It’s no longer pleasant to walk on New York streets. They are too dignified, men and women waiting beside the upended crates that serve as counters for the apples they hope to sell. I give them nickels and dimes but can’t look into their eyes for there I see myself as they must see me, well-dressed and complacent. I’m not at all complacent. I’m angry, raging at indifferent men and women who swagger by in mink and broadtail. “When you’re successful and making lots of money,” Nanette Kutner says, “and buying a second mink coat, give me your old one.” Scornful of women who wear wealth and success like displays in shop windows, I swear I’ll never flaunt my good fortune in mink.
Nanette takes the same vow. We’re both broke.
The play’s failure left me with just enough cash to get through a miserly month. Then what? The gutter or the advertising business. I think I dreaded the job more than the gutter. A miracle saved me. A few days before it closed, Paramount Pictures bought the play—not for a lot of money but in my circumstances, a fortune. The first thing I did was to sign a lease on an apartment in New York. An outrageous lie broke the lease on the Great Neck flat. I told the landlord a pitiful story about a lover who had lost his fortune in the stock market and could no longer keep me in that expensive apartment.
As soon as I had Mama settled in the new place I took another step toward the gutter. With a new wardrobe in my bags and an orchid on my shoulder, I sailed for Europe. “Goodbye, Austin. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Mama.”
“Goodbye, Vera. And don’t go around telling everybody your age. They’ll remember.”
As the ship slid into the North River I felt cut off from all connection with my country and my old life. The engines began to vibrate. I recalled childhood distress when the old “whaleback” set out on its slow and steady journey on Lake Michigan. The baby. Mama had said, has a weak stomach. The baby had learned early that a weak stomach was an effective way of winning attention. Who now would console the lonely traveler?
In my cabin I gave myself a sound scolding. “Now, Vera.” The words still echo because, often recalled, they’ve supported me through many a crisis. “You know you shouldn’t have spent money on this trip, but since you did, you’ve got to enjoy every minute. You can’t afford to be seasick.”
The lunch gong sounded. I ate heartily. Since then on many ships and in all weather, I’ve never missed a meal. “You can’t afford it, Vera. You can’t afford self-pity or sulks or loneliness. You’ve got to enjoy every minute.” The lesson was worth every extravagant dollar.
In the deck chair next to mine sat a startlingly beautiful girl. The placing of her chair had not been a coincidence. She came from Chicago, had read The White Girl and asked the deck steward to seat her next to the author. Ten days later Hope Skillman and I were sharing a service flat on Albemarle Street. For both of us London was a literary adventure: Baker Street, Wimpole Street, Ebury Street, Belgrave Square, Bayswater Road, Chancery Lane, Westminster Abbey were out of books; policemen and porters had been written by Barrie; costers and venders were characters by Shaw; and from the drawing-room comedies of Coward, Lonsdale and Maugham came the tall, handsome, rosy young men (named Ronald and Reginald and Rupert) who swarmed about Hope. She cut a swath, as the old novels said, in London society. The ladies were not enthusiastic. Hope was too pretty. The famous English peaches-and-cream complexion was no match for her delicate coloring. London society was clothed in black that season. The Court was in mourning for some cousin or aunt of the royal family. Hope’s bright dresses were called gaudy and her conduct in traveling alone considered improper. She told them she was living with an older woman. When the mothers and sisters came to tea, I wore black, kept on my glasses and, since they might not approve of a Jewish chaperone, hung a large silver cross from my silver chain. I moved in different circles. Through letters of introduction I met actors and writers who entertained me in pubs and Italian restaurants in Soho. They could not afford the posh places Hope was taken to but were, I thought, more spirited than the Ronalds, Reginalds and Ruperts in tails and white tie. Hope did not inform the mothers that I went off to Paris and left her alone and unprotected in a service flat on a street to which their husbands came to pick up whores.
The first thing I saw in Paris was my mother’s face behind the customs shed. I had last seen Aunt Hannah when she came from Paris to visit in Chicago and I had asked her to bring me back a doll with long hair. To her generation Mama’s younger sister had been a shocking creature, independent, a nineteenth-century career woman. A millinery buyer, a protégée of Selfridge when he was in business with Marshall Field, she had gone with him to open the millinery department of his London store. Chicago had gossiped about Hannah Cohen. Why had the popular, dashing young lady never married? She had left Selfridge to open her own salon in Paris, had prospered until the First World War had ruined her business. Later she made a precarious living as a commissionaire who guided rich women to little shops where they bought elegant dresses, hats and lingerie at the lowest prices, including Hannah’s commission.
She had not seen a member of her family in twenty years. In her wallet she carried a frayed clipping with my picture and the Chicago Tribune review of The White Girl. Every morning when I came downstairs I found her waiting in the hotel lobby, a valiant old girl in ancient sealskin and a pirate’s hat worn with great flair. Every day she brought a gift. Not the gift I had asked for, the Hebrew Bible brought from Portugal by our ancestors, treasured since 1497 and bearing a record of all the births, marriages and deaths in her father’s family. “I’ll bring it tomorrow, dear.” She brought embroidered gloves, an old brooch, a bracelet, her mother’s yellowed silk shawl, but never the old Bible. She may have been ashamed to tell me she had sold it and was now, perhaps, living on the proceeds of the fifteenth-century relic.
Hope came from London and took a room adjoining mine. Aunt Hannah brought to our rooms a procession of little milliners and little dressmakers who copied the latest models of the great designers. No commissions were added to the prices we paid for the new dresses, hats and handmade underwear. The proud old lady would accept nothing from her niece or the niece’s friend. Nor were we given her address. “Just write me in care of Guaranty Trust.” She never answered a letter and when I sent her a check, it came back saying that Miss Hannah Cohen was no longer a client of the bank. We received no notice of her death.
Out of memories awakened in Mama by my descriptions of the sister she had not seen for so many years came the notion of a novel. This was another novel I had to write. Nothing could keep me from it, neither fear nor practical considerations nor intimations of future gutters. I wrote as I had always wanted, completely absorbed in a tale of my mother’s generation, my sister’s girlhood and my own time, a novel that recorded the passing of forty-six years in a family; my family disguised, dramatized, but essentially the Casparys and the daughters of a man who had changed his name to Cohen. The theme was the same as in the novel I had written and discarded while I was still in the advertising business. It said what I burned to say to snobs like my sister, that prejudice is as destructive to those who employ it as to its victims, and that devotion to material possessions is a waste of life.
