For a couple of days, Sidney did not come in, so Casey and I were left alone, when I was not out of the office accumulating books, magazine articles, and documents. From her telephone conversations I was able to gather that Sidney was enormously late with his script and that CBS had not, so far, seen a word of it. I also deduced, without much difficulty, that this whole elaborate office was being paid for by CBS, as were Casey’s salary and mine.
My growing pile of research was transferred down to Sidney’s floor while I produced more. The Hungarian Revolution had been productive of paperwork, if nothing else. The United Nations had produced bulky white papers documenting every event, speech, and eyewitness report, as if the amount of paper would somehow make up for its complete inactivity in the face of brutal aggression. Various émigré groups had produced volume after volume of documents, too. If Sidney’s dearest wish was to have plenty of research material, he was going to be delighted.
It was Wednesday before Sidney showed up at last. I had already been warned that he did not like to be spoken to or interrupted except for emergencies. Indeed, when he appeared, he emerged out of the elevator, hands behind his back, eyebrows contorted in a pensive frown, rather like paintings of Napoleon after 1812, and went downstairs without talking to either of us. He stayed down there all morning, sending for Casey from time to time to take down a note or a letter or to fetch him a cup of coffee. At lunchtime, he left for his usual table at the Oak Room. He returned about three, burying himself downstairs for the rest of the afternoon.
Promptly at six, Sidney reappeared, still apparently lost in thought, and left for home. The next day and the day after, this pattern repeated itself exactly. Sometimes, if he noticed me on his way in or out, he would smile and say, “Hello, my boy”; more often, he ignored my presence.
He did not mention the gathering pile of my research, all of it neatly organized in black binders, with notes. I had drawn up what I hoped would be a useful chronology, showing what had happened day by day and, where possible, hour by hour. I had even found the pathetic messages broadcast by provincial radio stations as they signed off for the last time. If all this, I thought, wasn’t enough to start Sidney’s creative juices flowing, I couldn’t imagine what would.
From CBS came daily appeals for a “progress report” and, more boldly, “a face-to-face meeting.” I have no idea exactly how much money CBS had invested in Sidney Kingsley, but to judge from the apprehension this extended period of silence from Central Park South caused among the higher executive ranks of CBS, it must have been a considerable amount. This was, in any case, not the kind of relationship that television executives were used to having with a writer. In television, the writer was just about the lowest man on the corporate totem pole. Jim Aubrey, a major CBS executive of the time, was in the habit of calling writers to his office for meetings, then leaving them in his waiting room for hours, only to have his secretary tell them, at the end of the day, to come back tomorrow. The notion of a writer who didn’t take telephone calls and remained sequestered in his luxurious inner sanctum, as remote and silent as the Dalai Lama, had at first impressed CBS but was now beginning to cause alarm.
Eventually, some weeks after my arrival, Sidney, with great reluctance, agreed to a meeting to discuss his progress. The meeting would be held, naturally, in his office—the mountain would have to come to Mahomet—despite many attempts to lure him out of his retreat and into the CBS building, where he had never set foot.
The day of the meeting, Sidney put his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular fashion as he came in. “Let’s talk about your work, my boy,” he said, and led me downstairs for a chat. He made himself comfortable and lit a pipe.
The room was enormous, with a certain air of la vie de bohème but with money. It was half artist’s studio, half expensively furnished “study,” like the ones favored by major producers in Bel Air, with leather-bound books bought by the yard—just the kind of room, I reflected, that my father would surely have disliked as being neither one thing nor the other.
Sidney’s big leather chair was placed so he could look out at the park comfortably, with his feet up; around it were placed chairs for visitors, all of them rather nice, well-worn English antiques. On a low table beside him was his Dictaphone, his pipes, a cigar humidor, and a tobacco jar. His desk—a big, antique, leather-topped bureau plat, a piece even my father would have admired—was bare of papers or any sign of work. Against one wall, facing the fireplace, was a majestic leather sofa, with a lot of pillows and a boldly patterned Indian blanket thrown over one arm—the ideal place, it looked to me, for an afternoon siesta.
One corner of the room was set up for Sidney’s sculpture workshop, with a drop cloth on the floor. He appeared to be working on a life-size head of a man (unknown to me), in the style of Epstein, the clay layered on with deliberate roughness, and a small nude torso, much smoother, in more or less the style of Maillol—like so many amateur artists, Sidney did not appear to have a style of his own. The nude was not particularly graceful and was obviously giving Sidney a lot of trouble—patches of darker, fresh clay showed where he had recently scraped off what had been there and started all over again. I wondered if he used a live model, and if so, who?
Sidney’s enthusiasm for sculpture, I decided, was greater than his skill—indeed, his status as an art lover, while he took it seriously himself, was disputed by my father, who was an unchallenged expert, a gifted painter in his own right and a serious figure in the world of art collecting. On one memorable occasion, he had unwillingly been obliged to have dinner at Sidney’s apartment in the Dakota and found himself unable to avoid a guided tour of Sidney’s collection, which included a large Rubens, of which Sidney was extremely proud. My father stood before it in the trance that came over him whenever he looked at a painting, until Sidney finally got up the courage to ask what he thought. My father looked at it skeptically, ran his hands over the surface, and sighed deeply, like a doctor attending a dying patient. He shook his head sadly, having recognized it as a forgery. “Vat the hell, Sidney,” he said. “Vat it matters if it was painted by Rubens or not by Rubens? All vat matters is it gives you pleasure, no?”
