Free Seidel, Kathleen Gilles by More Than You Dreamed

arrangement would be an appropriate thank-you gesture, and set off for the legal department.
    On March 10, 1948, the legal department had read the Estimating Script of Weary Hearts and had memoed Miles Smithson with two single-spaced pages of concerns. The British Board of Censors, for example, always deleted quotations from the Lord's Prayer. Smithson would either have to have the dialogue on page fifty-nine rewritten or have Oliver McClay shoot alternative protection for Great Britain.
    These two pages told Jill nothing. The legal department certainly would have read the approved script; there was no chance the lawyers had been involved in the deception.
    On August 2, 1948, the department advised Smithson that on page eighty-seven of a script marked "Revised and Final: Make No Changes," the line "I wish to God," should be changed to "I wish to heaven."
    Jill thought. Yes, about a third of the way through the movie, Phillip said, "I wish to heaven."
    The only interesting thing about these files was that they weren't musty. They had probably been aired out a week ago by a former hotshot college basketball player.

    Now that Jill had visited her father's old studio, seen his lawyer and secretary, and talked to the people on his production staff, thoroughness compelled her to see only one other person who had known him: her mother.
    Melody had been Cass's second wife. His first wife he had known since childhood; they had grown up in the Valley together. Jill had never met Ellen Casler, but knew that she had come from a good Winchester family, that she had attended Stuart Hall and had graduated from Sweet Briar. After this proper upbringing, she had married Cass and had settled with him in Charlottesville.
    She had been content to be the wife of a University of Virginia English professor. Life in Charlottesville had been quiet, she had known everyone she had needed to know, she had understood the standards.
    But after Pearl Harbor a bad knee had kept Cass out of combat. He had been sent to the Office of War Information in New York, where he first wrote and then edited training films. Handling film had been, to Cass, everything that "gay Paree" had been to other soldiers. After that there was no bringing him back to the farm, even if that farm was the elegant university founded by Thomas Jefferson.
    Ellen had, of course, gone to California with him, but she had not been comfortable there. Hollywood had had a different set of rules, rules that Ellen did not believe in. A Hollywood hostess thought that she should never serve the same menu twice. Ellen could not understand that. Her mother had never given a party without serving Aunt Sally's peanut soup, and there wasn't a soul in Winchester who would have wanted her to.
    And the people in California had altogether too much money. Ellens grandmother had been born in 1867, and at that time in Virginia the nice people never had money. The movie business was suspiciously full of talented immigrants' sons, and her husband was turning out to be every bit as talented and energetic as these dark-haired men with their long, strange names. She did not approve.
    So, after three years of such a life, Ellen had taken her two boys and gone home. For more than a decade she and Cass had lived separately. She was still Mrs. William Casler, treated with respect, enjoying a far nicer income than any other nice lady in Winchester.
    She thought that Cass would eventually come home, but at age fifty-one, he suddenly demanded a divorce. The distinguished, Yeats-loving former professor was going to marry nineteen-year-old Melody Johnson. Melody was not from a good Virginia family. She had not gone to Stuart Hall; she did not have a degree from Sweet Briar. What she had was the best pair of legs in Las Vegas.
    A year after Melody and Cass married, Jill had been born. Five years later they were divorced. Melody had moved out of the Bel Air house; Jill had stayed.
    Jill knew that it was unfair to say that her