More fertile than magazines and newspapers dug out of dusty bins in the Public Library were Mama’s memories, rich with names of fashions and fabrics, bustles, waterfalls, bombazine, buffalo cloth, programs, menus, Jean de Reszke singing Faust, Johnnie Hand’s band at balls and weddings, stupid Aunt Bella standing up in the theatre to shout a warning when the blind sister in The Two Orphans moved toward the trap.
(A friend telephones. “What’s new?” she asks. “Beatrice dyed her hair,” I say. “Who’s Beatrice?” Who indeed? A character in the book, more real to me than a mortal friend.)
That summer lives so vividly in me that, thinking of it, I feel the tickle of sweat dripping down my naked body. I have placed my typewriter beside the window. My authoring costume is a pair of spectacles and a pair of sandals. Across a back yard two young men have an apartment. “Aren’t you ashamed? Those young men are looking straight at you,” Mama says. I go on typing.
At night frivolity is permitted. Austin and I dine in garden restaurants or on hotel roofs. When Sam Ornitz comes to New York we dance to Romanian, Russian and Spanish music, eat spicy food, drink homemade wine followed by bicarbonate of soda. Sam listens while I talk about my book, says it can be important. The adjective sends cold waves through my overheated body.
A sad winter follows. Nineteen thirty-two starts with a whimper. Shops close. Apple-sellers shiver beside their upended crates. Sears, never a well-established publisher, declares bankruptcy. Austin is out of a job but enjoys unemployment at the Racquet Club, and we go to the theatre often, our tickets paid for by my Gotham Life interviews. Coming out onto Broadway, we cannot close our eyes to the long lines of men and women waiting for free soup and I’m ashamed of my full stomach and evening coat.
The rebellion brewing in me exploded in spurts of rage, political confusion and inflamed speeches against U.S. Steel and women in mink. Sam blamed all injustice and inhumanity on the capitalist system, gave me instructive reading matter and involved me in activities that used my mail-order advertising experience in the writing of letters soliciting funds to support the Scottsboro boys and, later, the striking miners of Harlan, Kentucky.
These tasks alleviated but slightly my guilt in having been spared the indignity of real poverty. My time was given grudgingly because it took me from work on my novel. When Anne Watkins told me that the Liveright firm had accepted it, I felt the prick of laurel on my brow. High achievement, glory by association, my name on a publisher’s list that included Dreiser, O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce. I didn’t see Horace Liveright for three years after he had suggested marriage in his office. A great deal had happened to both of us; he lost control of his publishing house in the 1929 crash. Then one day I rode in an elevator with him. I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me and did not greet him. He pushed toward me. “Don’t turn away from me. I know you.” He was sick, poor. “If you’d done what I asked, how different both of our lives would have been.” A few months later he died.
Saxe Commins showed me the manuscript of Finnegans Wake, all additions, deletions, lines crisscrossing, minute scribblings on the margin. To prepare this jigsaw for the printer was for Saxe an act of devotion. The logic of syntax could not be applied, nor could the logic of narrative. Proofreading the galleys, measuring them against Joyce’s script demanded full-time dedication. Every word, every comma and colon had to be tracked down like a clue in a detective story so that there was no deviation from the puzzle Joyce had presented.
Broke again. Less driven by the urge to clarity than the need to earn, I worked far into the winter nights. (Saxe had told me that Voltaire had been asked to name the three greatest virtues in writing. “Clarity, clarity and clarity.” I have never found the quotation and may be wrong about Voltaire, but about clarity, clarity and clarity I have no doubts. To write well … no matter how contradictory the theme or characters, how complex the story, how tangled the interweaving, how subtly shaded the phrasing, poetic the image, mysterious the mood … to write well is to write clearly.)
With no regret for the money squandered on the trip to Europe or the profitless months given the long novel, I contemplated the next month’s rent, the cost of groceries, the obligations of respectable living. The Liveright advance helped for a few months, but was not enough to see me through the final revisions. Anne Watkins asked for another thousand-dollar advance. The publisher refused.
One gloomy day in defiance of fate I went with a friend to squander a dollar-fifty on lunch at the Algonquin. We stopped in the lobby to talk to Laura Wilck, then story editor for Paramount Pictures. “We need material badly. Can’t you girls come up with a good story?” Now, to earn money the quick, easy way, I thought of promises and lures to students of the late unlamented Van Vliet Course in Photoplay Writing. Better still, I used all that I had learned in writing the lessons, and so constructed a story according to the counsel of George Pierce Baker and William Archer. Clarity, clarity and clarity helped me tell a complex story in forty pages.
I wrote Suburb over a weekend, read it to Austin, fought his criticisms, spent another couple of days rewriting the forty pages. Paramount paid two thousand dollars for it. Two hundred thousand couldn’t have delighted me more. Ten years later Paramount still gave out mimeographed copies to show how an original (narrative material written directly for the screen) should be done.
I find it difficult to leap ahead, but must in this case anticipate the next seven years, during which I sold this story eight times. At the start it had been original both in form and concept, a murder story without a murder, the first to include comedy. In the next seven originals the backgrounds and characters were changed, situations altered, but there were always similar implements of suspense, unexpected twists, the idiosyncrasies of little people. (In Hollywood during the thirties a character who was neither criminal nor wealthy was a little person.) With each version the story was more mechanical, the price higher. Seven years later, when I was living in Connecticut, Richard Halliday, then Paramount’s New York story editor, telephoned.
“I’m afraid, dear, I’ve got bad news for you.” The sympathetic tone suggested rejection of the latest version. “Do you realize, dear, that this is the same story you’ve sold us before?”
Unready to show my hand, I put on a show of astonishment. “How can you say that? It’s about different people in a different place and the basic situation isn’t the same. It’s a different kind of murder.”
“It’s the same formula.”
Perfidy uncovered, I was free to laugh. “Has Paramount just found that out? I’ve known it for years. What about the new story?”
“They wanted to offer you a thousand dollars and say no more about it.”
“I’m not accepting it.” The story had not been submitted to other studios.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, dear. The legal department says that if we accuse you of plagiarism you can sue for libel.”
“Plagiarism? It’s my own story.”
“According to law you can plagiarize yourself. I’m not supposed to tell you about it, but I know I can trust you. They’ll pay eight thousand.”
