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You wanted to discuss Anatole Litvak. What kind of a person was he?
The wonderful part about Tola was, he became famous overnight in this country as the director of a foreign picture called Mayerling, which was the story of the murder of a Crown Prince over in Austria--a famous historical episode. It created a sensation, so Tola was immediately brought to Hollywood where he became overnight one of the leading directors of the United States.
What is he--a Czechoslovakian or something.
Oh, Russian. He is very handsome, utterly charming.
The way that I met him was rather amusing. It will make, maybe, one of the sidelights of this story. I think that I've told you that I was rather once friendly with a little blond movie star named Miriam Hopkins, who never stopped talking and was utterly undependable, but quite irresistible. After our romance broke up--that was when I met Sylvia Sydney--Miriam would always bring me her new boyfriends to look over. She valued my judgment. She was going to London once to do some picture in England and she didn't know anybody in London so I gave her a letter of introduction to Hamish Hamilton, the English publisher. I warned Hamish Hamilton, who was a very impressionable young man. I said, “You're going to be crazy about Miriam because she's
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