Another Life Read Online Free PDF

which Sidney was extremely proud. My father stood before it in the trance that came over him whenever he looked at a painting, until Sidney finally got up the courage to ask what he thought. My father looked at it skeptically, ran his hands over the surface, and sighed deeply, like a doctor attending a dying patient. He shook his head sadly, having recognized it as a forgery. “Vat the hell, Sidney,” he said. “Vat it matters if it was painted by Rubens or not by Rubens? All vat matters is it gives you pleasure, no?”
    I lit my own pipe, and we puffed silently for a few minutes. Sidney didn’t require conversation, or impose it at any rate; he was content to sit in silence, nor did he expect to be amused. Eventually he spoke. “That’s quite a pile of paper you’ve put together there,” he said. My binders, I noticed, were piled neatly on the floor near his desk and showed no sign of having been opened.
    I wasn’t sure whether his comment was meant to be praise or criticism. Winston Churchill once remarked that anything worth knowing could be put on one piece of paper, and by this standard I had certainly failed Sidney. Still, he was the one who had asked me to pile it on him, I reminded myself. “I hope it’s all going to be useful?” I said.
    Sidney chuckled. “Oh yes,” he said. “I think so.”
    “A good starting point for the play?”
    “Maybe. The fact is, my boy, I haven’t read any of it yet.”
    I tried to conceal my disappointment, but Sidney could tell that my feelings were hurt. He glanced at me shrewdly through a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You can’t hurry the creative process,” he reminded me sternly.
    We sat in silence for a few minutes. “I want you to sit in on the meeting with these guys from CBS,” Sidney said, to my astonishment. I could think of no good reason why he would want me present and said so.
    “You’re going to present what we’ve got,” he said. “After all, you know what’s there. I don’t.”
    “Do you think they’ll be interested?” I asked dubiously. There was an awful lot of material there.
    “No. But they’ll go back to CBS convinced that this is a mine of industry. I want you to bore the shit out of them, my boy. Don’t disappoint me.”
    The two executives from CBS arrived on time and were shown downstairs. They had that combination of bland WASP good looks and a ruthless manner that was the style of the period in the television business. Both wore tailored, pinstripe English suits, white shirts, dark ties, glossy, expensive shoes—the CBS look.
    Sidney greeted them amiably, every bit the artist, in a tweed jacket and a wool shirt open at the neck, offered them coffee, which they refused, introduced me as his assistant, and puffed on his pipe while they gradually worked their way up to asking him when he expected to have a first draft.
    He listened to them in silence, nodding sympathetically. They should not think he wasn’t just as concerned as they were, he said. He was anxious to get the play out of his system and move on to other things, but the creative process didn’t run in a straight line, they should understand, it zigged and it zagged. He gestured with his hand.
    “Is there anything in writing yet?” the more aggressive of the two executives asked.
    Sidney smiled benevolently. Was there anything in writing? You bet there was! He signaled to me. I should show them what he had so far, he told me. While I placed the black binders full of research material on the desk, he explained, in a low whisper, as if I couldn’t hear him, that I was a veteran of the revolution myself, a freedom fighter, and that my job was to give him the firsthand material that made the difference between fake theater and real theater: the human interest .
    “Human interest,” they understood. The one thing everybody inthe television business knew was that “human interest” was the key to success. News had to have it (i.e., fires in Harlem or lost children, as