“Thanks, Dick. I appreciate your trusting me. And I promise never to write that story again.” This was no sacrifice. By the eighth version I had become so bored that working on the story was no more diverting than writing ads for Reefer’s More-Eggs.
A few days after the original original was bought, Anne Watkins called me with the news that Liveright had agreed to advance another thousand dollars. Thus I became a millionaire.
That winter I helped put on a show with a cast of unmarried mothers. Catherine Crandall, the dancer who had posed for our first Sergei Marinoff photographs, was doing volunteer work in the New York Foundling Hospital, giving dance exercises to girls who had recently had babies. She asked and I happily agreed to write and direct skits for the revue the girls wanted to put on. Since the only unmarried mothers I’d ever encountered had been in books, I was grateful for the chance to meet the romantic creatures.
A modern wide-windowed building has replaced the gloomy brick hospital, but in its day the Victorian Gothic mood seemed more fitting to the concept of the unwed mother as a disgraceful female to be hidden from the community. Its inmates were everything but romantic, poor kids thrown out by their families, forbidden to return until they had shed the outward signs of sin. Many of them remained until their babies were adopted or they had found jobs which allowed them to keep the infants. The small rosy nun in charge of the recreation program thought that a musical show would build morale.
I suggested that the girls make up their own skits. They planned the action and dictated lines, which I cut or amplified to give form to the comedy. They wanted the skits to be about college girls in pajamas. Few of them had gone beyond eighth grade, but they had fixed ideas about college life. Drawn from the movies, of course: Betty Co-Ed was their ideal.
The rosy little nun censored the material. She thought popular torch songs too emotional for a cast and audience that had recently gone through heartbreaking experiences. Less evocative songs were banned, but she approved “Something to Remember You By,” ironic when sung by an unmarried mother to a girl dressed as a sailor.
Catherine’s accompanist donated his services for rehearsals and performances. She borrowed costumes from friends in the theatre, raided wardrobes and warehouses for a collection of evening gowns, peasant costumes, troubadour and sailor outfits. So enchanted was the audience that when the curtains closed on the final number, trained nurses, pregnant girls and nuns refused to leave unless the show was to be repeated.
A mentally retarded mother who could neither carry a tune, dance in time nor remember a line of dialogue was given the privilege of pulling the rope that closed the curtains. Musty green drapes served as the backdrop. They were not quite wide enough to conceal the religious paintings on the chapel walls and had to be pinned together obliquely over a statue of St. Joseph in a niche at stage center. One of his eyes looked out rakishly on the singing and dancing. A roguish little performer shook provocative hips and buttocks. The audience howled with delight. As the naughty singer made her exit, my retarded stagehand reprimanded her: “Why, Tiny, what you done in front of St. Joseph!”
The show ran for three nights. No one enjoyed it more than the nuns.
Brookfield Center is a calendar-picture village lying between gentle Connecticut hills. Old trees cast shadows on white clapboard houses, lawns are protected by picket fences. The house Mama and I had taken for the summer was neither old nor white but early twentieth century, painted somber green but redeemed by an unforgettable cherry tree. We had brought along a girl to help with the housework. She had stayed in the Foundling Hospital because she could not find a job that would enable her to keep her baby.
She was not an unmarried mother but had been wed in a furniture store in order to get a free dining-room suite. During her pregnancy the husband deserted. Mama and I helped her care for her baby and kept the young mother’s work light. Country life did not suit the city girl. She sulked until she had two weeks’ salary, called a taxi from Danbury and left without an explanation or farewell.
I had come to the country for peace, meditation and hard work. The guest room was never empty—nor was the stone cabin, once the laundry, which we had fitted out for an extra guest. Our most frequent visitor was my devoted Austin. When the house was dark and Mama safely asleep I would slip out to the ex-laundry. Mama’s room was above the back door. The screen whined on its hinges. If Mama heard she never mentioned my transgressions. Had the subject come up, it would have been her maternal duty to disapprove, but as she had, as she often told me, learned so much about life from me, she maintained a tactful silence.
Hope Skillman came for a weekend and spent the summer. She had come to New York to look for a job but found that summer was the wrong season, 1932 a hopeless year. We were soon surrounded by her admirers and the phone constantly announced calls from distant places.
One hot afternoon when she and Mama had been shopping in Danbury Hope broke house rules by bursting into the room where I worked. New York papers were shoved at me. Reviewers called The Night of June 13th the freshest and most entertaining picture of the year, story by Vera Caspary. It was my original original. Suburb, expanded into an excellent screenplay, superbly directed.
The next day Anne Watkins phoned from New York to say that Leland Hayward, the famous agent, wanted to talk to me. “A thousand a week,” he said and asked how soon I could leave for Hollywood. I walked out of his office on watery legs. A fortune, years of writing without fear of the gutter, easy living seemed my destiny. For weeks I quivered when the phone rang. Mr. Hayward never called back.
Great promises collapsed. I had thought myself on the verge of a fortune and fell, not with a thud but with the slow motion of dying hope. At the end of the summer my long novel came out, its title Thicker than Water. Reviews were good but the Liveright firm had no money for exploitation or advertising. My publishers went bankrupt.
Little was left in the bank when Mama and I returned to New York in September. We had no home. Our lease had been broken, our furniture stored. By courtesy of Gotham Life we lived on a due bill at the Windsor Hotel while I sought a way to earn enough for rent on an apartment, groceries, clothes and the doctor bills of an aged diabetic mother.
Nanette Kutner used to say I was like Elijah; when I was hungry the ravens came to feed me. This time only a single raven arrived, in his beak an invitation from the Chicago Council of Jewish Women to speak at the opening of their fall season. No payment in this, only expenses. But out of the expense account I paid for Mama’s stay in a Chicago hotel. For her, my appearance at the meeting was a kind of vindication of her position as only a fringe member of Jewish society.
My speech was an impassioned plea for unity to replace the prejudice and snobbery of assimilated Jews. This was 1933. In Germany Hitler’s campaigns of persecution had begun. The popular press barely recognized the menace. Few members of the audience cared to believe in the existence of the threat. Bourgeois ladies remained smugly certain that nothing serious could happen to nice Jewish people who minded their own business and refused to believe the propaganda of Communist agents.
