The Sunday Gentleman Read Free

book, Roman Holiday , a biographical account of the first twelve Caesars. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-two, I compiled and rewrote a book. Etcetera , a collection of some newly written articles together with many I had already had published in magazines. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-five, I wrote Japan’s Mein Kampf, a documentary account of the infamous Tanaka Memorial. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-seven, I wrote a full-length book. With Their Pants Down , a candid memoir of celebrities I had met and interviewed in my writing career. It was rejected, never published. When I was thirty-four, I wrote two chapters of a book, Gabriell e, a detailed history of the pretty French murderess, Gabrielle Bompard. I was discouraged, never submitted it. In those years, I wrote at least one or two chapters of a half-dozen novels, but became doubtful about each, and never finished them or submitted for possible publication what I had finished.
    This was my illustrious record when, at the age of thirty-seven, I so cavalierly left magazines to write books seriously seven Sundays a week. Actually, I had always written books “seriously.” But at the age of thirty-seven, the effort was more “seriously” because I intended that my new career not be an avocation but a vocation, and I felt that I was bringing to it more experience, more understanding, more wisdom, and more passion than I had possessed when I was younger.
    Between the years 1953 and 1959, I wrote and had published four books: three nonfiction books of biography and one novel. All were minor critical and minor financial successes, and combined they did not earn me as much money as I had earned, or was able to earn, in one year from other writing sources. My friends were right, after all. I could not make a living from the writing of books—a week was not meant to be made up only of Sundays—yet I had found that if I could not live from books, I certainly could not live without them.
    From the first book to the fourth, I did everything I could to buy time for the next one, and to keep my wife, my two children, and others of my relations alive. I scrounged through every literary and pseudoliterary alley I could find in search of money that could buy Sundays that could mean books. I had turned my back on magazines, and so I went elsewhere for sustenance. I wrote countless tricked-up idea outlines and present-tense original screen treatments, on speculation, to submit to the film studios. I wrote numerous screenplays, on salary, for every major movie studio. At my lowest point, I wrote ten television scripts for six producers on order.
    I am not complaining about this. It was a plush hell, an infernal region dominated by double-dealing, politics, feuds, pettiness, thievery, cretinism, where the writer suffered indignity, disrespect, disdain, and where he could make more money than he could possibly make in any other salaried medium of writing. There were also, in this region, good people, honest people, highly creative people, and sometimes the product of their collective talents produced a motion picture or television film that equaled or exceeded in artistic value the best current books or plays. But these talented ones, and their best products, were in the minority.
    In those days, for that money, for that survival and books-in-the-future money, I worked harder and longer than I had ever worked in my magazine years. But for me, for one like myself who likes to create on his own rather than adapt, and who prefers to work alone, and rise or fall by his own efforts rather than collaborate with other writers, directors, producers, actors, it was a miserable period. I found that the big money was too costly to earn, emotionally. In the magazine world, at least, I could do a skilled craftsman’s work six days a week, and know that the seventh day would be Sunday. In this frenetic, competitive world of celluloid,