• 6 •

My Kid Seems to Like Your Kid

How was it, I pondered, that in New York I had felt like an alien and as our plane set down in London, I was overwhelmed with an emotion of homecoming? Part of the reason could well be that in London I belonged to a community—and a large one at that. I never counted how many of our American expats currently lived in England. We had arrived like sheep, one following the other bringing our American customs, dreams, and resentments with us. Being survivors had bonded us. There were degrees of separation, but they mattered little. Some of our group had been famous and secure before HUAC; some too embryonic to have made our names and fortunes yet; and some had neither garnered fame nor fortune, but a livelihood that kept the wolf away from the pantry and their dreams intact. All of us were, however, like-minded in our liberal viewpoints and none, that I recall, were Republicans.

Resentment ran high. Companies hired blacklisted writers for payment far, far below Hollywood standards and their names did not appear in the credits, except in the form of a pseudonym. Anger festered over their Hollywood colleagues who had recanted their former position and had given names. These things distressed me as well. But, I was convinced that the only way to survive was to concentrate on present needs and not on past abuses.

In Great Britain a seriously ailing Sir Winston Churchill had stepped down as prime minister in favor of the elegant Conservative, Sir Anthony Eden, his former secretary of war. Eden had ordered British forces to occupy the Suez Canal Zone ahead of the invading Israeli army, and Great Britain was in the grip of a bitter controversy caused by his action, which had been condemned by the United Nations. The prolonged dispute was so acrimonious that Eden resigned the premiership in January 1957, to be succeeded by Harold Macmillan, a Conservative and scion of the publishing firm, Macmillan. Although English politics were complicated, we expats could not help but get involved, at least in the hard issues that were current. Nonetheless, what was happening in the States remained our top concern.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been reelected president for a second term in November 1956, defeating yet again the intellectual liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson. The whole colony of us had voted at the American embassy, giving Stevenson the largest percentage of votes in any “precinct.” For one of us not to vote was considered a cardinal sin. We gave Eisenhower points for sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of black students. Still, it seemed incredible that the nation could not see the damage that Senator Joseph McCarthy had done to our Constitution, nor how cowed during his first term Eisenhower had been by McCarthy’s growing power in the early 1950s over the Senate. The more recent Army Investigations Hearings when McCarthy had gone over the line and abused and threatened Senate members finally spelled the end of McCarthy’s grasp on the government. Censored, ridiculed, and robbed of power, he died in 1957 of diseases caused by alcoholism. But for those whose careers had been mined and their rights to free speech trampled upon, the blacklist outlasted McCarthy’s life and would remain in existence for many more years.

Before my departure from New York, I had been brought sharply up to date by Ted Ashley, a major agent, as to my chances of finding work in television. He advised me that I would do better to distance myself in England and continue to write under an assumed name. With children to support, I had to have a reliable income to cover our living expenses. Hannah Weinstein was producing a new adventure series so I sent off a letter to her. She would see what she could do, she replied. In the same post was a letter from my dear friend (and elder statesman) Sidney Buchman, written in his minuscule handwriting (Sidney could get on one piece of thin, blue airmail paper what others needed three sheets to accommodate). There was a project he wanted to talk to me about. Sidney had championed my career in my early years in Hollywood when he had been second man to Columbia Studios’ mogul Harry Cohn. Mitchell Gertz had sent him my screenplay, Riot Down Main Street (that Gertz later sold to 20th Century-Fox). Sidney was all for buying it, but Cohn turned it down. Sidney had been one of the first expats I had contacted in London as he was working on a project, coincidentally being produced by Raymond Stross.

The evening before our return flight to London, we three had dinner with the Rossens. The hostility between Bob and Sue was tangible. Bob was in an extramarital relationship with a young female assistant, Elise, at least half his age. Sue was determined to keep their marriage intact. These were tough times for the Rossens. Old friends, still loyal to their beliefs, turned their backs on them. Bob was able to work and had formed his own production company. Most of his projects had to be made in Europe and Sue seldom accompanied him. He was in New York during a break in his shooting schedule.