In the audience the ravens were represented by my royal patron Princess Pat—otherwise Fanny Gordon, for whom I’d written copy on mail-order beauty. She had deserted her business that afternoon to hear her protégée lecture ladies who had not worked for their bread and mink and had looked down their long noses at the daughter of a Russian Jew when she had served them in the drugstore where she and her husband had mixed the rouge that was the foundation of their fortune. Mrs. Gordon had gone into the fiction business, not the fictions of cosmetic advertising but the drama of radio publicity. Although she had a keen ear for the clink of dollars, it was not for profit alone that she had become a producer of weekly shows. As a girl she had studied elocution and still fancied herself a gifted actress. The radio plays were secondhand theatre and when she swept into the studios, she was greeted with no less reverence than those princes who had established theatres and produced spectacles out of royal conceit.
The job was created for me. After my play failed I had given myself a course in drama, analyzing more than a hundred plays, writing outlines that clarified the movement and meaning of every French scene. The Princess Pat playlets provided exercise in the craft as well as one hundred dollars a script. As I did not want a career as a radio scenarist, I tried to acquire a substantial bank account by writing two to three plays a week, an impossible task if I had not acquired skill at plagiarism.
Blackest of sins. Before this if I suspected that, unaware, I had borrowed a phrase I would rewrite the sentence. Shameless now, I swiped and borrowed, twisted motives, brought old situations into modern settings, made the men women and vice versa. The princess was pleased. “Why are your stories so much more original than the others? All these writers keep using the same stories over and over again.”
“I steal only classics.”
She thought I was kidding. To her, plagiarism was no sin. During her elocutionary years she had given a reading from the Music Master and wanted it condensed for radio. The estate of Louis K. Anspacher demanded a royalty fee. “Couldn’t you change it a little so they won’t recognize it?”
“I don’t plagiarize,” replied the noble authoress.
Nevertheless, a twisted version was produced. No one ever remarked the similarity to the Anspacher play. On the one occasion when I borrowed the form and changed the sexes of The Play’s the Thing, only one person caught on.
“Congratulations, Miss Molnar,” said Harold.
He was a new friend, devoted admirer and gay in both senses of that much-abused word. His z.q.—zest quotient—was hearty but thin, a crust over self-hatred. He was small, skinny, myopic, unhealthy and, I suspect, perverse only in imagination. One of his games was the pretense that he was engaged to me, a notion never mentioned in my presence but implied, no doubt, in conversation with others, as our romance was reported in a New York gossip column. This sent him into transports of delight. It would have been unpardonably cruel to have laughed at the absurdity and caused a hurt that might forever have scarred the delicate tissue of his pride.
Although my gaiety was not as desperate as his, I was in need of the diversion he offered. There was an aching emptiness in me. Unsatisfying work left me barren, querulous and bored. Harold provided surcease with unending entertainments: nightclubs and dives, Sophie Tucker belting out her songs, Ethel Waters offering in black-and-tan joints songs considered too bawdy for vaudeville, Fanny Brice playing a Russian Camille with a Jewish accent; Ben Bernie, Isham Jones, Duke Ellington; ham and eggs at three in the morning. Presently this palled. I had dallied too long, wasted weeks that should have been given to a new novel.
Telling myself and my friends I needed loneliness and peace, I left Chicago after a farewell party made memorable by my hostess’ remark: “Gin shouldn’t be too young. It should be made at least half an hour before it’s served.”
I had no sooner got off the train than I heard syllables that sounded like my name. Science had not yet discovered the public address system so that announcements made by the unmechanized human voice were audible. “Miss Caspary, Miss Vera Caspary.” Who would be paging me in New Orleans? I had chosen to spend a season of lonely concentration in a place where no friends would divert me.
My old boss, the Junior Partner, did not believe a girl should be alone and friendless in a strange city and had alerted the advertising manager of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. By the end of that week I had an apartment in the French Quarter, a dozen acquaintances and had been drunk on absinthe. “Do I bo’ you, sugah?” asked the advertising manager when I turned down the third dinner invitation. It was his own fault. He had introduced me to Gwen Bristow, a feature writer on the paper, and her husband, Bruce Manning. Bruce worked in radio, writing, directing and acting in plays presented by an ex-bootlegger turned legal by selling canned grape juice which, if allowed to ferment, would become illegal wine. Gwen interviewed me for her paper, Bruce persuaded Miss Alberta Kinney, who painted and sold pictures of the French Quarter to tourists, to rent me the renovated slave quarters behind her studio. Miss Kinney promised to have the apartment furnished by the end of the week, and a friend of the Mannings offered the use of heirlooms kept in storage.
On the day I moved in with my clothes and a portable typewriter, the only furniture was a bed and kitchen table. Later the heirlooms arrived. Never in Louisiana nor in France had more rococo lyres, wreaths, roses, twisted ribbons and cherubs been carved and gilded. In their faded elegance the chairs gave insulting contrast to the bare floors, uncurtained windows, and unshaded light bulbs. On my first night in the former slave quarters, I woke to hear savage rain beat down like echoes of the drums beating in my head. Alone in the alien city, isolated by rain and darkness, I knew horror more chilling than nightmare. Enemy eyes pierced curtains of rain. Angry descendants of slaves surrounded the slave house. The black man who had tortured my childhood rose from the grave. Rococo cherubs whose gilded torsos supported the arms and legs of the chairs threatened to detach themselves and wriggle toward me on their amputated legs. Rigid, I lay in the glare of an unshaded bulb, offended by its brilliance yet more afraid of the dark.
Daylight brought little relief. Rain continued to beat its mocking dirge upon the roof. There was neither food nor coffee in the kitchen. When at noon the bell rang I was afraid to open the door. There with a huge cotton umbrella was the Mannings’ maid. I refused to sleep in the slave house again and spent that night in their living room. A couple of days later I moved into a museum.
Madame John’s Legacy, left to the Negro mistress of a wealthy planter, was listed as a historic site. On balmy days I moved a card table and my typewriter to the balcony. Tourist guides led their flocks into the courtyard. “The French Quarter is famous for its artists and writers,” and the guide would point up at me pounding out a radio drama for Princess Pat, so that sightseers might tell their neighbors back home that in the French Quarter of New Orleans they had seen a writer writing.
