Our story is set in the years before Mad Men, when Eisenhower was in the White House and America had only 48 states. Our stage is Beverly Hills, still a small town in 1958, where movie stars and other entertainment-industry leaders led active but traditional, even somewhat constrained social lives.

There was a zone of privacy in that time and place we can’t begin to imagine today. Money, emotional traumas, and personal doubts were simply not discussed, even by the closest of friends. Appearances were accepted as reality, so people kept very busy making sure every aspect of their lives looked correct. That didn’t mean having the most lavish house, the heftiest jewels, or the largest private plane, as it came to in later decades. It did mean dressing, behaving, and speaking appropriately; appearing to be happily married, in love, or looking for love en route to marriage; not complaining about one’s career or annual income; and being enormously ambitious without evidencing any ambition whatsoever.

Social lives were just as circumspect. Dinners were small A-list gatherings at Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Don the Beachcomber, or poolside barbecues at private homes. The most visible scandals arose when dancing partners who were married—but not to each other—indulged in excessive caresses or when someone (almost always a man) drank too much, though boozy belligerence and even outright drunkenness were rare to invisible.

Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a “joint” was a body part or a lower-class dive. If people were “doing lines,” you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned “acid,” you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem. Nobody in Hollywood—or almost anywhere else in the United States—had ever heard of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy.

“When I’d say I was in therapy with a doctor using LSD, people thought I was talking about World War II landing ships”—L.S.T.’s—remembers Judy Balaban, the daughter of longtime Paramount Pictures president Barney Balaban. She didn’t know much about LSD when she started taking it, in the late 50s, but, she laughingly says, “I figured if it was good enough for Cary Grant, it was good enough for me!”

If appearances were important to those behind the camera, they were crucial to stars of the big screen. And as far as the public of 1958 was concerned, Betsy Drake and Cary Grant had “perfected the ideal living pattern” after eight years of wedded bliss. According to the fan magazines, theirs had been a fairy-tale romance: Cary had seen Betsy on the London stage in 1947, and then, when they both serendipitously found themselves on the Queen Mary returning to the States, he begged a friend, the movie star Merle Oberon, to arrange an introduction. After an intense several days on shipboard, Betsy bolted into New York City, but Cary sought her out. Within months he had persuaded her to move to Los Angeles, where she signed with RKO and David O. Selznick and then burst to screen stardom opposite Grant in Every Girl Should Be Married. The Los Angeles Times proclaimed her “the freshest, most distinctive personality since [Jean] Arthur,” and Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper declared her to be “at the threshold of a brilliant career.”

Grant and Drake made headlines when they flew to Arizona to elope on Christmas Day 1949 with their pilot and Cary’s best man, Howard Hughes. Betsy made a few more films before she decided to put her marriage ahead of her career. Determined to be a successful wife, she sought ways to become indispensable to a man who already had a secretary and valet. She developed into a great cook and became his trusted sounding board. She studied hypnosis and, at Cary’s urging, helped both of them to stop smoking, but when he asked her to do the same for his drinking, she agreed to banish only hard liquor and not the wine and beer she enjoyed.