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Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest . But when I got involved in the theatre group at Lafayette, I finally discovered myself. I liked the distillation of one’s entire being into the spill of a spotlight, discovering one’s character, one’s mannerisms, movements, posture, dreams, aspirations, disappointments, in the outline of some playwright’s imagining, not simply given but made, borrowed, assumed from the lives and characters of people around me. That’s not as odd as it seems. It’s one of those schemes in which the plan of your life is already determined and you spend your life establishing what it is foreordained that you are going to he.
    I was in those days a fairly good-looking fellow—tall, gangling, and awkward I admit, with maybe too large a mouth, too narrow a head, but good-looking all the same, and in time I outgrew the awkwardness. When they decided to do Seventeen , one of Booth Tarkington’s foolishly-engaging middle-class comedies, I tried out and somehow got the lead role, the part of a muddle-headed adolescent named Willie Baxter. I was transformed into someone or something I had never been. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I never realized it until I got to Lafayette, but I spoke with a Bronx accent—flat, nasal, assertive—and I set about eliminating every trace of it from my voice. I had a roommate from Syracuse and I spent that fall catching the sound of his voice, his tones, his intonations and gradually got that Bronx accent out of my mouth.
    From the time I saw Peg O’ My Heart , when I was ten, I had always gone to the theatre whenever I could. I didn’t care what I saw. Theatre was still a populist art in those days. You could sit in the second balcony for twenty-five cents, and people flocked to do so. But once I got bitten at Lafayette, I began hanging out in the places in New York where theatre people congregated—theatrical bars down Fourteenth Street from Tony Pastor’s and the Academy of Music—met a few actors and learned something of the business, and some of them even told me they’d arrange an audition with producers they knew.
    But that never happened. Manny came back from Russia that summer and announced that I was going back to the Soviet Union with him. To hell with his medical ambitions, he was going to be an import-export agent dealing in Russian commodities, and he needed someone he could trust, to handle the details of the business for him, keep the books, write the letters, be nice to the commissars or whatever, someone he could rely on, and that was the end of my theatrical career. It didn’t happen quite as easily as that, but it was just as inevitable.
    In those days, I admired the hell out of my brother. He was four-and-a-half years older than I was, twenty-three to my nineteen. That’s not much now that I’m pushing eighty but in those days it made him 25% older than I was and gave him all the edge in the world.
    He was a head shorter than I, but a lot more compact, weighing almost as much as I did. He was smart-alecky and brash; he could talk the tin ear off a donkey, whatever that means, and he always seemed pleased with himself in a way I could never be, except maybe sometimes on the stage. At twenty-three he was already a man of affairs. He had taken over Pop’s wholesale drug business two or three years before and got his medical degree at the same time—his spare time, for all practical purposes—and still ranked at the top of his class. He had lots of money, was experienced and sophisticated, and he knew all there was to know about business, booze, and girls, or if he didn’t I was so inexperienced I would never have known the difference.
    When Manny was fifteen, Pop had taken him to a whorehouse in Harlem and introduced him to what the world was all about, what drove everything that people did with their lives—how they dealt with everyone and everybody they