The writers and artists of the Quarter were a proud lot, scornful of tourists and the bourgeoisie. Faulkner wasn’t there that winter and Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon (whose books brought many tourists to the city) came home just before I left. Through Bruce and Gwen I met and mingled with the celebrated circle. Nights were filled with talk, laughter, Coca-Cola and corn whiskey. Living was cheaper than in northern cities, easier and free of the tensions of driving ambition. Vagrants came like the prosperous to enjoy the gentle winter climate. Domestic help was too plentiful, wages shameful. If your maid failed to turn up, you had simply to lean over the balcony and ask some passing black woman if she wanted a job. They shopped in the French Market and if they cheated, it was for pennies, too few to count. Their apron pockets were filled with secret herbs.
The streets were magnificent stage sets. On old buildings iron balconies hanging like dusty lace over faded brick were picturesque backdrops for the seedy dramatics of the Quarter. Streets were lively with picture galleries, souvenir stalls, antique shops, oyster bars, restaurants, teashops for tourists, French groceries, Italian groceries, fortune-tellers’ salons and a parade of exhibitionistic whores. Properly costumed tarts wore patent-leather shoes with white tops, large feathered hats, dyed their hair flamboyant colors and painted their cheeks no less emphatically than the aging gentlewomen of the Garden District.
I was turned back by a cop when I tried to walk on a street where whores lounged in the open doors of narrow houses. It was not considered safe for a neatly clad lady wearing gloves to walk there. Was I a lady deserving of the law’s protection? I had been asked to move out of Madame John’s Legacy for reasons of moral turpitude.
I’d been as chaste as a nun. My offense was hospitality compounded by publicity. Horace Kallen, philosopher, teacher and writer, had come from New York to lecture before a woman’s club. Knowing that philosophers are not among the financial elite and women’s clubs were not too generous with expense accounts, I had offered him the couch in my living room. A newspaper report had it that Dr. Kallen was staying with the writer Vera Caspary.
The landlady—who belonged to the club he was to address—was afraid other members would not approve of her letting an apartment to a scarlet woman. “Good Lord,” I said, “does that bitch think that if I had a man staying with me illicitly, I’d have it announced in the newspapers?” But I was not too anxious at the time to remain in New Orleans. I was alarmed by the tremors and tempo of my heart when I heard certain heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs that led to my balcony. I listened too eagerly for those footsteps. The man’s wife was my friend. She went out to work by day while he wrote radio scripts at home and was free to stroll over at noon and interrupt my efforts at concentration on the novel that had yet to find theme and form. He had the Irish love of a good story, the genius of the Irish for the telling of a tale. In time I learned that many of the stories were untrue, but heard them with no less enjoyment. He was a good listener too so that, stimulated, I told my stories with abandon and embroidery. We seduced each other with narrative and turned our skill to profit. The two days I gave to Princess Pat’s radio plays were unendurable boredom. He thought it generous beyond imagination for a writer to offer half the job and half the income to another. Generosity was not the motive. I suggested collaboration as an excuse and guarantee for his delightful visits.
By the time I was declared immoral and unfit to live in Madame John’s Legacy, a clamoring heart, imagination run amok, uncontrolled dreams threatened to betray me. “Get away,” advised my philosophic visitor. “Get away quickly.”
Poor Mama had been in Milwaukee all this time. My sister’s illness had progressed to a point where she could no longer dress herself or walk to the bathroom without assistance. The girl hired to act as nurse and housekeeper was too careless and too ignorant to care for the invalid, and Phil Singer too mean to hire trained help. All that Phil had trusted had betrayed him—his financial charts and graphs, his study of the rise and fall of bonds, debentures and pounds sterling, his faith in Herbert Hoover’s promises of normalcy’s return. The metamorphosis that had reduced the paper millionaire to middle-class mediocrity seemed to him a personal attack by a vengeful wife. In turn he sought revenge by miserly treatment of the invalid.
As though further to thwart him. Sister became so helpless that she could not be cared for at home. He was forced to put her in a sanitarium. Reluctantly I paid a dutiful visit. She could not think or speak clearly and no more resembled my witty grown-up sister than misery resembles fun. Reality had fled. Unavoidable memories were avoided by distortion of the time sense. In her raddled memory Papa lived; with her old friends. The Girls, she attended afternoons of embroidery, bridge and chicken salad; former admirers escorted her to dances and the theatre. Into these projections of the past came the living present, her son recognized as a boy of fourteen. Her husband, his family and Milwaukee friends did not exist. The anguished spirit had exorcised all recollections of the bitter years of her marriage.
In Hollywood a few months later I received a telegram with a red star on the envelope. Irma had died that morning.
I could not grieve. The torments that had called forth the ghosts of her past, the stumbling speech, the palsied movements had ended. Years before, Sister had taught me not to fear death … “even the weariest river flows somewhere safe to sea.” It was not death that saddened me, but the sense of life wasted. Did anyone who had known her in those last querulous years remember the high-spirited girl with a wild sense of humor, a love of poetry, appreciation of painting? Not greatly talented but with skill enough and ingenuity to have supported her pride and her needs, had she not shackled herself with snobbery and outworn attitudes?
For all my adult life I struggled against her influence, and even after she died I went on defying her in every book I wrote. “You see, Irma,” I was to say again and again and again, “you see, there was no reason for you to look down your big nose at the poor working girl. Not poor at all, she’s the twentieth-century woman. She lives as she chooses.”
In 1933 March was the cruelest month. It roared in with the news of the bank moratorium. On March fourth, the day of Roosevelt’s inauguration, New York shuddered in the enemy wind; moisture hung in the air without the grace to fall like simple rain. Like a symbol of the French Revolution a small baroque carriage of red and gold rolled along Fifth Avenue. “So first of all, let me assert that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the new President said, and then, “The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple.” How inspiring Roosevelt’s words after the hollow prophecies of Herbert Hoover. The baroque carriage rolling along Fifth Avenue was no more than a painted vehicle delivering bonbons.
It is a curious quirk of human nature to be stimulated by disaster. The air was charged with excitement, not entirely unpleasant. Bottom had been reached; banks were closed, checks could not be cashed, solvent citizens were reduced to temporary penury. When the banks reopened, the hate campaign began. Roosevelt soon earned the enmity of the rich. Austin, who called himself the only Democrat in the Racquet Club, sought refuge from the rancor in my room at the Windsor Hotel where, living (on a due bill) I had eaten well and entertained friends during the bank holiday.
Cash was running short again; credit could not go on forever. Once again the ravens descended with manna in their bills: D. A. Doran, who had been at Paramount when The Night of June 13th was filmed, had become story editor for Fox (not yet Twentieth Century-Fox). He asked if I could give them an original like the earlier one. This is exactly what I gave them, the second of the eight versions, the formula with a new setting, little people, little secrets, blunders, entanglements, murder and jokes. The deal included a stint in Hollywood, four weeks in which I was to write a treatment.
