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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

Heiskell:

And he just couldn't. “Well, where could he work?” said we. We were back here, in New York, of course. “Oh, Marakesh.” But of course, the laws of England only allowed him to take twenty pounds out of the country at that time, so, obviously, he couldn't go to Marakesh. We got the hint; we said, “That's fine, we'll fly you to Marakesh and we'll take care of your expenses.” Well, it turned out that he doesn't exactly travel alone. But anyway, we did, and he spent two or three months there, and he got a lot of writing done. He went back to England, slowed down, still kept writing. Next winter--just couldn't, things are just terrible. But this time he was just too old to fly commercial. We got the hint, we got a charter, and he went to Marakesh, did a lot of work. Then we sent the plane to pick him up and come back. The third year, same story. He needed a bigger plane, and he insisted, because he didn't know what his plans were going to be, that the plane would just have to stay there. [laughter] So here was this DC-4, I think it was, sitting in Marakesh for week after week, month after month, while he wrote.

When it was all over, I had somebody add up the expenses, and it came just about to the cost of one extra volume, which is what he wrote. And I bet he knew it!

That was my first encounter with him. My second encounter came a few years later, when I was in London, and I got a message at my hotel to be at 10 Downing Street next morning. I thought, “That's funny.” We had had slight conversations--very slight conversations-- about a series or a book, books, to be called The History of the





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