“Look, kid,” he said to me privately after dinner. “I need a reader, a scout, someone with story sense and good taste. You’re determined to go back to England with the kids—okay, check out what’s being published there for me. Maybe, you’ll find a good story. I’ll put you on the payroll, fifty bucks a week. It’s only a part-time job and you can do it on your own time. It shouldn’t interfere with any writing you may be doing and it’ll come in steady. Deal?”

He was sitting on the edge of a desk, looking down at me, his gaze penetrating, his forehead furrowed, concentrating entirely on what I was about to say. I could easily imagine him in the same pose making a deal with an actor he wanted to hire. Although short and stocky, Bob’s piercing blue/gray eyes, his attitude, the use of his hands (quick jabs for emphasis, thumbs-up fist when he knew he had scored a point), and his carefully measured speech—most times low and personal, his breath seeming the only barrier between himself and the listener—were mesmerizing. Bob possessed a powerful presence and he knew it.

“This is a professional offer, not a family handout?” I asked.

“Strictly.”

“Deal,” I replied.

We shook hands (dry palms, hard grasp).

“You’re doing a great job with the kids,” he added. “Ever hear from that sonofabitch nephew of mine?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You’re better off. I washed my hands. I did what I could to straighten him out. His mother’s my sister. Blood counts with me. I always treated him like a son. But a man doesn’t take care of his kids—he’s shit.”

On arriving back in London we three stayed for two weeks at the moderately priced Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. The place was like a setting for an Agatha Christie novel. Built in 1910, it appeared untouched by time. The guests were mostly frugal, English country folk in the city for a week’s holiday and shopping. Afternoon tea (served in a mahogany-paneled room with paintings of sporting dogs on the walls) contained the only edible food their kitchen served. The toast at breakfast was presented burnt and wrapped in a white linen napkin. The eggs were overcooked, the coffee bitter. Yet, I loved the very stodginess of the building, the narrow, winding corridors, and the windows of tinted amber glass. I could write a good mystery here, I thought!

I found an apartment for us in a small building on Elvaston Place, just off Gloucester Road, and enrolled the children in the American School to insure a continuity of the studies they had been having at PS 6 in New York. The school (actually two branches—lower school for Cathy, upper for Michael) was across town near St. John’s Wood, where they were taken to and collected from by private transportation. Without the additional two hundred dollars a month I was regularly (and gratefully) receiving from Bob, I would have had to squeeze things to handle the school fees and transport. At the same time, I was enjoying the task he had given me, and had made contact with numerous publishing houses. Books and manuscripts arrived so regularly, I no longer found time to listen to A Book before Bedtime.

Our new home was on the top floor of a small, four-story building. Each of the lower floors were divided into two flats, whereas ours occupied the entire top floor (however, I am not sure one could call it a penthouse!). A narrow lift with room for two (if on lean daily diets) was situated in the small lobby. By clasping the children close to me, we three could ride to the top together. Once there, it seemed well worth the cramped (and sometimes halting) ride. Windows on all sides afforded some light even on the gloomiest of days. The children each had their own bedroom and mine connected with a dressing room large enough for me to use as an office. The living room was divided by an archway to a dining room that led into—great wonder of wonders—a large kitchen with American appliances that worked on transformers (left behind by the previous tenant, said to have been an employee of the American embassy).

The first thing I did was go out to Hammersmith (a ten-minute tube ride from the Gloucester station near us) to collect the things I had left behind in storage. The apartment was comfortably furnished but the small knickknacks, paintings, photos, art deco ware, kitchen equipment, and our personal treasures (all items on English current, plus toys, books, and files) that I brought back in a taxi (amazingly stackable in the great old black English vehicle) made the place our home. The area was not as fashionable as Markham Street, but I loved the ethnicity of the food stores and small restaurants on Gloucester Road. There was a public library and a post office (the latter in a paper shop) within walking distance, and Kensington Gardens was at the top of the road (with Kensington Palace close by in case one should want to drop in for tea).

