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The very next day—that’s how it happened—Sam Spiegel asked if I’d go to California with him to direct a film he was making from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon; Harold Pinter had written the screenplay, Sam boasted. “Is that the film Mike Nichols was going to direct?” I asked. “He’s out of it…

The very next day—that’s how it happened—Sam Spiegel asked if I’d go to California with him to direct a film he was making from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon; Harold Pinter had written the screenplay, Sam boasted. “Is that the film Mike Nichols was going to direct?” I asked. “He’s out of it…

Of everybody who wrote about the book, I thought Jimmy Baldwin got it best. “The tone of the book,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition but on something older than that: the tale told by a member of the tribe to the…

For many years I lived this life of dissembling, and the one I deceived was a person who had a brilliant mind, who’d made me a family, who’d been unfailingly loyal, and whose actions were never anything but in my interests. She was my champion, with devotion beyond measure. She never spoke anything…

There were some carping notices, and I’ll admit I was fractious enough to be on the side of the “refuseniks.”