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of Sidney’s plays, it was a strong love story. He was an old-fashioned 1930s social realist, a dramatist who worked in the tradition of the novelist John Dos Passos (and who, like Dos Passos, had moved from mild left-wing opinions to strongly held right-wing ones as he grew richer). Each of his plays dealt above all with a single issue; the fate of slum children in Dead End , young doctors in Men in White , crime and punishment in Detective Story . Nobody would have claimed that the love story was his métier.
    He didn’t look up. “If that’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get,” he said. “Or that’s what they’ll turn it into, more likely.”
    “I thought the meeting went well. I mean, they seemed to go away happy.”
    “Mm. It will keep them off my back for another few months. With any luck.” He clicked the ice in his glass and drank. “There’s a lesson here for a writer, you know.”
    “Is there? I’m not sure that I’m going to be a writer, though.”
    Sidney laughed. “Oh, you will be, you will be, my boy. Trust me. I can tell. I know more about you than you do. What kind of writer, I don’t know. Not a very serious one is my guess. And not a playwright. A journalist, perhaps,” he said with some contempt. “Or a popular novelist.” He sighed deeply. “Your father will be disappointed. He’ll think you’ve wasted all that expensive education.”
    That was true enough, I thought, though not very nice of Sidney to say. “What’s the lesson?” I asked.
    “Ah, the lesson. Never forget that the people who pay a writer always have much, much more money and power than he does, whether it’s a publishing house, a movie studio, or a television network. With that in mind,”—his voice changed to a fair imitation of W. C. Fields—“ ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ You can go now.”
    I THOUGHT about Sidney’s lesson long and hard that night. I finally knew what I was looking for, and I already knew I wasn’t going to find it sitting behind a desk and writing. Though I wasn’t what anybody would call a “team player,” I wanted to belong to a team—anybody’s team.
    As for Sidney’s comment about writers, I realized, even then, that there was considerable wisdom in it. Writers are always outsiders and probably ought to be, since only outsiders see things clearly: the people who publish them, or make movies, or produce plays are always richer and more powerful, however successful the writer is. As I was soon to discover, there’s a tendency among book publishers, especially when making speeches on public occasions, to boast that the writer and the publisher are both part of the same team. This, of course, is pious nonsense. Nobody in the book business really believes it, and no writer is ever taken in by it. A lot of people start out in book publishing believing that it’s true, or at least that it ought to be true, then have to waste time learning otherwise, but I had the good fortune to know better, thanks to Sidney’s insight.
    D ESPITE S IDNEY ’ S optimism, CBS eventually pulled the plug on his Hungarian project, which would have left me jobless, except that Sidneyfelt obliged, out of family feeling for my mother, to get me a job as a freelance reader in the CBS story department.
    This was, at the time, about as low as you could get in the hierarchy of television, and indeed only one or two steps above being unemployed. First of all, the networks were already beginning to abandon the whole idea of doing original “quality” drama, even by established playwrights like Sidney or Paddy Chayefsky. Further, though we didn’t know it at the time, they were planning to eliminate their story departments altogether. (Why own a cow when you can buy milk?)
    It had never made much sense to have a whole department just to read books and scripts; the only reason CBS still had one was that it was too small and powerless to draw much attention from the cost cutters in the