The Way the Future Blogs

Alfred Bester

When the Air Force decided they wouldn’t need my services in order to accomplish the defeat of Japan — the reason for that being that Japan, discouraged by the simultaneous American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Stalin’s last-minute invasion of their northern front, had finally given its struggle in World War II and surrendered — they sent me home to New York City. There I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and, for reasons connected with a book I was trying to write, went looking for a job in the advertising business.

I answered three help-wanted ads in the Sunday Times employment section. One of them, a small Madison Avenue advertising agency, Thwing & Altman, took me on as a copywriter.

It didn’t pay as well as I had thought a Mad Ave. advertising job would, but otherwise it was a likable enough job. Its good features included location. Within the perimeter of a circle with a ten-block radius there were literally hundreds of quite good restaurants where I could get a lunch of almost any school and ethnicity. I quickly learned that, even with all that variety available, there were a handful that I kept returning to, and one of those was in the lobby of the Columbia radio (not yet TV) network’s then New York headquarters, the present skyscraper not yet having been built. The restaurant was frequently used by people from the network, and one of the reasons I liked it was that every once in a while I would run into Alfie Bester, also looking to grab a lunch there, and we would have a nice meal together, spiced with shop talk.

 
The thing to remember about the career of Alfred J. Bester is that he was first and foremost a money writer. He had the talent to do that well. He could write almost anything — science-fiction stories, comics, radio-serial scripts, you name it, and he could do them all at the top of his form — and what particular kind of thing he did write, depending on how the vagaries of the market fluctuated at any given moment, was whichever one of them was paying the most dollars per hour of punching typewriter keys.

Alfie had begun writing science fiction, back in the ’30s, because he had a number of friends — including Horace L. Gold and Mort Weisinger — who worked as editors at Standard Magazines, publishers of, among many other pulps, the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. They coached him in the writing of sf, and bought his practice stories. (Well, they didn’t buy all of them. A very few they rejected, and of those I bought one or two when, as a teenage editor, I was editing Astonishing and Super Science Stories).

Then Alfie discovered that comics were paying better than sf just then, so he tried his luck at comics, discovered that they were as easy to write as sf — for him — and switched his personal production line to comics.

Then he got a tip from his wife, Rolly, that changed everything.

Continue reading ‘Alfie’ »

Our continued reminiscences of Isaac Asimov, and we must be getting somewhere near the end by now, mustn’t we?Now Isaac had a pretty good job, with enough social standing, as a tenured college professor, almost to impress his wife Gertrude and enough of a paycheck — along with the increasing income from all those books of his that publishers were bringing out and people in growing numbers were buying — to keep them well out of the danger of poverty. They had a nice house in a nice Boston suburb, and along the way they had acquired two nice babies, a boy named David and a girl named Robyn, to help fill the rooms.

Still, Gertrude wasn’t entirely happy. She knew that her husband was getting quite well known, you could almost even use the word “famous,” with all those books and all those people who kept wanting him to come and speak to their groups. But she was a normal Brooklyn girl who read the gossip columns, and the kind of fame that she really wanted for her husband came with a special flavor that could come only from Broadway.

Isaac spent some effort on trying to make her happy. He wasn’t a particularly addicted theater fan, but that’s where you found the air Gertrude liked to breathe, so he took her to each season’s most important plays — and often to dinner before the curtain and to a snack when the show was over, always in the places where the famous people flocked together. But eating in the same room as the stars of the gossip columns wasn’t the same as eating with them, and on one occasion Gertrude decided to act.

She and Isaac were sharing a table for two at Sardi’s, the very definition of the famous people’s Broadway hangout. And a few yards away, as Isaac told it to me:

“There was this table for eight or ten, all directors and actors and all that, and they were laughing and hollering and having a great time. And Gertrude was after me to go over there and talk to them.

“‘You’re famous, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘So let’s just drop by, and you can say, “I’m Isaac Asimov, and my wife and I noticed you were having such a good time we thought we’d stop by and say hello.”‘

“And I didn’t want to do that, but she kept on. So finally I gave in. We walked over there, with me rehearsing what I was going to say in my mind, and I asked for some autographs, and then one man on the far side of the table looked up. Then he jumped up and came running over in our direction — but not exactly to both of us, and definitely not to me. It was Gertrude he was aiming for, and he was yelling, ‘Gittel! Is it really you? My God, I haven’t seen you since you moved out of the old neighborhood!’”

