Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [10]
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