I had no idea what a treatment was. Nor had my producer. We held story conferences, because story conferences were what writers and producers were supposed to have. I had expected to learn all about movie writing, but all this experience taught me was that a new writer who has neither a famous name nor friends in the studio is shunned like a typhoid carrier. Dorothy Parker was said to have had GENTS painted on her office door. I had my shoes shined twice a day, bought gum, candy and cigarettes because the vendors talked to me.
My office was in the then New Writers Building, a cardboard castle sometimes used as background for scenes of medieval activity. One day I looked out and saw Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. It was not for Macbeth but for Berkeley Square that an army of Japanese gardeners marched forward, carrying large trees. On the far side of the lawn back of the building a row of eighteenth-century houses, exact replicas of the terrace fronts of the Square, had been set up. My window was a theatre on whose stage strolled nobles and commoners, prostitutes, beggars, nurses pushing parasoled prams. Street vendors offered lavender, oranges, buttons and lace. Children gamboled under transplanted trees, cavaliers in velvet breeches greeted ladies whose plumed hats rode high on powdered wigs. The eighteenth century shone in California sunlight and Leslie Howard, gracing the scene in peruke and silk stockings, seemed to belong to that graceful age rather than to our world of cameras and microphones.
My departure was as inconspicuous as my presence had been. I’d learned nothing about movie writing and my story had not been improved. What neither my boss nor I recognized was that my original was a treatment, a dramatic outline of a story told in narrative. Much later I learned that most of the painful conferences and endless revisions were merely excuses for producer and writers to hold jobs. Until the nouvelle vague hit Hollywood, screenplays were rigidly structured. Most producers and many writers had to grope for a story line. By altering scenes, adding lines, changing the heroine from a working girl to the madcap daughter of a millionaire, they could argue themselves into believing they had constructed a solid story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It was better for me not to be instructed in screenplay writing than to have been taught by an amateur.
None of those prodigious Hollywood payments came my way, but with a few thousand dollars in the bank, I felt as secure as a widow with a safety deposit box full of gilt-edge securities. Cautious because I wanted to invest in the freedom to write a long novel, I still felt able to rent a handsome white house behind a picket fence in Brookfield Center. Mama and I were to share it with Gwen, who had given up her newspaper job to write a novel. Her husband had not been sure he wanted to spend the summer with three women, yet was the first to arrive. He tried to teach me to drive the secondhand Ford I had bought, but I, enchanted by his wit, gave more attention to his jokes than to his instructions. Pickets were knocked off fences, hubcaps left lying on the road. The experience was so traumatic that it took seven years and a course of professional lessons before I could handle a car with confidence.
It was a delirious summer, a season of illusion and delusion, of gaiety, bewilderment, dreams and dedication to failure. Heartbreak may have been the incentive. I pined for a man who slept across a narrow corridor. With his wife.
I don’t think what I felt for him was love, neither was it carnal attraction. We liked playing games, stimulated each other to hysterical lightheartedness, bewitched each other with verbal tricks, made adventure of every trifling incident.
Then Sam Ornitz came from Hollywood to announce that I was to write a play with him. I resented the interruption of my unwritten novel but could not resist the temptation to collaborate with a man whose companionship seemed well worth the time I fancied I was sacrificing. We worked on a screened porch, fighting over every line and shouting with such vigor that the neighbors thought we were married.
As I look back on that crazy wonderful summer, it seems that our actual dedication was to fun and games. Yet Sam and I finished a play and I wrote an outline and the opening chapters of a novel. Sam left. Austin came then, blithe in the belief that he still possessed my undivided affection. The guest room was next to mine. I had only to tiptoe along the corridor to be with him. On the first night we had barely embraced when there was a knock on the door and my mischievous friend Bruce Manning brought in a nightcap for Austin. Naked, I scurried into a closet before Austin opened the door. The closet in this nineteenth-century house was a space under the attic stairs, low and with a slanting ceiling. The two devils entertained each other with bawdy stories while I crouched, shivering, in that clammy den.
Mama exercised her usual discretion, relishing the jollity too much to notice the pollution. When she failed to understand a joke she thought we were making fun of her and grew petulant. For days the offended queen, deaf to our cajoling, ate rye bread and chocolate cake defiantly and suffered a diabetic attack. The cuisine would then deteriorate, the maid quit and female guests struggle through the housework with but slight assistance from my untrained hands. When Mama recovered, the maid wheedled and bribed to return, we resumed our wanton ways.
It was all play-acting. Story-tellers, actors, we strutted our roles against a backdrop of New England hills and orchards. Yet in our most exultant moments we were aware of fakery and evanescence. Eventually the curtain would fall, the lights darken, the brilliance fade. What, I demanded, was to become of us when the summer ended?
The end of that raffish season saw Mama established in an expensive New York apartment hotel, Gwen on her way south to do research for a novel while her husband and I took rooms in a local inn to write originals and make our fortunes. We stayed a few weeks, wrote two originals, sold one and saw the days growing short. Because I had only just started a new novel, my conscience pricked unceasingly. I knew the end was inevitable: twilight came too early. On a desolate October morning we left Connecticut. Light rain became a storm that split the sky and spilled out water as though millions of buckets had been overturned. Rain isolated us. The little Ford was a lonely vessel on a raging sea. In midafternoon night surrounded us. The darkness was so intense that we became blind to the world beyond the streaming windows. Our windshield wipers failed. We crept along at the pace of a crippled snail. The roads of Maryland were new to us. To read signs Bruce had to squint by flashlight at signposts bearing the names of villages not shown on our map.
At last we arrived at our destination, the isolated farm of a friend who had invited me to stay with her while her husband, a ship’s captain, was off at sea. In bed that night, listening to the beat of rain, I hoped the storm would keep up so that my love could not drive with that useless windshield wiper. In the morning I opened my eyes to feeble sunlight. He was dressed and ready to leave. With a grand gesture as though bestowing a Rolls-Royce, I said “The car is yours.” And I was left without love, without obligations, without fun and friends. Free. Free to go on with the novel.
The early chapters were never read, the notes discarded. The theme was too close to my sore heart.