Next, I rang up Hannah and Sidney, who both seemed hopeful that there would be work for me. Sidney Buchman was a wonderful guide and mentor. Before the blacklist, he had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and considered “the golden boy” of Columbia Studios. Many people compared him to the late Irving Thalberg who had been equally revered at MGM in the 1930s. He was both a brilliant screenwriter and an impeccable filmmaker with the ability, sensitivity, and intelligence to deftly handle drama and comedy (often blending the two). A list of just a few of his screenplays reveals the caliber of his talent: Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, Lost Horizon, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and a particular favorite of mine, Holiday, the delightful Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn comedy (with strong anticonformist overtones). In addition, for over ten years, he had overseen the production of most major Columbia films as vice president of the studio.

Called before HUAC in 1951, he had admitted a membership in the Communist Party twenty years earlier but refused to give names. The ten men who had preceded him on the witness stand had been found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to admit anything, and sentenced to a year in prison. Sidney duly expected the same penalty. Miraculously, he had been spared prison, fined $150 and given a year’s suspended sentence. Harry Cohn’s intervention on his behalf was believed to have been responsible for the “leniency” given him. Immediately blacklisted, he came to England in 1952 and would commute back and forth to a home he owned in Cannes (being one of the more affluent of his fellow expats and having had a French mistress, film star Simone Simon, for many years).

In his youth, Sidney had been a strikingly handsome man. Now, well into his fifties, he had retained a strong presence: well built, a perfectly carved profile, and possessing the most amazing china blue eyes. He walked with innate authority. There was an aura about Sidney that Scott Fitzgerald could have best described—for he seemed to carry with him a lost period in time. He was old world in his manners, a poet in his heart, and a ready captain when a project or a person needed one. In the twenty-five years I would count Sidney as a close friend (only his death would inactivate our friendship), I do not recall him ever using swear words (at least in my presence). He possessed a gentlemanly regard for women and a respect for their intelligence. He remained on good terms with his past lover and his divorced wife and loved and worried over his only daughter who lived in the States.

Sidney was happiest when working in collaboration with other writers. He enjoyed the give-and-take of ideas and the company of fertile minds. He never gave me the feeling that he felt anything of a sexual interest in me, and I regarded him with the fondness one might feel for a close relative. When in London, he was always on his own. We went to the theater together and discussed books, films, and the world condition. On one of his London trips, he asked me to read a Romain Gary book that he had optioned. He did not yet have a production company, nor did he know if he could find one that might commit to a film deal. But the story haunted him—and he was, above all, a story man. I worked on it with him for a time until we both finally concluded that it was better as a novel than a movie. (Titled Curtain at Dawn, it would be filmed in 1970 by Jules Dassin as Promise at Dawn.) His much-loved daughter lived in the States, and with her at such a distance, I suspect I became sort of a substitute, for his attitude toward me was quite paternal.

On the surface, Sidney could seem a cool, controlled man, always in command of a situation. But he also could be highly emotional. Once he sobbed openly when he began talking about his childhood. He had a younger brother, Harold, and a sister. They lived in a rural area outside Duluth, Minnesota, and his father enjoyed the sport of hunting. One day when the three children were alone, Sidney (eleven at the time) had taken down his father’s hunting rifle, which he had never been allowed to handle. The gun went off and killed his sister. Family life was never the same. He had left early and had always felt the weight of his childhood misaction and the tragedy he had caused.

With shocking duplicity, Sidney’s home studio, Columbia (who had fired not only Sidney but all employees who had tangled with the Committee, leaving many destitute) was the first Hollywood studio to make use of the tremendous talents of the expat population living in England and had sent over executives who had clean bills from HUAC to inaugurate foreign productions for film and television. Many in our community were hired to write scripts under assumed names (at a rate of pay often as little as one-twentieth of what Columbia would have had to pay their Hollywood staff). All such deals were done under the table and with the use of pseudonyms. Of course, it was not moral, but it was a living and a means of survival.

The commercial feature films being made for American production companies were in quite a different category from those being produced by British filmmakers. The English theater’s “kitchen sink realism” had led to the birth of “new wave cinema,” which dealt with formerly taboo subjects (still taboo stateside) like homosexuality and abortion. Working-class dramas had overtaken English country-house frolics. A new breed of young actors lit up their screens, many with regional accents that were incomprehensible to the American ear. The “wicked witch” on the censorship board had been ousted. The new rule seemed to be that no film, excluding those of politically controversial nature, could be too intimate, while in the States the proven box-office winners were epic movies like The Ten Commandments, teenage romps, or beach parties. Comedy was apparently not universal. Hollywood broke box-office records with the zany clowning of Jerry Lewis, later to also take France by storm, but never England. What caused laughter in Great Britain was of a subtler nature like the Alec Guinness comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, or the more ridiculously outrageous ones made by the Boulting brothers that pilloried national institutions (the forerunners of Monty Python).

