The Sunday Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page B

passing out in mid-sentence from excessive drinking.
    I remember the pugilist. Kid McCoy, a few weeks before he killed himself, telling me how he had put the term “the real McCoy” into the language. I remember Diego Rivera, resentful and brusque because I had interrupted his painting of a nude in his studio, later coming in the rain, sweet and cooperative, to submit to an interview in Mexico City’s Ritz Hotel. I remember a hushed conference with three members of the anti-Franco underground in a shaded restaurant in a suburb of Madrid, and the Resistance lookouts on the watch for headlights of the Falangist police cars. I remember Pablo Picasso’s guided tour through his attic studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, as he (“looking like a prosperous Italian shoemaker wearing a beret,” my notes remind me) explained his work in progress in an undertone, his eyes brimming because of the death of the wife of a friend in Switzerland that morning. I remember a Nobel judge in Stockholm, a special room inside Buckingham Palace in London, a croupier in the basement of the Casino in Monte Carlo, a monsignor in the editorial offices of L’Osservatore Romano in the Vatican, a legendary madam in a Montmartre bistro in Paris.
    All of this is but a small portion of what I remember as the best of my two decades of magazine writing. And many of the other persons, and places, and institutions that I have not mentioned, but were a part of my magazine years, I have included in full detail in the pages of this book.
    In this collection are those factual stories which I decided were the most interesting and durable of my Sunday Gentleman narratives. There are twenty of these stories in all. Of these, nine were previously published, but in abridged form. Here, they appear re-edited and in their full original length. The remaining eleven stories, which I have also re-edited, have not previously appeared in print. Of these, three were sold to magazines, but for one reason or another were never published in America.
    To each of these chapters I have added an afterword or postscript which I call What Has Happened Since , and these vary in length from 750 words to 7,500 words. For when I began to reread these magazine articles, I became intensely curious to know what had happened to my subjects with the passage of years since I first wrote about them a decade or two ago. What had happened to the two old ladies who, in their youth, had managed the most spectacular house of ill fame in American history? What had happened to the young man who had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy? What had happened to the great sleuth who lived in Lyons? What had happened to the Nobel judge who worshiped Hitler? What had happened to the head of the geisha union? What had happened to the greatest art forger in modern times? to my favorite train, the Orient Express? to my favorite advertising column in The Times of London? And so from 1963 to 1965, I traced and tracked down the subjects of my articles, to find out how they had fared from the time I had originally written about them until today. This proved to be a fascinating detective job in itself. My findings, described in twenty postscripts, add up to approximately 40,000 words written to complete this book.
    For the most, these stories are a miscellany of my personal adventures with, and topical soundings of, unusual people and places that aroused my curiosity in recent years. Since subjective writing is little desired in the articles that popular magazines publish, many of the short pieces in this book are factual and objective in style. These stories are interviews, reports, impressions, made at home and abroad, on subjects that intrigued me at the time and interest me still. Why did I select these subjects at the time I did? I do not know, exactly. Perhaps my choices were always based on instinct. Or perhaps I never quite forgot what the editor of a great weekly magazine once told me. I had asked him,