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come this far and we were all old friends. So Harold told him, “I'll talk to you down here, but the minute we get back to New York, I won't talk to you again.”

You can understand that.

But I tell you that Dick did not mean to be dishonest. He saw it only his way and he went through life that way.

Didn't he make a lot of enemies?

Sure. But also he was such a naive fellow.

I remember one night in Boston with George Gershwin. This is a typical Dick Simon story. George Gershwin and Dick and I went to a party in a Boston suburb, given by a fellow named Isaac Goldberg. He was a biographer of Gershwin. We hired a car to get out there.

Coming back from the party, George was speaking on his favorite subject, which was George Gershwin, and he had just gotten to the point where he admitted that his music stemmed directly from Bach. He was explaining to us about how he and Bach were pretty much alike, when Dick suddenly interrupted and said, “Hey, I was on this block this morning.” This is the way that Dick Simon thought. He never listened. His mind was on his own thoughts. We were going through some part of Boston where he had happened to be that morning, and he suddenly said, “I was on this block this morning,” in