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It was very successful, but not nearly as successful as The Young Lions.

Then Irwin kept on, writing slick stories for magazines like McCall's and Playboy. I think that his work started slipping because he began making so much money that he became careless. He was a gay boulevardier and one of the first of the American authors who moved abroad for tax reasons. He wrote several big movies and got into the bracket where he was getting a couple of hundred thousand dollars a picture. He became very rich, married a beautiful, lovely girl, and lived in Paris. They have a big house in Switzerland, where they ski and drink with a wealthy group of convivials. Irwin isn't so young anymore, but he still acts as though he were. He just broke his leg skiing. Gradually Irwin wrote more and more for the movies and less and less for books. Then the last novel that he did, several years ago, was called Two Weeks in Another Town, which was not nearly as successful as his other books because he was away from his field. The people that he knew and could write about were here, and he was living in luxury in Switzerland and Paris and just coming here once in a while.

We had a new book of stories ready two years ago. The contract was all signed. We had edited the book already, had it in our catalogue, and sold it. It was proof-read and just about to go to press when a raiding party started. NAL, New American Library, and Dell--these two big paperback houses-- decided that they were going into hardback publishing and