Ellroy has a long-term vision of Delany’s future. “What is she now, 54? When she moves into her sixties, she’ll be the doyenne,” he predicts. “And she can get some kind of groovy Barbara Stanwyck gig, like The Big
Valley,” the late-1960s TV series on which Stanwyck played a nineteenth-century rancher who wielded a bullwhip and an iron will with equal skill. You know—a woman capable of doing a man’s job. “I’m not much for whips,” Ellroy says, “but Dana would look good with a whip in her hands.”
