Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [12]
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