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About Whit Burnett and his wife Martha Foley--we brought them over from Majorca. One of the people they discovered--they discovered lots of young writers in those days--was Martha Dodd. I told you about Martha Dodd. Another one was Bill Saroyan, and we asked him if he had enough stories for a book and he did. Out of that came a book of stories called The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, which was an enormous success.

Bill had never been East in his life. He came from the great vineyards of Fresno, California, and I brought Bill to New York. He was a natural...Bill. He was an absolute natural--the cockiest young Armenian that has ever lived. And he charmed everybody. Here's the first thing that we did. He had never been to a show on Broadway, and we took him to a theater on Broadway because he said that he wanted to be a playwright. It was very amusing. The play was called Ceiling Zero, and Osgood Perkins was in it, a superb actor, father of Tony Perkins. Those were the early days of flying, and the locale of Ceiling Zero was an airport. A plane headed there got into trouble with ice on its wings. I've forgotten the details of the story. After the first act--it was quite a hit, and the lobby was crowded--we walked out for a breather and I said to Bill, “Well, what do you think of a Broadway show?" expecting him to be bowled over. Bill said, “So that's a Broadway show. For god's sake, I can write a better show than that in twenty-four hours.” This was his first reaction...after the first play that he ever