Another Life (3 page)

I tried the secret telephone number that Graham Greene’s friend had made me memorize, but it turned out to be that of the British Embassy, which you could find in any Budapest telephone book. I was eventually hustled out of Hungary in a long convoy of foreigners who had managed to annoy the Hungarian communists or their Soviet masters. As I crossed the border into Austria, I saw that man from MI6, dressed in the uniform of a British army doctor. He cut me dead—actually turned his back on me when I waved at him.

I
T WAS
a portent. I did not return home as a hero.

My friends and I got rather more attention than we wanted in the British press, but most of the papers treated our journey to Budapest and back as an escapade by high-spirited Oxford students, although the French press described us as if we had been adventurers in the John Buchan tradition. “Vacances en prison!” one Paris headline blared inaccurately, above a photograph in which we appeared unshaven and scowling, like Balkan bandits.

In fact, we had plenty to scowl about. We had left Oxford midterm, without permission, on the very sensible grounds that we would have been refused, and neither the university nor our colleges were pleased or in a forgiving mood. At last, at the cost of a long and serious lecture from the college dean warning me in no uncertain terms to apply myself to my studies more seriously in future and to avoid adventures, foreign or domestic, I was allowed back again, though not quite forgiven—I had committed the unpardonable sin of getting Magdalen College mentioned in the newspapers.

A
S
I struggled through that winter to catch up on my studies, lost in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (my tutor’s specialty), I felt, for the
first time, a certain discontent with my life at Oxford. It was not, I recognized, the fault of the university or of Magdalen College. They had not changed, nor were they ever likely to, but I had.

When spring came, I surprised my father—and myself—by taking a job as a waiter in a Chelsea espresso bar owned by the father of a girlfriend instead of joining him on the Cap d’Antibes. My father put it down to love (a possibility that struck him as far more dangerous than the Hungarian Revolution), while Alexa, who knew a thing or two more about love than my father, dismissed it as an ostentatious act of “slumming”—after all, I didn’t need the money. The truth, however, was that I
liked
the noisy, late nights, the easy camaraderie with total strangers. It was a pleasure to be too busy to think. It was 1957, and Chelsea was at the forefront of that great cultural sea change in English life that was to take place in the sixties.

Besides, I was trying to stay out of my father’s way, and Alexa’s too, for what neither of them knew was that I had already decided to go to America—and that I wasn’t planning on coming back.

CHAPTER 2

I
n the summer of 1957, I returned to New York, which I had not seen since 1946. My father saw me off at Heathrow, dry-eyed and for once with no advice. I had already said good-bye to Alexa, with tears on both sides, and was never to see her again—she committed suicide some years later, after an unsuccessful second marriage and a difficult love affair.

New York is not like London, most of which changes slowly (many of the changes having been wrought by the Luftwaffe rather than by builders and planners). The New York I returned to was a radically different place from the one I had left. Then, the Third Avenue El had divided the East Side of Manhattan, its noisy trains rumbling and screaming above innumerable outdoor markets. Then, air-conditioning was quite unknown, except for the “air-cooled” movie houses, in which people took refuge during the summer. Offices were equipped with big, noisy standing fans, roaring like airplane propellers, that stirred the hot air to a gale, sending papers and cigarette ashes flying. Then, Fifth Avenue
buses were double-deckers, like those of London, except that the top deck was open. Now, air-conditioning had tamed the summer, the El was gone, as were the double-decker buses, and everywhere glass-fronted skyscrapers were rising.

Television sets had been a scientific curiosity then, with postage stamp–size screens—a thick magnifying glass was placed in front of the screen by those who could afford to buy one, creating a picture that it was just possible to watch from a distance of a few feet, though everything looked as if it were being photographed in the dim waters of an aquarium. Now, in 1957, television was everywhere, most of it emanating from New York.

A
S A CHILD
, I had been taken to the BBC studios to watch my mother appear on a primitive television set. My nanny and I stared with amazement at the tiny screen, on which we could just make out my mother—or a miniature, black-and-white version of her—doing an old number from
Charlot’s Revues
. Since then, television had played a very small role in my life. It simply did not
exist
, for all practical purposes, and for many years I was one of the few people in England who had ever even seen a television set in action. In France, in Switzerland, there was no television—in the evening people still sat in the café, read newspapers, and played cards, without even dreaming that their lives were about to be changed by a box with a glass screen in the front. In America, however, television had caught on while I was away. Everywhere I went there was a set, already changing people’s lives, as it was about to change mine.

In that innocent age, moreover, there was still such a concept as “
quality
network television,” though it was already beginning to die on the vine.
Playhouse 90
had been instrumental in bringing serious original drama to television, introducing talented playwrights such as Paddy Chayefsky. CBS was the undisputed leader in the culture stakes. So determined were they to produce quality original drama on television that they had signed very substantial contracts with some of America’s leading playwrights, including Sidney Kingsley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Dead End, Men in White
, and
Detective Story
. Kingsley was married to Madge Evans, former Hollywood child actress; Madge, as it happened, was my mother’s cousin.

It was my mother’s intervention that procured me a job on the fringes of television almost as soon as I arrived in New York. Sidney, it turned out, was writing a play for CBS about the Hungarian Revolution and was stalled for want of “background.” My qualifications for any job were nebulous, but if there was one thing I had to offer it was background about the Hungarian Revolution; more of it, actually, than most people wanted to hear.

