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would circle the project as a hunter circles his quarry before moving in for the kill. He made his decision on A Farewell to Arms following lunch at Le Veau d'Or one day, after expostulating for three days on why he was going "to give it a miss." This was the David O. Selznick remake that starred Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson. Ernest lasted thirty-five minutes. Afterward we walked along Forty-ninth Street and up Fifth Avenue in silence. Finally Ernest said, "You know, Hotch, you write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."
    We saw The Sun Also Rises the day before the start of the 1957 World Series, for which Ernest had made a special trip. When Mary asked him how he liked it, he said, "Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy."
    The only movie that Ernest himself had anything to do with was The Old Man and the Sea. He edited the script and then spent weeks with a camera crew off the coast of Peru, catching large marlins that never got hooked at the right hour for the Technicolor cameras; so like all movie marlins, they wound up being sponge-rubber fish in a Culver City tank. Ernest sat through all of that movie, numb. "Spencer Tracy looked like a fat, very rich actor playing a fisherman," was his only comment.
    When in New York, Ernest made a point of seeing the television plays I had dramatized from his stories or novels. I would arrange for them to be shown at CBS on a closed-circuit set. Of all the shows, the one that he liked best, and the one I always declared to win with, was called "The World of Nick Adams," an episodic drama that I had based upon seven of the Nick Adams stories. It was brilliantly directed by Robert Mulligan; and after Ernest had seen it and the viewing-room lights came up, he said, "Well, Hotch, you got it on the screen as good as I got it on paper." That was the best compliment I ever received about anything. It was my good fortune that he never wanted to see "The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio," which was a disaster from beginning to end. He liked most of the three-hour For Whom the Bell Tolls , which I did for two successive Playhouse 90s with Jason Robards, Maria Schell, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton playing the leads; he thought, however, I should have included more material favorable to the Nationalist cause. "But you got the spirit of the people, with their tempers and their true unwashed smells, and that's what counts. You see the cinema version? The big love scene between Coops and Ingrid and he didn't take off his coat. That's one hell of a way for a guy to make love, with his coat on—in a sleeping bag. And Ingrid, in her tailored dress and all those pretty curls—she was strictly Elizabeth Arden out of Abercrombie and Fitch."
    Ernest's attitude toward New York shopping was the same as his attitude toward movie-going; he circled for days and then finally made the distasteful plunge. In no area was his innate shyness more pronounced than in a store. The mere sight of sales counters and salespeople caused him to break out in a sweat, and he either bought the first thing they showed him or bolted before they got the merchandise off the racks. The one exception to this shopping syndrome was Abercrombie & Fitch, especially its gun department and shoe department. But even at Abercrombie's a salesman in the clothing department would have been well advised to hold Ernest by the sleeve while turning his back to get a trench coat off the rack.
    Actually, Ernest's attire was very restricted and, in a manner of speaking, constituted a uniform; the leather vests, the knitted tan skullcap, the gott mit uns leather belt which had been appropriated from a dead Nazi and was religiously worn with all raiment (it was too wide for the loops of any of his pants, but he wore it anyway outside the loops). He owned one decent jacket, made for him in Hong Kong, two pairs of pants, one