There are times when a writer plunges into some alien theme as others take to drink or drugs. I wrote the first draft of another novel in five weeks. It was a bad book, too quickly conceived, too hastily written, soon discarded. As I look back over my working years, I see a pattern of escape indulged during periods of distress; attempts to find solace in facile fictions I believed would bring swift and generous rewards. Escape of this kind is not as dangerous as drink or drugs, but its inevitable failure cuts cruelly into the ego already weakened by disappointment.
Now back in New York, living in a seedy hotel while keeping Mama in comparative luxury among rich elderly bridge-players, I tried a play, revised, rewrote and knew before my agent read it that it was sentimental and dreary. My bank account was dwindling fast. With every check I wrote I saw myself selling apples on the street. That winter I touched bottom with charge accounts unpaid and just enough cash to keep us for a month.
I thought I heard the wings of the ravens when my agent said A. H. Woods wanted to talk to me. As always when I went for an interview, I wore white kid gloves and pinned on a fresh gardenia—not as talismans to bring luck but symbols to strengthen self-confidence. Gloves and gardenia made me a lady, kin to the two princesses who had smoothed their long gloves over their wrists as they looked down scornfully upon a barelegged little girl in dirty gingham.
Mr. Woods wanted to talk to me about the play I had written with Sam Ornitz. “You look like a nice little girl. How could you write such a dirty play?”
“Do you think it’s dirty, Mr. Woods?”
“Your heroine is a bad woman,” said the man who had produced plays called vulgar, suggestive and risqué: Up in Mabel’s Room, The Demi-Virgin and The Shanghai Gesture, in which a salty character. Madam Goddam, had operated a brothel in which various perversions were profitably indulged.
In our play a woman desperate for the survival of her family, for her husband’s self-respect and the education of her daughters, gave herself to bill collectors because she could not pay the monthly installments. We thought it a timely, socially significant play. Moral, because the poor woman paid for her sins with a year in prison. How much, Mr. Woods asked, were the monthly payments for which she gave her virtue? Five dollars, I said.
“Huh! You mean the woman sold herself for five dollars?”
“Many do it for less.”
“I don’t believe it.”
His office was on Forty-second Street. “Look down there,” I said. “You’ll see girls who do it for a dinner.”
“That’s the dirtiest thing I ever heard.”
“Do you think a whore who gets fifty dollars is morally superior to one who gets five?”
Mr. Woods closed the door of his private office. “My secretary’s a nice little girl. I don’t want her to hear that kind of talk.” He whispered, “I know a woman, not pretty, homely as sin in fact, and she’s got all kinds of jewels, stocks and bonds, an apartment on Park Avenue and a big bankroll.”
“She must be a good businesswoman.”
“No. She gets it from her lovers.”
“She’s as shrewd at her business as a woman who designs hats or manufactures cosmetics.”
“What kind of talk is that?”
The secretary came in with letters to be signed. Leaving, she kept the door open. Mr. Woods closed it again. He went on probing for facts about immoral girls who got only five dollars for their services quite as though he’d never heard of the Depression, never looked out of a train window at the Hoovervilles, never noticed breadlines across from Broadway theatres.
Although our first play was never produced, Sam wanted to write another with me. He took a room in the seedy hotel and wooed me with a renewal of familiar pleasures: Moskowitz playing the cymbalom, the fat contralto resting massive breasts on a table while she sang Jewish love songs, the girl accordionist playing La Bohème while Sam half-spoke, half-sang a working-class interpretation of the libretto. Memories of the crazy summer were revived poignantly. I sighed and yearned and played my lovesick role with sad sincerity. Sam tried to divert me with jokes and social statistics, and sang the song about hanging his hat on the weeping willow tree. If I’d agree to return to Hollywood with him, he argued, the cost of the trip on a cheap train would be an economy since I was to live in his house while we worked.
Call me Elijah. The blessed ravens could not have descended at a time of greater need. In one week I sold three stories to the studios and got a contract starting at five hundred a week. My luck was so miraculous that Sam would not let me cross the street alone for fear that jealous gods would wreak vengeance. Two of the sales were of stories I had drafted in New York, revised and typed between noisy sessions on the new play; the third and most profitable, half-interest in a novel written by my collaborator and based on the story we had tried and failed to sell to Fox.
What does a woman do when she comes into money? I gave the Ornitz’s maid every stitch of clothing and, in a dressing room at Magnin’s, with salesgirls whirling in and out with lovely things to show me, I bought nightgowns and robes, dresses, suits, evening gowns, coats, blouses and bags. I bought a car, rented a house, hired a maid and sent for Mama. She made a grand exit from New York in new clothes, a delegation of my friends to see her off, an orchid on her shoulder. In her day ladies had received bouquets of roses and nosegays of violets. The orchid made her the equal of New York’s most popular debutante. It was kept on ice during the trip so that when she arrived at the Pasadena station she could descend from the train like a movie star with an orchid pinned to her new coat.
My first producer at Columbia said, “I’ve got that new little girl working for me. She’s a good writer but she hates movies.” I was such a smart aleck that I went around saying that I thought all films inferior to all plays while the best movie was less worthy than a mediocre novel. A stupid point of view, snobbish as well. The writing of screenplays can be creative, ingenious, brilliant, tremendously skillful, but for a hired writer working under a hired producer the work is often more mechanical than creative.
Restlessness was compounded by the climate. In Chicago and New York I’d always enjoyed walking on lively streets, watching passers-by, becoming part of the parade. On Sunset Boulevard there were no faces to look at, few pedestrians, only ugly bungalows, scrawny palm trees, seedy shops, the never-ending line of cars. After a couple of blocks I became so weary that I had barely the energy to stumble into my office and fling myself on the couch. I gave up the walks but fatigue did not give me up. It was like the first day of flu, like spring fever that went on all year. Older residents said, “Every newcomer has it at first. It lasts two weeks.” For me it lasted eight months.
In the cool of the morning I worked energetically enough to accomplish the day’s stint. After lunch I closed the Venetian blinds, locked the door and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my office door. Too lethargic to read, too tired to sleep, I spent the long afternoon in unrelieved drowsiness. Other writers interpreted the sign on my door as a show of concentration. “But I’m not working,” I’d protest, “it’s just that I don’t want people walking in when I’ve got my clothes off.” Out of this grew a rumor so persistent that years later at another studio, they wanted to give me a woman collaborator because it was believed that I worked nude.
