Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [9]
ON MONDAY morning, promptly at nine, dressed as if for a funeral in a sober, dark suit, I turned up at Sidney’s office, only to be told by Casey, his attractive young secretary, that he never arrived before eleven. The office was in fact a duplex apartment. Sidney had the downstairs part—a huge, two-story living room overlooking the park, together with a bedroom and the master bathroom—while Casey and I shared two small, windowless rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen upstairs. A circular flight of stairs descended to Sidney’s quarters, which, I was warned, I was never to visit unless he invited me to. I sat myself down at a desk in one of the small rooms and started to call around for material on the Hungarian Revolution.
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