Clearly, filmmakers in Britain and the States marched to different drummers. This was where the expats came in. Here, in London, was a large pool of American-trained film writers all desperately needing work. The system was corrupt, and yet it allowed writers to engage in what they did best while putting food on their family tables. Did any of us refuse to work under these inequitable conditions? Not any I know of. Were we also corrupting our ideals? My answer is: You can’t feed your kids ideals.

Although eminently gifted, by the mid to late fifties, several of our community had risen to heights they might not have achieved had HUAC never existed. Jules Dassin, whose work as writer/director/actor evoked a European spirit, had made the right decision in settling in France where he was well received and able to work under his own name (later in Greece, as well). Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes), a prototypical caper movie, was a huge success in its American release (for the US version Dassin had to use the pseudonym Perlo Vita). He won the Best Director Award at Cannes, and Rififi at the time became the most profitable film ever made in France. With the Cannes Award his new career as a writer/director of foreign films took flight. Cannes also ended his marriage to Bea, as it was at Cannes that year that he met and fell in love with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he would later marry. That merger eventually produced the internationally successful film, Never on Sunday.

Joseph Losey, the Harvard-educated, blacklisted American director, now living in London, had never become an integrated member of the expat community. His distancing of himself from his peers was replicated in his films where it produced a Brechtian alienation—“a deliberate denial of audience involvement, intended to make spectators think rather than feel”—surely a more European than American approach to film. He had paid his dues. One of Losey’s first films made in the UK was The Sleeping Tiger. The credit was given to the English producer Victor Hanbury. For a time he assumed the name of Joseph Walton. But by 1957, he was credited under his own name (the brilliant films The Servant and Accident would later be among his best work).

The expat who was on his way to achieving the greatest financial success and power in London was Carl Foreman. This had not yet happened when I returned from New York but soon would. He had been something of a golden boy before leaving Hollywood, having received an Academy Award nomination for his script of the Kirk Douglas film Champion. His original screenplay, High Noon, on which he was also the associate producer, was in midproduction when he was called before the Committee. Once blacklisted, he and his wife, Estelle, came to London where for the next six years Carl worked without credit. Recently, he and Michael Wilson (a fellow blacklisted writer) had cowritten the adapted screenplay for the acclaimed The Bridge on the River Kwai. The screen credit was given to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel, who had contributed very little to his book’s adaptation. River Kwai was the turning point for Carl. A feisty Jewish guy who grew up in a Chicago working-class family, he began to fight for his life and his career.

Estelle, blunt and often militant, was not an easy woman to be with. But she was a friend of Sue Rossen’s and had called me several times to join them and their young daughter Katy for dinner. Carl looked a bit professorial behind his large, horn-rimmed glasses but was, in fact, fiercely ambitious and a bit of a rough diamond. As a young man he had worked as a circus barker. I could see that was entirely possible. He liked to talk and was good at it. Any subject, you name it, he had something to introduce, add, or contradict. Sometime late in ’57, he had returned to Washington to meet behind closed doors with members of the Committee. There would always be speculation in the community about what happened in that room when, a short time later, he inaugurated Open Road Productions where he would write, direct, and produce under his own name (rumors circulated that he had made a deal and had secretly named names—an accusation never proved). Despite his ability to work unencumbered, those expats he hired to work for him could not use their name and were paid far below established minimum wage, an action that did not endear Carl to me, nor have I ever been able to excuse it.

I remember Carl once saying to me, “You’re no one in the film industry unless you are a hyphenate: writer-director, writer-producer. But when you are a triple hyphenate—writer-director-producer—then, and only then, do you have real power.” Carl was making sure he had it. In contradiction to this, Sidney had told me, “Any filmmaker who wears three hats—writer/producer/director—is a three-headed monster. Sometimes lines have to be cut. If they are your lines, you might not do it. And sometimes if you are the director, an entire scene needs to be scrapped, and if you feel it contains something you like, you might [foolishly] retain it.”