Harry Cohn believed in clean pictures. During the 1933 drive against suggestive scenes and risqué dialogue (when copulating couples could be photographed only on different levels and no actress could say in plain words “I’m going to have a baby”) I heard Mr. Cohn make an impassioned speech. “I don’t want any picture to come out of this studio that I wouldn’t show my little nieces. Once we made a dirty picture and it lost money. I’m against dirty pictures.”
Big, handsome, flamboyant, irrepressible, Cohn could be charming or brutal as the mood struck. From his balcony he looked down upon the patio or across at the writers’ offices. If a couple or a group stood talking, he would shout “Hey, you guys, I pay you to write, not to stand around gabbing!” A female writer who was not pretty and who had, moreover, been hired in Cohn’s absence by Sam Briskin was not worth the great man’s notice. I had no more than a nodding acquaintance with him until the day I defied God.
A picture already shot needed alterations. I was honored with the task. I had read the script and seen the film in a projection room which I’d left as soon as the first dreary reel was over. Nothing could have made it a good picture; the changes were mere clarification of the opening sequence. I could have finished the job in a morning had I not been saddled with a collaborator who was having husband trouble. Between tears and calls to New York she would remember that she was supposed to be working on the script. In order to contribute to the chore she would tear my scenes apart and command changes with the authority of a high executive. We finished in a few days, sent the pages to the producer, who submitted them to Harry Cohn to be read over the weekend. On Monday we were told to wait for summons to Mr. Cohn’s office. Late in the afternoon we were told to meet with him that evening. We waited until eleven, heard that he had gone to the wrestling matches and would not come back to the office. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we waited, morning, afternoon and late into the night. In those days the work week went on until noon on Saturday. We were told to wait during the afternoon; Mr. Cohn would surely see us that day. He did. At five o’clock, when he had got back from the races, we were summoned. Our producer was there, a director and several yes-men. We looked on while Cohn sat high and imperious in a barber chair.
Presently Cohn ordered the barber to quit while he read a couple of pages. Silence. The shaving was resumed, stopped, a few more pages scanned. At last, with another regal signal to the barber, Cohn said: “It has no light and shade.” The audience bowed their heads as though a bishop had ordered prayer. Only I had the temerity to question authority. “In this scene the characters are introduced from photographs on the old lady’s desk. It’s all from her point of view, which is completely subjective.”
The barber was commanded to go on. No one moved or spoke. Cohn said, between strokes of the razor, “You’ve made her an unsympathetic character.”
“All through the script she’s an unsympathetic character.”
Cohn shoved off the barber. “She’s a great woman, she built up the mill, made a fortune for her family and not one of them was grateful to her.”
“She was selfish, righteous, domineering. To the people who worked for her, too.”
“She gave them jobs.”
The yes-men who knew the value of jobs showed signs of nervousness. Cohn smiled. “Look at her family, living in Europe, squandering money, a bunch of bums.”
“Except for the grandson.”
“He’s the worst. Her favorite. She’s crazy about the kid, intends to hand the business over to him and he”—scorn iced the tone—“wants to be a painter.”
“If he wants to be a painter, why shouldn’t he be a painter?”
Heresy was not to be borne lightly. Cohn thundered argument. Why should a man want to be a painter if he could run a business? I answered sassily that the young man might have talent. “Suppose,” sneered the boss, “young Ford or Andrew Mellon’s son had wanted to paint pictures?” Painters, said Cohn, were idlers, wasters, bums on relief.
“Is that your opinion of Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, Mr. Cohn?”
He descended from the barber chair, leaped across the room, shook a finger and charged “You’re a Communist, too.” The accusation seemed too silly to be denied. Further to challenge me, he demanded that the scene be rewritten that night. I refused. He insisted. Mae Robson was coming in to work at seven-thirty on Sunday morning, the crew would have to be paid for overtime, so why couldn’t I give up a few hours on Saturday night?
I said that I’d invited guests for dinner, that I had not expected to be kept at the studio so late on Saturday afternoon, that Mr. Cohn had kept us waiting overtime for five nights. Moreover, I said that I wrote badly at night. The revisions he demanded were trivial. I could write them in a couple of hours on Sunday morning—and would gladly get up at five o’clock to save money for the studio. My attitude was not respectful.
“I want them tonight.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I repeated.
“You know who I’ll ask to write it?” With a smirk, Mr. Cohn roared a name that had been linked with mine. Punishment was intended. I was not discountenanced. Fine, said I, splendid; this man would happily give up his Saturday night to save money for the studio.
I could not be fired. My option had only just been taken up and had some five months to run. But no assignments were given me. I sat in my office reading, gossiping, waiting for a phone call. Finally I quit going to the studio, spent my days at the beach or in the mountains while my agent picked up my weekly check.
Presently the phone call came. A script had to be rewritten. The producer should have been selling artificial silk ties or making book at the races. The story that I was called on to revise was a so-called mystery whose clues could have been spotted by a retarded ten-year-old. I suggested a new story with less visible clues. The producer loved the clumsy device. I declined to work on such dreck and wrote a short potent note to Sam Briskin. In the circumstances, I said, I could not make something out of nothing for the studio. Would he please release me from my contract?
The news was transmitted by studio grapevine. All over town discontented writers said, “I could do the same thing.” No one did. Writing jobs are precarious. For all the fancy talk about quitting pictures to write my novel, my play, only the most successful and self-confident are willing to sacrifice the weekly check. I wanted to get back to New York to write my novel, but was offered a job the next day. When I told the producer I was not interested in writing pictures, he argued that it was a short assignment and that February was of all months the worst in New York. Although tired of being drowsy and oppressed by California sunshine, I preferred not to plunge into winter.
After a few weeks the job ended. I hired a companion for Mama and set sail for New York by way of the Panama Canal. On the ship I was pursued by an insurance broker who boasted that his ex-wife had deserted him with the two mink coats and forty-eight pairs of shoes he had bought for her. He promised me the same, but I said that four mink coats and ninety pairs of shoes could not tempt me and sought refuge behind the locked door of my cabin, where I worked on notes for the book I thought I was going to write. For diversion I flirted with the ship’s orchestra and flaunted my scorn before my repulsive suitor by drinking absinthe in Panama City and Havana with the saxophone player. In New York I passed tempting shop windows without a second glance, knowing I could buy whatever I wanted and wanting nothing but a ream of yellow paper. Years were to pass before I had a novel published.