By the way, I’m pretty sure that Gertrude’s dream of Heaven was that her husband, and perhaps even herself as well, might possibly become subjects of a couple of the 1,300 cartoons of celebrities that festooned the walls of Sardi’s and were the restaurant’s trademark. I don’t think that ever happened, but I don’t know for sure. Does anyone?

(The reason I never looked for myself is that about the only times I ate at Sardi’s was when I was grabbing a quick lunch before an Author’s Guild Council meeting, the Guild offices being on an upper floor of the same building. When the Guild moved out, I stopped going. There was nothing wrong with the food or even with the prices, which are what you’d expect from a fashionable restaurant in the theater district, but it was always too crowded for my enjoyment.)

 
The Asimovs stayed married through the decade of the 1960s, but that was the end. Isaac was by quite a large margin more interested in sex than Gertrude was. He was in fact a healthy human male, not much over forty and unwilling to endure a life of deprivation. Accordingly, he began supplying his lacks through a series of affairs.

I don’t know the identities of most of his partners in the affairs, but as it happens I do know where he had them. That’s because on one later occasion he and I agreed to meet for some purpose in the lobby of a big old Boston hotel just off the Common. When Isaac got there he looked around, grinning, and volunteered that this was the place where he used to take his girlfriends. But he didn’t say who those girlfriends were, and I didn’t ask.

Continue reading ‘Isaac, Part 6’ »

The One That Went Right, Almost

The Space Merchants was actually the first science fiction novel that Cyril Kornbluth and I wrote, and it pleased us both greatly by becoming a quick success. We scored good sales and got a ton of reviews, mostly good.

And in the fullness of time, I got a phone call from a man named Arnold Perl. He said he had just read the book. He thought it might have some possibilities that might not have occurred to me, and would like to discuss them. And why didn’t I drop by his house in Alphabet City — a pleasant residential section of the lower East Side at the time, not yet carved into drug kingdoms — and have a chat?

If you are a more sophisticated person than I was in the 1950s, you know who Arnold Perl was. I didn’t. He had to tell me. He was the fellow who had taken a book of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, Tevye’s Daughters, made it into a Jewish theater play … and then encouraged the process, together with Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, who fiddled with the milkman’s story and added some great songs — and everything else it needed to become Fiddler on the Roof, pretty much the biggest and best musical event to hit old Broadway.

And what he was wondering, Arnold said, as he poured me another cup of tea, was whether something like that could be done with The Space Merchants.

 

Now, I can’t honestly say that I knew just what was being offered to me, but what I did know was just a tiny bit worrisome. I didn’t want to disappoint this nice man, and I was well aware that I knew nothing about playwriting. Ah, not to worry, Arnold said. He wasn’t looking for a finished script. What he was hoping for was glimpses — a short story, even a single page from a story, a confrontation, a discovery. An idea.

Or a song.

Or a dance number — I was after all, I was a big ballet fan, wasn’t I?

Nothing that had to attain the professional standards of theater, though.

So I did it. I said I’d give it a try, and as I wandered down from his place in the East Village, the ideas were beginning to condense themselves out of what had been that amorphous cloud that these things come from. So I waited for the ideas to hit.

No “If I were a Rich Man” came to me out of my gymnastics, not even a long and empty length of railroad track. But I was, I thought, beginning to catch the rhythm of the process. One notion — a song and dance about a major surgical procedure — stuck in my mind for a while. What did that have to do with the future of the advertising business? Nothing.

What did Arnold say when I showed it to him? He said, “I’m glad to see you’re loosening up.”

Was any of this stuff real story material? I don’t know, but sometimes I would get a feeling that there were useful images coming along, any minute now. My big sorrow was that I had to do it all by myself, because Cyril had died some months earlier. If he had been around, the whole process would have been at least twice as easy and at least twice as good. But he wasn’t.

And then one morning the phone rang at a shockingly early hour, and it was the office of my film agent, H.N. Swanson, on the line. I don’t mean it was Swanie himself. It was one of his large number of assistants and associates and assorted other human beings who inhabited the two-story walkup that was his office.

“Fred?” said the voice on the phone. “Swanie says some English people called Redifusion Television are offering $750 for the film rights to The Space Merchants and what do you want him to do about it?”

To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:
Me and the Biz
Me and the Biz, Part II (continued)