The arrival in Hollywood was something less than auspicious. It was February, 1962, and I had broken freeof the human monster for whom I’d been editing in Chicago. It was one of the worst times in my life. The one timeI’d ever felt the need to go to a psychiatrist, that time in Chicago. I had remarried in haste after the four-year anguishof Charlotte and the Army and the hand-to-mouth days in Greenwich Village; now I was living to repent in agonizingleisure.

I had been crazed for two years and hadn’t realized it. Now I was responsible for one of the nicest women inthe world, and her son, a winner by any standards, and I found I had messed their lives by entwining them with mine.There was need for me to run, but I could not. Nice Jewish boys from Ohio don’t cut and abandon. So I began doingberserk things. I committed personal acts of a demeaning and reprehensible nature, involved myself in liaisons thatwere doomed and purposeless, went steadily more insane as the days wound tighter than a mainspring.

Part of it was money. Not really, but I thought it was the major part of the solution to the situation. And I’d