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my authors. He was considered a very dangerous character. He was really closely connected, I'm sad to say, with McCarthy and with Schine and Cohn and he had had a lot to do with outrageous black-listing a lot of decent actors and writers. He was very powerful. Well, I agreed to have lunch with him at the Stork Club and I made a reservation for a table way in the back of the room, in the Cub Room of the Stork Club. When I got there--George was there ahead of me, sitting at the table, he said, “I see that you got a table in the back of the room so nobody would see you with me.” I said, “You're absolutely right, George. I'm not going to lie to you. Your activities have made you a suspect character with a lot of people who believe the way that I do about life.” So we had lunch together, reminiscing about Columbia--about Simon and Schuster and Knopf, and many other Columbia figures, like Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, who had become famous. Then George said, “You know, you're one of these liberals that gives me a pain in the ass. A liberal is supposed to be in the middle. At one end is the communist. At the other end is the reactionary like myself. You're the liberal in the middle. I've met lots of liberals like you. If you lean over, you never lean over to the right side. You always lean over to the left side. Every liberal that I know is a little bit on the left of center, not to the right of center.” I said, “That's a lot of bunk,” but I must admit there was a great deal in what he said. George continued, “The whole bunch of you are damn fools. You're all supporting causes that are