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but how he promised his mother that when he got to be rich and famous he would buy her a mink coat. My mother expected that of me. And I promised that I would buy her a mink coat.
    Mike Nichols was telling me that when he was casting The Graduate he had Redford in to interview, because Redford was so brilliant in Barefoot in the Park . Mike was talking to him about the role of Benjamin in the movie, saying, “You know what it is when you’re that age and you want to get the girl and you’re not sure you can get the girl and you’re not sure of anything.” Redford had no idea what he was talking about. Because he was Robert Redford. There are those kids who grow up to have the good fortune of being Robert Redford, knowing that they’ll always be Robert Redford, or O. J. Simpson before he became an accused killer. I think the reason he found himself in that position is that from the time he’s a kid, he’s a star. No one ever says no to him. He was handsome. He was the best athlete in the world and he was charming. There was nothing he couldn’t have.
    We who weren’t the best looking, we who weren’t the biggest, we who wouldn’t automatically have women fall all over us had to find our own way of figuring out how to deal with rejection, failure, high-level schmuckery. How to deal with the casual insults of others and the not so casual. I used to say in my twenties, and I felt it was true, I’m gonna have to get famous in order to get girls. Because I’m essentially shy, I don’t know how to start a conversation. If I sit on a plane, and this is still true, if I sit on a plane next to a stranger, unless he or she talks we can ride around the world and not a word will be said.
    Fame really meant a lot. When people talk about the downside of fame, I don’t know what they’re talking about because it’s only been good for me.
    The reason I’m a cartoonist is because I was good at it. If I could throw and catch a ball, maybe I would’ve been an athlete. But I couldn’t throw or catch a ball easily. I gravitated to the thing that I felt I had a chance to be successful at. You want to break into some circle of acceptance with people who’ll buy your story and pay attention to you. It was about being paid attention to. I wanted to go out in the street and get attention when I was a kid so I would draw cartoons on the sidewalk. I got some attention because I could do that and the others couldn’t. I could draw Dick Tracy and Popeye. They couldn’t. That’s how I survived. That’s how I didn’t get beat up. I was little. I was underweight. I wasn’t the masculine macho kid. I would’ve been thought of as sissy or a pansy. But no, I was an artist. I was an artist and they let me live. That was a lesson I learned at a very early age. If you draw a lot they’ll let you live.

 
    DAVID YARNELL

    Independent producer of television programs and documentaries
    (1929– )
    “The Bronx? No Thonx!” a poem by Ogden Nash, is one I cynically recited for a good part of my life, but I’ve changed my mind. I have great memories, in spite of the awful rush-hour rides on the loud and squeaky 241st Street IRT subway line.
    There were the fragrant, sweet smells from the Saperstein and Snowflake bakeries. No Parisian patisserie produced a more luscious éclair than those two Jewish corners of heaven, especially when you bit into the outer shell and the inside custard released in all its glory. There were the delicatessens with their pickle barrels, the Italian grocery stores, lilacs growing wild in empty lots—yes, lilacs! And in my restless teens I found the tiny Ascot Theater showing foreign films, a trip into an exotic world of other places, other languages, with subtitles in English. These experiences gave me a heady feeling of sophistication since I was the self-proclaimed number one expert in the Bronx on the work of the French actor Louis Jouvet.
    However, I knew that I wanted to get out of the Bronx when I