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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, moreboldly, “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.
    Eventually, some weeks after my arrival, Sidney, with great reluctance, agreed to a meeting to discuss his progress. The meeting would be held, naturally, in his office—the mountain would have to come to Mahomet—despite many attempts to lure him out of his retreat and into the CBS building, where he had never set foot.
    The day of the meeting, Sidney put his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular fashion as he came in. “Let’s talk about your work, my boy,” he said, and led me downstairs for a chat. He made himself comfortable and lit a pipe.
    The room was enormous, with a certain air of la vie de bohème but with money. It was half artist’s studio, half expensively furnished “study,” like the ones favored by major producers in Bel Air, with leather-bound books bought by the yard—just the kind of room, I reflected, that my father would surely have disliked as being neither one thing nor the other.
    Sidney’s big leather chair was placed so he could look out at the park comfortably, with his feet up; around it were placed chairs for visitors, all of them rather nice, well-worn English antiques. On a low table beside him was his Dictaphone, his pipes, a cigar humidor, and a tobacco jar. His desk—a big, antique, leather-topped bureau plat , a piece even my father would have admired—was bare of papers or any sign of work. Against one wall, facing the fireplace, was a majestic leather sofa, with a lot of pillows and a boldly patterned Indian blanket thrown over one arm—the ideal place, it looked to me, for an afternoon siesta.
    One corner of the room was set up for Sidney’s sculpture workshop, with a drop cloth on the floor. He appeared to be working on a life-size head of a man (unknown to me), in the style of Epstein, the clay layered on with deliberate roughness, and a small nude torso, much smoother, in more or less the style of Maillol—like so many amateur artists, Sidney did not appear to have a style of his own. The nude was not particularly graceful and was obviously giving Sidney a lot of trouble—patches of darker, fresh clay showed where he had recently scraped off what had been there and started all over again. I wondered if he used a live model, and if so, who?
    Sidney’s enthusiasm for sculpture, I decided, was greater than his skill—indeed, his status as an art lover, while he took it seriously himself, was disputed by my father, who was an unchallenged expert, a gifted painter in his own right and a serious figure in the world of art collecting. On one memorable occasion, he had unwillingly been obliged to have dinner at Sidney’s apartment in the Dakota and found himself unable to avoid a guided tour of Sidney’s collection, which included a large Rubens, of