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what was coming up and down Sixth Avenue.

Paley didn't go along with it. He didn't say no, but he wouldn't say yes. And by that time, having consulted him, I then couldn't go off on my own--and I wouldn't have anyway. But it was a little sensitive.

Did you have an actual plan from Saarinen that Paley saw?

“Back-of-an-envelope” kind of thing. Had nothing in writing about a deal or anything else. I think over two years went by. And we were carrying the costs, the interest, on this site. It was nothing but broken-down tenements.

I finally came to the point where I said to Bill: “We've got to either get on with it or go in some other venture.”

Then one day he came in and said: “I've got the answer! Chemical Bank is going to buy a building on Park Avenue, and we can go in with them.” We had already discarded going into the Pan Am Building, and Park Avenue wasn't a good place to be for television, even though we were going to have our studios in a different location. That was one of the first holdups--that he thought we ought to have our studios and our offices in the same building. In New York. Not in Hollywood, but in New York.

I think he was largely influenced in that, because that's the way NBC did it. I didn't think that made any sense--to build expensive studios in a high-rent area, when you could do that in Astoria or someplace else. The factory was one thing and the offices were another. We did cut the cord and decide that we would only build offices on Sixth Avenue, except for