I lit my own pipe, and we puffed silently for a few minutes. Sidney didn’t require conversation, or impose it at any rate; he was content to sit in silence, nor did he expect to be amused. Eventually he spoke. “That’s quite a pile of paper you’ve put together there,” he said. My binders, I noticed, were piled neatly on the floor near his desk and showed no sign of having been opened.
I wasn’t sure whether his comment was meant to be praise or criticism. Winston Churchill once remarked that anything worth knowing could be put on one piece of paper, and by this standard I had certainly failed Sidney. Still, he was the one who had asked me to pile it on him, I reminded myself. “I hope it’s all going to be useful?” I said.
Sidney chuckled. “Oh yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“A good starting point for the play?”
“Maybe. The fact is, my boy, I haven’t read any of it yet.”
I tried to conceal my disappointment, but Sidney could tell that my feelings were hurt. He glanced at me shrewdly through a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You can’t hurry the creative process,” he reminded me sternly.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. “I want you to sit in on the meeting with these guys from CBS,” Sidney said, to my astonishment. I could think of no good reason why he would want me present and said so.
“You’re going to present what we’ve got,” he said. “After all, you know what’s there. I don’t.”
“Do you think they’ll be interested?” I asked dubiously. There was an awful lot of material there.
“No. But they’ll go back to CBS convinced that this is a mine of industry. I want you to bore the shit out of them, my boy. Don’t disappoint me.”
The two executives from CBS arrived on time and were shown downstairs. They had that combination of bland WASP good looks and a ru
thless manner that was the style of the period in the television business. Both wore tailored, pinstripe English suits, white shirts, dark ties, glossy, expensive shoes—the CBS look.
Sidney greeted them amiably, every bit the artist, in a tweed jacket and a wool shirt open at the neck, offered them coffee, which they refused, introduced me as his assistant, and puffed on his pipe while they gradually worked their way up to asking him when he expected to have a first draft.
He listened to them in silence, nodding sympathetically. They should not think he wasn’t just as concerned as they were, he said. He was anxious to get the play out of his system and move on to other things, but the creative process didn’t run in a straight line, they should understand, it zigged and it zagged. He gestured with his hand.
“Is there anything in writing yet?” the more aggressive of the two executives asked.
Sidney smiled benevolently. Was there anything in writing? You bet there was! He signaled to me. I should show them what he had so far, he told me. While I placed the black binders full of research material on the desk, he explained, in a low whisper, as if I couldn’t hear him, that I was a veteran of the revolution myself, a freedom fighter, and that my job was to give him the firsthand material that made the difference between fake theater and real theater: the human interest.
“Human interest,” they understood. The one thing everybody in the television business knew was that “human interest” was the key to success. News had to have it (i.e., fires in Harlem or lost children, as opposed to commentary and facts), quiz shows had to have it (thus the need to rig them so the more appealing contestants won), drama had to have it, which is to say that it had to be about people the audience understood and, if possible, identified with. Television was an extension of the home, and the people who appeared on the screen had to be like family, not remote, glittering, and improbably good-looking, like movie stars, but familiar and unpretentious. All this the CBS executives knew by instinct; it was gospel, bred into their bones. If Sidney was pursuing human interest, he was on the right track.
It was my turn now to put them at their ease. I read to them highlights from the binders, now displayed on Sidney’s desk. They didn’t look particularly interested, but it wasn’t my job to interest them. A veil of polite boredom settled on their faces, interrupted by one or the other of them glancing at his wristwatch. After about half an hour, they exchanged looks and stood up. Sidney, who had been listening to my recitation of facts, figures, and news items with Buddha-like contentment, looked concerned. Were they sure they had to leave? he asked. There was much, much more, all of it riveting.
No, no, they protested, they would love to stay, but they had to be getting back.
Sidney stood up and looked them in the eyes. What they had to understand, he said gravely, was that this—he made a sweeping gesture toward the binders—was the hard part; this was what had taken all the time and effort and—yes, let’s be frank about it—money.
He stood in front of the window and pointed at the trees. Writing a play was like clearing a forest, he explained—a long, backbreaking job that made the plowing and the harvesting of the crops seem like nothing. He had now cleared the forest, his land was ready to be plowed, the harvest would soon be theirs.
I recognized that these homey agricultural metaphors derived from The Patriots, a play Sidney had written about the Founding Fathers, which had disappointed the critics and his investors. He also owned an estate in New Jersey about which he had squirearchical pretensions, as if he had planted every tree and strand of poison ivy himself.
Sidney accompanied his guests to the spiral staircase. “Go back and tell them,” he said in a commanding voice, “that the play is right here.” He slapped his forehead hard. “It’s just a question of getting it down on paper now,” he went on, beaming with confidence and goodwill.
