The former studio head told me, “In staff meetings, in writers’ rooms, in casting sessions, how you greet somebody in a restaurant, the language you use—every nuance has been impacted.” Unless someone’s father just died or you are best friends, no one is hugging anymore. “Unwanted hugs” featured in an apology issued by Pixar’s John Lasseter and, unforgettably, in the details that emerged about his behavior. (“He was inappropriate with the fairies,” hugging them too long, a former Pixar executive told Deadline.) Cathy Schulman, an Oscar-winning producer and the president of the advocacy group Women in Film, said that lately, when she walks into a man’s office and tries to close the door, he objects. “It’s happened at least ten times in the past two months,” she told me. “And there are constant apologies in meetings—‘I didn’t mean that to sound gendered.’ Fumbling over language to be careful to say ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they’—not everything ‘he.’ But not naturally. As in, ‘Whoever gets this job, he should—they should—she should . . . ’ ”

In a historically male-dominated business, the burden of earning acceptance has shifted with fearful speed. “Everyone’s tiptoeing,” a male comedy producer told me. “ ‘You know I’m one of the good guys, right? You’ll put in a good word with the matriarchy for me?’—as we gloriously flip into the reverse ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ society.” Every phone meeting includes a mandatory detour into conscientious talk about what repulsive lowlifes the perpetrators are and how it’s about time, and if there’s some collateral damage so be it, it’s just a fraction of what women have endured, et cetera. The assistants—young and often female, the presumed inheritors—are listening on the line. No one wants to get caught on the wrong side of history.

The actress came to Hollywood with her mother when she was three, after her father gave his secretary a fur coat for Christmas and her mother demanded a divorce. The actress was a year older than Shirley Temple, a year younger than Jane Withers. She could remember lines. On her third day in Los Angeles, her mother took her to a casting call, where she met Judy Garland and got her first role.

Upon signing a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the actress became a player in Louis B. Mayer’s stable. “If you worked for Mr. Mayer, you didn’t just lollygag,” she says. “I was loaned out to everybody. ‘Altruistic’ would not describe him. If you were under contract to him, you were like a piece of chattel. You were supposed to bow and scrape and curtsy. Mr. Mayer was, in his own mind, godlike.” In the course of the next thirteen years, she appeared in a hundred and ten films, alongside Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Merle Oberon—as the little-girl version of all the big-name stars. Bette Davis was the first person to send her flowers. Lana Turner, her babysitter, taught her to tweeze her brows. Harry Ruskin, one of M-G-M’s most prolific writers, made her his protégée, supplying her with books and instructing her in his view of the world. She never went to school.

One day, when she was around six, as she remembers it, she and her mother were waiting to see Mayer. The door to his office opened, revealing a woman, with her back to them, shouting at Mayer, “Don’t tell me! I fucked every one of you bastards on the way up.” The woman turned around: it was Norma Shearer, who was married to Irving Thalberg, Mayer’s partner at M-G-M. That was the first time the young actress heard the word “fuck.” Later, in Mayer’s office, she asked him what it meant. She didn’t get her answer right away.

When she turned sixteen, she recalls, Ruskin invited her to his office for lunch—a normal occurrence, as he hosted a lunch-hour salon with people who amused him, and she often went. On this day, no one else was invited. He handed her a synopsis with a part written specifically for her. “Right there came the proposition,” she says. “Just frank. Just out. I was the typical battered wife—I thought I had done something, that I had been provocative or dressed provocatively or done something to instigate this. Because why would he do this? It was like incest to me.”

She left Ruskin’s office and found a broom closet to weep in. “I felt myself coming unglued,” she says. “My mother never permitted me to cry, unless I was being paid for it.” When she had composed herself, she went upstairs to Mayer’s office. “He said, ‘Have you seen Harry?’ I said, ‘Yes, but’—he wouldn’t let me say anything. ‘Have you read the synopsis?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Don’t you love it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We have your favorite producer, your favorite cinematographer,’ and so forth. Finally, I got a word in. I said, ‘But, Mr. Mayer, do you know what Harry wants me to do?’ By this time I was in a chair. He was a little man, and he definitely had a Napoleonic complex, because he had huge overstuffed furniture. I was in a great big black leather chair over in a corner. He was behind this enormous square desk, and he came around, sat on the arm of the chair, put his arm on my shoulder, pulled me toward him, and said, ‘You’ll get used to it.’ ”

She wouldn’t. She went home and burned all her films, photographs, scripts, and memorabilia. Her mother didn’t believe her, and implored her to apologize to Ruskin for hurting his feelings. When Mayer realized that she was serious about refusing to play along, he threatened to destroy her career: wagging his finger under her nose, he said she’d never work on a soundstage again. “Mr. Mayer,” she said, “that is my heartfelt desire.” She confided in her friends Lucille Ball and Ava Gardner, who were not surprised. “They said he was a rat bastard, but the more you stir you-know-what, the more it smells,” she says. “Their advice was, Live with it, get over it, let it go, just let it go.”

The actress is ninety now, vibrant and witty, a favorite of the waiters in Beverly Hills. She wears heels and trim leather blazers and pencils her eyebrows. (Thanks to Miss Turner, they never grew back.) After telling me her story—a story she has not told her children, because it still fills her with shame—she paused, then said, “Does that answer all your questions about that epoch, how different it is not? It’s not a bit different than today.”

The sexual revolution, anti-harassment laws, the testimony of Anita Hill—despite them, the silence found places to hide. Women who spoke out were deemed “crazy,” unreliable witnesses and reckless self-saboteurs, or they were “difficult,” not likely to get the next job. (Cassandra, the classical figure of the discredited woman, is also a victim of sexual assault and retribution: when she rejects Apollo, he spits in her mouth and curses her to proclaim truths that no one believes.) In Hollywood, respecting the silence has practically been a condition of employment. One woman I talked to, a television writer who has worked on seven shows—and who remarked ruefully that three of her former bosses have recently been implicated in sexual misconduct—told me that a colleague cautioned her on the first day of her first job, at Warner Bros.: “This used to be the ‘Friends’ room, and you know what happened to that writers’ assistant when she made a stink?”