Delayed by casting problems, filming had finally begun on A Question of Adultery starring the American singer and actress Julie London. The movie also had a distinguished English cast that included her British costar, Anthony Steel, and fine supporting actors Basil Sydney, Donald Houston, Anton Diffring (actually German), and Andrew Cruickshank. Since censorship had been eased, the sequences that Raymond had originally wanted were returned to the script with added melodramatic flourishes not writ by my hand. Nonetheless, it was being made and as it was now an English production my name would be up there on the screen.

Raymond wanted me on the set, although I don’t know why because hardly a word from the screenplay they were shooting was changed during production, except perhaps Julie’s husky moans and sighs as the muscular Tony Steel made love to her. Handsome as Tony was, he lacked sexual chemistry on-screen and off, but was a “jolly good fellow” liked by all his coworkers. Julie and I hit it off. She was open, frank, caring, and down to earth. The last few years had been difficult. Her divorce from Dragnet actor Jack Webb, worse than bitter. She needed to talk about it and I was a willing and sympathetic ear. She claimed he was often violent, and that even separated by so many thousands of miles, she found herself looking over her shoulder, fearful he would appear. We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together (turkey and ham—no goose!). She had two young girls, one who was having emotional problems. Friendships during the filming of a movie are tentative at best. Yet, they can be more intense than outside friendships. A film company is like an island unto itself. The members spend fourteen hours a day together. They share experiences and secrets. Then the movie is in the can. Most go on to make other movies, join with other crews, and might never see a colleague from a past endeavor again. Julie and I exchanged Christmas cards for a few years. I was pleased when she remarried the musician Bobby Troup. But our lives never again crossed.

Dalton Trumbo was in London, and Sidney was hosting a small lunch for him at the Ivy and had invited me. There were nine of us: Dalton, Sidney, me, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., his wife Frances, Lester Cole, Kate Simon (the American travel writer who was dating Lester at the time), and Harold Buchman, Sidney’s brother. The Ivy catered to the before-and-after theater folk. We arrived as most of the customers were leaving for a matinee performance and had the place almost to ourselves for the rest of the afternoon.

I had not previously met Dalton. He was a well-sung hero among the expats, silent before the Committee, having served prison time for it and, although blacklisted, turning out one excellent screenplay after another from Mexico under an assumed name. The previous year his screenplay for The Brave One, which was credited to Robert Rich, won the Oscar for Best Original Story. The Academy had not known that Dalton Trumbo and Robert Rich were the same man. Dalton never showed up in Hollywood to collect the award and so a mystery was born: who was Robert Rich? The expats knew but weren’t talking. (The credit, as well as the Oscar, was given to him years later.) Dalton was well loved, a small, vigorous man, dapper in appearance.

Four of our group—Dalton, Lester, Ring, and Adrian—had been members of the Hollywood Ten and had spent a year in prison for contempt of the Committee by refusing to give names. Lester had achieved less success in Hollywood than the others and was of the strong opinion that his best work was on the horizon when HUAC dropped the ax. He was a very angry man. Fortunately he was warmhearted as well, loyal to his trusted friends and giving. He often was a guest at my table and each time he would bring with him a gift, however small, that represented my taste, or the children’s—not his. A true talent. But he did have this combustible anger inside and when fired up, his face flushed dark red, and his voice took on a hard, cutting edge. Someone at the table made a passing remark about the director Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten who had been sentenced to prison and then cooperated with the Committee to give names to earn an early release. Lester bristled. “I hate that sonofabitch!” he said as he put down his knife and fork and edged his plate away.

“Calm down, Lester,” Kate advised.

He instantly turned on her. “I hate that man!” he repeated.

“It doesn’t help to hate,” she cajoled.

“What do you know about hate?” he asked in a raised voice. “Hate is when a little Napoleonic chairman can sit in judgment of you and your government allows it. Hate is when you live in subhuman conditions for a year in a state institution that your countrymen permit to exist!”

