Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [8]
It was my mother’s intervention that procured me a job on the fringes of television almost as soon as I arrived in New York. Sidney, it turned out, was writing a play for CBS about the Hungarian Revolution and was stalled for want of “background.” My qualifications for any job were nebulous, but if there was one thing I had to offer it was background about the Hungarian Revolution; more of it, actually, than most people wanted to hear.
Sidney and I met for lunch in the dark and gloomy Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, a few yards from his office on Central Park South. I saw before me a short, powerfully built man with broad shoulders, a big head, and rough-hewn features that made him look like a bust by Sir Jacob Epstein. He had a deep, almost self-consciously “musical” voice and a strange accent—stage British lightly painted over New York Jewish—intended, I suspect, to disguise his Lower East Side background. He spoke slowly, articulating each word very clearly, as if talking to the village idiot, keeping his voice low, so that I was obliged to lean close to hear him. His method of writing, he explained, was to do meticulous, thorough research until he knew everything there was to know about a subject—not so much in his head (he tapped that organ for emphasis) but deep down in his gut. He patted his stomach forcefully. When you had that, the writing was easy—it was getting to that point that was hard. Research and facts, then more research and more facts, was what he needed. He would steep himself in them, soak them up, and demand still more. The story would come out of the research, eventually—there was no hurrying the process of creation. Eventually, the creative juices would reach the boiling point and flow.
I nodded vaguely. Even then, perhaps because of my friendship with Graham Greene, I knew that on no subject more so than their own writing are writers more likely to be self-deceived or, in conversation, more boring. Graham, perhaps for just that reason, never discussed how he wrote books and made savage fun of writers who did, but Sidney was of a more old-fashioned, self-taught school. His plays always had big social themes and “realistic” dialogue, very much in the spirit of the thirties, when he had had his big successes. He was now somewhat out of fashion and deeply resented the fact.
Sidney took the process of creation seriously and expected others to. He talked about it long into the afternoon, puffing on his pipe, slumped reflectively in his big leather chair, as the room grew darker and the waiters began setting the tables around us for dinner. My job, he emphasized, was to provide him with all the facts, the background, the raw material.
Apart from shoveling information at him, I was to play devil’s advocate and tell him—frankly and ruthlessly—when he was full of shit. Above all, I should not spare his feelings. He could take it—he was a stage writer, not some cloistered novelist; he was used to arguments, objections, suggestions, pitched fights. He was not, in short, the kind of guy who bruised easily.
I promised to keep that in mind. My Uncle Alex’s view had been that all writers had to be protected carefully from the harsh realities of the movie business, like children or sensitive plants, but I reasoned that perhaps the stage was different. Certainly Sidney looked like a tough guy. There was something of the boxer about him, with his heavy brow, his powerful chest, and his strong, muscular hands. (He had taken up sculpture as a hobby late in life, to my father’s scorn, for when it came to art, he despised amateurs.) Sidney had, surely not by accident, the hunched-up stance of a fighter too, though there was, in fact, nothing particularly pugnacious about him. Indeed, his eyes, pale, deeply expressive, rimmed with long, pale lashes, seemed to be those of a man who was sensitive, withdrawn, perhaps easily hurt.
Did I want the job? Sidney asked. Absolutely, I said—after all, it was the only one I had been offered, as well as a foot in the door of serious television. We shook hands—Sidney’s handshake was