I’ve studied friends at the end of their lives. Who that I’ve known has shown me something of how to die? On the other hand, who claimed my sympathy but not my admiration? I can still hear Clifford’s operatic outcry—this at fifty-seven—“Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” And, his last, “Imagine! Clifford Odets dying!” I can recall the laughter of Orson Welles, like an explosion of impatience and pain, a laugh that seemed to be mocking everyone, above all himself. What could the genius who’d made Citizen Kane have thought as he studied his bloated image on a studio relay monitor, assuring the nation of what he had no way of knowing himself? How had he maintained the dignity he deserved in Paris as he strained to amuse Darryl Zanuck at dinner so Darryl would pick up the check, then loan Orson enough dollars to travel to wherever it was he wished to go next? What had Orson felt then? Perhaps Tennessee Williams, who knew that feeling, had a name for it, something like self-disgust.