Sidney rose from his chair and came around the table and placed his hands on Lester’s shoulders.

“We know, Lester. We know,” he said gently.

The room had suddenly chilled. There was graveside silence. Then, Frances Lardner, whose husband had also been incarcerated, began to talk to Kate who had grown pale—just a casual conversation, inquiring about Kate’s long stay in Paris, people they both knew. Sidney remained with his hands in place for a few moments and then went back to his seat.

Ring and Frances were a great couple. He had won an Academy Award in 1942 as coscreenwriter with Michael Kanin of Woman of the Year and had written many fine movies before his world had crashed. It would not be until 1965 that his name would reappear on new works for the screen—The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H being two of his later screenplays, the latter bringing him a second Oscar.

At one point, Adrian (who had kept his ear to the Hollywood scene) leaned across the lunch table to tell me that he understood someone at MGM had bought from Fox the rights to my script Riot Down Main Street in a trade-off deal. There was a rewrite being done, changing the reporter’s race from Mexican to black as a vehicle for Sidney Poitier, who was a fast-rising star.

“But it’s based on a true story,” I protested.

“What does Hollywood know about truth? You’ve heard the axiom ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’?” he laughed. “They have a black actor bringing in the coins and a lack of stories for him that Southern exhibitors will accept.”

[Flash forward to 1961: Sidney Poitier had not made the movie. I get a call from a man who tells me he is a representative of Pennebaker Films, Marlon Brando’s independent production company. Mr. Brando, he informs me, has recently purchased the rights to my script from MGM and is in London and would like to discuss the story with me. He added that Mr. Brando would not be appearing in the film if it was made; he would be acting as producer and director. I made an appointment to meet with Brando the following afternoon in his suite at the Savoy Hotel.

I had been around so much celebrity in my life that I was not usually awed in one’s presence. Marlon Brando was another matter. I had seen A Streetcar Named Desire four times and On the Waterfront twice. I considered him America’s finest screen actor. He was both an artistic and a social force. I arrived on time, and a bit nervous. He stood up when his assistant led me into the drawing room of his suite, but he kept his hands buried in his pants pockets. No handshake. His dress was casual—a blue cashmere sweater over a white shirt—hair slicked back in place.

The assistant departed. Brando freed his hands, motioning for me to sit down on one of the two sofas that faced each other in the room. He lowered himself carefully on the sofa opposite where I was now seated and picked up the receiver of a telephone from the end table beside him. “Tea, coffee, maybe something stronger?” he asked.

“Nothing, thank you.”

He replaced the receiver. “I’m told you’re a blacklisted writer.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a more intimate level. No mumbling, however. He had beautiful, melting eyes. “It fucks,” he said. Then he spread his legs and leaned back against the cushions of the sofa. “I thought you might want to take a look at the script. I got two versions—yours and another one. Yours is pretty damn good. I’d like to preserve what I can. The basic premise. You’re writing about racial bias. The Mexican situation in Texas? Fucks. We know that. You ever think about real Americans—Native Americans. The country’s injustice to them. That fucks. Nobody writes about them. Unless they’re riding hard on their way to scalp a party of white usurpers. It was their land, after all.” He pulled himself slowly together and up and walked around the back of the sofa and leaned on it as he stared directly at me.

“You never see an Indian hero in a movie. I know a few Navahos. They fought in World War II, the Korean War. They live like shit and are treated like dogs. Now ya know, you can stick to the same story. The minority guy, this time a Native American, getting a bum rap. He was a hero. Fought in the war, fuckin’ died, and now they want to ship his remains to a reservation and bury him without all the rat-tat-tat that a white soldier would get. Like the government doesn’t want the country to know that there’s been an Indian who helped save American lives.”

“Mr. Brando,” I interrupted, “I have no doubt that what you say about our Native Americans is correct. They are treated shabbily. They live in poor conditions. But my story is based on a true incident. The dead hero was of Mexican descent. From Texas. There was some historical truth to MGM’s recasting the story with blacks. There is, as we know, color restrictions in parts of the States where cemeteries are repugnantly segregated. Maybe there’s a story in your Indian—”

“Navaho.”

