Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [7]
Besides, I was trying to stay out of my father’s way, and Alexa’s too, for what neither of them knew was that I had already decided to go to America—and that I wasn’t planning on coming back.
CHAPTER 2
In the summer of 1957, I returned to New York, which I had not seen since 1946. My father saw me off at Heathrow, dry-eyed and for once with no advice. I had already said good-bye to Alexa, with tears on both sides, and was never to see her again—she committed suicide some years later, after an unsuccessful second marriage and a difficult love affair.
New York is not like London, most of which changes slowly (many of the changes having been wrought by the Luftwaffe rather than by builders and planners). The New York I returned to was a radically different place from the one I had left. Then, the Third Avenue El had divided the East Side of Manhattan, its noisy trains rumbling and screaming above innumerable outdoor markets. Then, air-conditioning was quite unknown, except for the “air-cooled” movie houses, in which people took refuge during the summer. Offices were equipped with big, noisy standing fans, roaring like airplane propellers, that stirred the hot air to a gale, sending papers and cigarette ashes flying. Then, Fifth Avenue buses were double-deckers, like those of London, except that the top deck was open. Now, air-conditioning had tamed the summer, the El was gone, as were the double-decker buses, and everywhere glass-fronted skyscrapers were rising.
Television sets had been a scientific curiosity then, with postage stamp–size screens—a thick magnifying glass was placed in front of the screen by those who could afford to buy one, creating a picture that it was just possible to watch from a distance of a few feet, though everything looked as if it were being photographed in the dim waters of an aquarium. Now, in 1957, television was everywhere, most of it emanating from New York.
AS A CHILD, I had been taken to the BBC studios to watch my mother appear on a primitive television set. My nanny and I stared with amazement at the tiny screen, on which we could just make out my mother—or a miniature, black-and-white version of her—doing an old number from Charlot’s Revues. Since then, television had played a very small role in my life. It simply did not exist, for all practical purposes, and for many years I was one of the few people in England who had ever even seen a television set in action. In France, in Switzerland, there was no television—in the evening people still sat in the café, read newspapers, and played cards, without even dreaming that their lives were about to be changed by a box with a glass screen in the front. In America, however, television had caught on while I was away. Everywhere I went there was a set, already changing people’s lives, as it was about to change mine.
In that innocent age, moreover, there was still such a concept as “quality network television,” though it was already beginning to die on the vine. Playhouse 90 had been instrumental in bringing serious original drama to television, introducing talented playwrights such as Paddy Chayefsky. CBS was the undisputed leader in the culture stakes. So determined were they to produce quality original drama on television that they had signed very substantial contracts with some of America’s leading playwrights, including Sidney Kingsley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Dead End, Men in White, and Detective Story. Kingsley was married to Madge Evans, former Hollywood child actress; Madge, as it happened, was my mother’s cousin.