Sidney and I met for lunch in the dark and gloomy Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, a few yards from his office on Central Park South. I saw before me a short, powerfully built man with broad shoulders, a big head, and rough-hewn features that made him look like a bust by Sir Jacob Epstein. He had a deep, almost self-consciously “musical” voice and a strange accent—stage British lightly painted over New York Jewish—intended, I suspect, to disguise his Lower East Side background. He spoke slowly, articulating each word very clearly, as if talking to the village idiot, keeping his voice low, so that I was obliged to lean close to hear him. His method of writing, he explained, was to do meticulous, thorough research until he knew everything there was to know about a subject—not so much in his head (he tapped that organ for emphasis) but deep down in his gut. He patted his stomach forcefully. When you had that, the writing was easy—it was getting to that point that was hard. Research and facts, then more research and more facts, was what he needed. He would steep himself in them, soak them up, and demand still more. The story would come out of the research, eventually—there was no hurrying the process of creation. Eventually, the creative juices would reach the boiling point and flow.

I nodded vaguely. Even then, perhaps because of my friendship with Graham Greene, I knew that on no subject more so than their own writing are writers more likely to be self-deceived or, in conversation, more boring. Graham, perhaps for just that reason, never discussed how he wrote books and made savage fun of writers who did, but Sidney was of a more old-fashioned, self-taught school. His plays always had big social themes and “realistic” dialogue, very much in the spirit of the thirties, when he had had his big successes. He was now somewhat out of fashion and deeply resented the fact.

Sidney took the process of creation seriously and expected others to. He talked about it long into the afternoon, puffing on his pipe, slumped reflectively in his big leather chair, as the room grew darker and the waiters began setting the tables around us for dinner. My job, he
emphasized, was to provide him with all the facts, the background, the raw material.

Apart from shoveling information at him, I was to play devil’s advocate and tell him—frankly and ruthlessly—when he was full of shit. Above all, I should not spare his feelings. He could take it—he was a
stage
writer, not some cloistered novelist; he was used to arguments, objections, suggestions, pitched fights. He was not, in short, the kind of guy who bruised easily.

I promised to keep that in mind. My Uncle Alex’s view had been that all writers had to be protected carefully from the harsh realities of the movie business, like children or sensitive plants, but I reasoned that perhaps the stage was different. Certainly Sidney looked like a tough guy. There was something of the boxer about him, with his heavy brow, his powerful chest, and his strong, muscular hands. (He had taken up sculpture as a hobby late in life, to my father’s scorn, for when it came to art, he despised amateurs.) Sidney had, surely not by accident, the hunched-up stance of a fighter too, though there was, in fact, nothing particularly pugnacious about him. Indeed, his eyes, pale, deeply expressive, rimmed with long, pale lashes, seemed to be those of a man who was sensitive, withdrawn, perhaps easily hurt.

Did I want the job? Sidney asked. Absolutely, I said—after all, it was the only one I had been offered, as well as a foot in the door of serious television. We shook hands—Sidney’s handshake was the kind that made you wince in pain—and parted on an amicable note. I was to start work on Monday.

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

For a couple of days, Sidney did not come in, so Casey and I were left alone, when I was not out of the office accumulating books, magazine articles, and documents. From her telephone conversations I was able to gather that Sidney was enormously late with his script and that CBS had not, so far, seen a word of it. I also deduced, without much difficulty, that this whole elaborate office was being paid for by CBS, as were Casey’s salary and mine.

My growing pile of research was transferred down to Sidney’s floor while I produced more. The Hungarian Revolution had been productive of paperwork, if nothing else. The United Nations had produced bulky white papers documenting every event, speech, and eyewitness report, as if the amount of paper would somehow make up for its complete inactivity in the face of brutal aggression. Various émigré groups had produced volume after volume of documents, too. If Sidney’s dearest wish was to have plenty of research material, he was going to be delighted.

It was Wednesday before Sidney showed up at last. I had already been warned that he did not like to be spoken to or interrupted except for emergencies. Indeed, when he appeared, he emerged out of the elevator, hands behind his back, eyebrows contorted in a pensive frown, rather like paintings of Napoleon after 1812, and went downstairs without talking to either of us. He stayed down there all morning, sending for Casey from time to time to take down a note or a letter or to fetch him a cup of coffee. At lunchtime, he left for his usual table at the Oak Room. He returned about three, burying himself downstairs for the rest of the afternoon.

Promptly at six, Sidney reappeared, still apparently lost in thought, and left for home. The next day and the day after, this pattern repeated itself exactly. Sometimes, if he noticed me on his way in or out, he would smile and say, “Hello, my boy”; more often, he ignored my presence.

He did not mention the gathering pile of my research, all of it neatly organized in black binders, with notes. I had drawn up what I hoped would be a useful chronology, showing what had happened day by day and, where possible, hour by hour. I had even found the pathetic messages broadcast by provincial radio stations as they signed off for the last time. If all this, I thought, wasn’t enough to start Sidney’s creative juices flowing, I couldn’t imagine what would.

From CBS came daily appeals for a “progress report” and, more
boldly, “a face-to-face meeting.” I have no idea exactly how much money CBS had invested in Sidney Kingsley, but to judge from the apprehension this extended period of silence from Central Park South caused among the higher executive ranks of CBS, it must have been a considerable amount. This was, in any case, not the kind of relationship that television executives were used to having with a writer. In television, the writer was just about the lowest man on the corporate totem pole. Jim Aubrey, a major CBS executive of the time, was in the habit of calling writers to his office for meetings, then leaving them in his waiting room for hours, only to have his secretary tell them, at the end of the day, to come back tomorrow. The notion of a writer who didn’t take telephone calls and remained sequestered in his luxurious inner sanctum, as remote and silent as the Dalai Lama, had at first impressed CBS but was now beginning to cause alarm.