“Navaho—hero. I don’t think the story I wrote works with your premise.”

“Ya don’t?”

“It’s a different story. I don’t know if a Navaho Indian in Arizona—or whatever state there’s a reservation—has been refused burial outside his reservation. I sincerely doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Well, a lot of research would have to be done.”

“It could happen. It could happen,” he mused, ignoring my answer.

“And the reporter?” I asked. “He is really the major player. The soldier is dead from the opening shot.”

“Big league. Comes to town—desert shit-place. Sand in your teeth when the wind blows. He comes into town ready to fight for one of his own.”

“The reporter is an American Indian?”

He looked upward as if the movie was being projected on the ceiling. There was silence for a few long moments. Then he lowered his gaze and smiled at me, not a big, wide smile, one that twitched at the side of his mouth. “It could happen,” he repeated.

I rose from the sofa.

“I’ll keep in touch,” he said as I spoke my farewell and headed for the door. He followed me there and held it open. “It fucks. Really fucks,” he said and patted me on the shoulder.

That was the only meeting I ever had with Marlon Brando. Riot Down Main Street was never made as a movie.]

Sunday mornings a lucid stillness descended on London until the sound of church bells echoed across the city. Pubs were closed. Many stores locked their doors at one p.m. Saturday and did not open them until Monday morning. One paid a penny a day for an overdue book from the library, but as it was closed on Sunday there was no charge. The museums generally did not open until two p.m. Tourists tended to go out of the city, weather permitting, to places like Hampton Court where the famous maze was a popular attraction. We three took the train there one Sunday that began with moderate sunlight then darkened into a threatening storm. I have never had a decent sense of direction. The children had run ahead in the maze, Michael leading the way dexterously when I suddenly found myself separated from them by thick shrubbery and descending black clouds. Everywhere I turned took me farther away from the clear sound of their bright voices. I was quite terrified, so I stopped and began shouting to them. Suddenly, there was Michael’s grinning face as he pulled Cathy behind him and called out, “Here we are!” He believed I thought they had been lost.

One similar thundershowery Sunday afternoon, Kit Adler called to invite we three over to her apartment where she was planning a puppet show for the children (she now had four) and some of their small friends, tea to follow. It struck me as a jolly way to spend a dreary Sunday afternoon and off we three went. The show was a happier, less slap-me-down version of Punch and Judy. Kit was wonderful with children—old and young ones. There was one little girl, about three, accompanied by an au pair. The child’s name was Laura. The young woman seeing after her was a friend of Kit’s helper. Laura did not let go of the au pair’s hand for a minute and was not really happy to be where she was or to join in with the other children when the puppet show ended. By the time tea was served (highly diluted with milk) along with cookies and small sandwiches, Cathy, always the hostess even when she wasn’t, had made a small inroad in gaining Laura’s attention and she sat down beside her. About an hour later, her father came to collect her and the au pair. Laura was clinging to Cathy’s hand, not wanting to let go. The father introduced himself—sort of.

“My kid seems to like your kid,” he said, a Brooklyn cadence to his voice. “You live near here?”

“Off the Gloucester Road.”

“Oh, uptown.”

“That depends on which direction you are coming from.”

“Audley Street.”

“Uptown.”

“Maybe we can make a date—your kid—”

“Cathy.”

He grinned at her. Strong, even, white teeth, big smile, black wavy hair—carefully coiffed, the scent of a familiar men’s cologne.

“Cathy. Hi. I’m Sy Stewart, Laura’s dad.” He turned to me. “And Cathy’s mother?”

I nodded and added, “Anne Edwards.”

He went over and lifted Laura in his arms. He was not a tall man—maybe five foot seven, tops. A little heavier than Tony Curtis, but there was a distinct similarity in their looks and manner. Never could Sy Stewart be taken for any other nationality than American, even if he was silent.

“I’ll call you,” he said as he was leaving. “I got your number from Kit. Okay?”

“Okay.”

In movie-talk, this would be called “meeting cute.” But I gave little weight that he was actually interested in me in anything other than to organize a playdate between his daughter and mine and, as Cathy was four years older than Laura, I was not sure that would work out satisfactorily.