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was in April of '39, about the 6th or 7th of April--and altogether he was the most brilliant man I had ever met, I thought. He was very agitated and nervous, and I realized that he was terribly distressed, but he was at the same time extremely interesting and entertaining.

Well, he said he was going home to Chicago, and he departed. I recall that he returned from Chicago for his birthday on May 1, 1939, and that I went someplace to dine with him, I think to Dorothy Draper's, and then we went to 21 and had a lot more conversation.

Had he corresponded with you in that interim?

Oh, no, I don't think so, no. And it turned out that he was about to get a divorce from a well-known movie actress called Doris Kenyon, whom he had married shortly after the death of his first wife to whom he had been married for 35 years, and he was extremely distressed by the idea of getting a divorce and really his unhappiness was this despair in marriage, and he felt very extremely upset and terribly, emotionally disturbed.

At any rate, he did get the divorce in June of '39 and after that he came to the World's Fair, which was then opened, and I remember that Kay Swift and I gave a party on the 21st of June of '39 at which we had a large number of people in the penthouse that I had then, at 400 East 52nd Street, including Wendell Willkie