Across the courtyard lived my other paycheck, an aging Southern actress named Ruth Ford, who on December 8, 1980, placed the first call reporting shots fired outside the Dakota. She was once a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and had been a close friend of William Faulkner’s since her college days. When I worked for Mrs. Ford, she lived in a ten-room apartment with her lover, the writer Dotson Rader, who was thirty-one years her junior, and they hosted dinner parties for a Mount Rushmore of playwrights and artists. Dotson was boyishly handsome and, while a student at Columbia, had made
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