One of the executives cleared his throat. Will there be a love story? he asked. Television viewers, especially the women, were a whole lot more interested in love stories than in revolutions.
Sidney positively beamed at him, as if he had just made a critical comment worthy of F. R. Leavis in Scrutiny. He was glad that the question had been raised, he said. A love story was exactly what they were going to get, he assured them. All good theater was about love. Look at Romeo and Juliet! Look at Othello! Look at his own plays! This would be a love story, of course, played out against the drama of a city on fire, besieged by the communist hordes, about a man and a woman who find each other in a moment of supreme drama, and who end up making the ultimate sacrifice.… But no, he didn’t want to spoil the play for them by giving away the ending now. They would read it, and, even if he said so himself, it would knock their socks off.
They went up the stairs, apparently happy, while Sidney breathed a long, low sigh of relief. He poured himself a drink and sat down in his chair, brooding over his view. I put the binders back on the floor quietly. “Is it going to be a love story?” I asked. Sidney hadn’t said much about the play, but I had the impression that what he was aiming at was something more like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a strong, dramatic denunciation of communism. As a matter of fact, if there was one element missing from most of Sidney’s plays, it was a strong love story. He was an old-fashioned 1930s social realist, a dramatist who worked in the tradition of the novelist John Dos Passos (and who, like Dos Passos, had moved from mild left-wing opinions to strongly held right-wing ones as he grew richer). Each of his plays dealt above all with a single issue; the fate of slum children in Dead End, young doctors in Men in White, crime and punishment in Detective Story. Nobody would have claimed that the love story was his métier.
He didn’t look up. “If that’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get,” he said. “Or that’s what they’ll turn it into, more likely.”
“I thought the meeting went well. I mean, they seemed to go away happy.”
“Mm. It will keep them off my back for another few months. With any luck.” He clicked the ice in his glass and drank. “There’s a lesson here for a writer, you know.”
“Is there? I’m not sure that I’m going to be a writer, though.”
Sidney laughed. “Oh, you will be, you will be, my boy. Trust me. I can tell. I know more about you than you do. What kind of writer, I don’t know. Not a very serious one is my guess. And not a playwright. A journalist, perhaps,” he said with some contempt. “Or a popular novelist.” He sighed deeply. “Your father will be disappointed. He’ll think you’ve wasted all that expensive education.”
That was true enough, I thought, though not very nice of Sidney to say. “What’s the lesson?” I asked.
“Ah, the lesson. Never forget that the people who pay a writer always have much, much more money and power than he does, whether it’s a publishing house, a movie studio, or a television network. With that in mind,”—his voice changed to a fair imitation of W. C. Fields—“ ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ You can go now.”
I THOUGHT about Sidney’s lesson long and hard that night. I finally knew what I was looking for, and I already knew I wasn’t going to find it sitting behind a desk and writing. Though I wasn’t what anybody would call a “team player,” I wanted to belong to a team—anybody’s team.
As for Sidney’s comment about writers, I realized, even then, that there was considerable wisdom in it. Writers are always outsiders and probably ought to be, since only outsiders see things clearly: the people who publish them, or make movies, or produce plays are always richer and more powerful, however successful the writer is. As I was soon to discover, there’s a tendency among book publishers, especially when making speeches on public occasions, to boast that the writer and the publisher are both part of the same team. This, of course, is pious nonsense. Nobody in the book business really believes it, and no writer is ever taken in by it. A lot of people start out in book publishing believing that it’s true, or at least that it ought to be true, then have to waste time learning otherwise, but I had
the good fortune to know better, thanks to Sidney’s insight.
DESPITE SIDNEY’S optimism, CBS eventually pulled the plug on his Hungarian project, which would have left me jobless, except that Sidney felt obliged, out of family feeling for my mother, to get me a job as a freelance reader in the CBS story department.
This was, at the time, about as low as you could get in the hierarchy of television, and indeed only one or two steps above being unemployed. First of all, the networks were already beginning to abandon the whole idea of doing original “quality” drama, even by established playwrights like Sidney or Paddy Chayefsky. Further, though we didn’t know it at the time, they were planning to eliminate their story departments altogether. (Why own a cow when you can buy milk?)
It had never made much sense to have a whole department just to read books and scripts; the only reason CBS still had one was that it was too small and powerless to draw much attention from the cost cutters in the top brass. There was perhaps also some vestigial guilt feeling among the older television producers that the networks ought to consider original material, much as book publishers used to feel an obligation to read “the slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, rather than mailing them back unopened, as is now usually the case. Then, too, in television as in the book business, senior executives were always promising to look at somebody’s novel or TV script, which then got sent down to the story department for a reading.
The script readers were a mixed bunch, mostly young writers for whom this was the equivalent of waiting on tables for aspiring thespians. They were paid twenty-five dollars apiece for each report, so it wasn’t exactly a good way to get rich—still, neither was waiting on tables, and I’d already tried that.
Another Life Page 3
