"Why worry?" Stacy smiled. "Let him come to the show Sunday. We'll be waiting. It might be interesting."
"Interesting!" Lennox snorted. "God knows what's going to happen to who. It could be anything from a gun to a bomb. Is that your idea of interesting?"
"It's the only idea, unless you play poker for matchsticks."
"I don't play poker," Lennox said, and left.
Going down the brownstone stairs, he growled: "Four down. Two to go. It's either Plummer or Hansel. The advantage of statistics. Poker for matchsticks! Are they all crazy?"
I met Lennox in a network studio where he took advantage of an unexpected opportunity to make peace with Roy Audibon. The veep had gathered the leading script writers for one of his annual exhortations on the aims, needs and ideals of the network and the position of television in the Expanding Universe. Audibon's theme that afternoon was the fact that we writers were the bottle-neck in the flow of progress because we refused to think galactically.
I won't try to reproduce Audibon's lecture. He has to be seen and heard to be appreciated. He's charming and attractive and successful. He is also a unique product of American culture ... the erudite ignoramus. He discourses entertainingly in a jargon of advertising slang, science fiction clichés and pocket book philosophy. He can mix phrases like "cross-ruff client expediency" "fourth dimensional cybernetics" and "the Hegelian dialectics of The Thirty Years War" in one sentence and hypnotize you into believing that he's making sense. It isn't until you listen that you realize he's just talking out loud.
We all sat and kept our faces straight while Audibon drew a picture of the soaring, searching minds of the top network brass seeking the uppermost cultural levels for television only to be blocked and thwarted by the conservatism and lack of imagination of the writers.
"There are new techniques, new philosophies, new infinities to explore," Audibon told us. "Reach out to the stars. Don't be afraid to experiment in your garret. We may loathe what you do. We'll probably reject nine out of every ten scripts you send us, but that doesn't mean we're opposed to new ideas. We want new ideas. We need them. It's up to you to produce them in acceptable form for the network and clients."