walls within which Molly lived. A roulette wheel that didn’t stop turning, Barbara would keep me wondering when it would, and where. Life with Molly, to continue the figure, was a safe-deposit vault.