That guy over there, Ray Massey. He can put his boots under my bed any day of the week. - Mary Astor

There is a kind of attitude, a manner of speaking, a look in the eye, the kind of smile you get, the embrace from a director or producer that carries the most depressing hypocrisy: "Hey! You know you're still looking pretty sexy!" "Wow, you still got it, you know!" "You haven't got a worry in the world—you can be right up there again." Translated, in means "The old girl still looks pretty good." But the old girl, now nearing fifty, is not a young girl, is not sexy and has no intention of competing with anybody. Competition has never been my thing, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be right up there again. [...] I wanted to put my craft, what I had learned, my experiences, to work. The myth of Sunset Boulevard, with the old glamorous actress looking at all her old movies in the sumptuous, decaying mansion, is just that. It may have been taken from a factual story of some kind of nut—but believe me, that isn't where old actresses go!

Tuesday night we had a dinner at ‘21’ and on the way to see he did kiss me—and I don’t think either of us remember much what the show was about. We played kneesies during the first two acts, my hand wasn’t in my own lap during the third. It’s been years since I’ve felt up a man in public, but I just got carried away. Afterwards we had a drink someplace and then went to a little flat in 73rd Street where we could be alone, and it was all very thrilling and beautiful. Once George lays down his glasses, he is quite a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long. It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. I didn’t see much of anybody else the rest of the time—we saw every show in town, had grand fun together and went frequently to 73rd Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me.”

My father often used to rebuke me by saying, "You're almost nine years old" (and then "ten," and then "eleven," and "twelve") "and you haven't learned a thing!" Well, here I was, fifty years old and I still hadn't learned a thing! My father's rebuke had always seemed to imply a promise that years, the very accumulation of years, would bring experience and understanding. So, at whatever age I was, I wished I were older. At seventeen I longed to be twenty-five. At twenty I wanted to be a woman of the world of thirty. At thirty I read that the French thought a woman did not reach full maturity of beauty and attractiveness until she was forty. Finally, at forty-five, I decided that the whole thing was a pack of lies. Where was the "serenity" that the years were to bring? Where was :"the cooling of passion's blood?" I realized that I, who leaned on so many people and things, had been leaning even on the abstraction of time.