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So that was number one. Number two. I thought there was a certain strength in stone that you didn't get in glass. Now why the black as against the light gray stone, as long as it was rough? I guess I wavered a little bit on that. I don't guess--I knew I wavered, because we were having trouble finding a source for the stone. And Gordon Bunshaft, with whom I was very close--we were having lunch one day, and when the lunch was over, I had propped up against my wall, like these things, slabs of samples of stone.

Gordon couldn't miss seeing [them] and said: “What in hell's all this?” I told him we were in the throes of trying to decide about the stone. There was one dark piece there, a very small piece, and he said: “That's the way you should go. Don't go for this limestone. Get the granite. That black.”

Well, that didn't upset me, because that's where I started from; but we couldn't find a source for it. So it just redoubled my efforts to go, and I think he was the one who finally put the screws to me and said: “This is the way you've got to go.” And he did it with a sense of respect for Eero and out of friendship for me. He didn't want to see me do something that I wouldn't be happy with.

He and I were as close as anybody in the art world could have been. He wasn't really in the art world, although he was a great collector. I always liked him very much. He did, I thought, some excellent buildings. Lever House was a good example of Gordon at his best. I had him do a building for him up in Connecticut, before the CBS Headquarters building, and--I don't think I used him--I considered him, I guess, on a building I built in St. Louis for CBS, but went a different direction in the end.