I scurried into the corridor outside the studio and grabbed the first man in sight. “Can you read?” He nodded, startled. “Then come on in. Here’s the script. I’ll give you a nod when it’s time, and you start reading where it says ‘Announcer.’”
We got on and we got off without casualties. Years later, when I was interviewing that calm, cool, and collected young man, Jack Webb, he said to me: “You know, you put me on radio, where I got started in show business. I was the guy you kidnaped one day in a CBS corridor in San Francisco. I was just out of uniform and needed a job.”
The first hesitant and somehow inspired sessions of the General Assembly were held in the San Francisco Opera House. Only the year before, I’d sat in a box there admiring the ladies and the glitter of a fashionable crowd listening to Puccini. Strictly as an observer of how the world was waging the peace, so I thought, I sat squeezed into one of the boxes of the Diamond Horseshoe with H. V. Kaltenborn on one side, Bill Henry on the other, and Walter Winchell to the rear with his knees digging into my back.
Walter was delivering some staccato comments into a microphone when a sound engineer tapped me on the shoulder: “You’re on next,” said he, “and you’ll have five minutes.” This was Friday.
“But I don’t start until Monday,” I whispered. Too late. I was on. I closed my eyes and prayed. I had no more idea than the man in the moon what I was going to say.
With my eyes closed, I thought how different it was now from the last time I’d been there. I said into the microphone: “The entire Diamond Horseshoe is now taken over by the press, cameras, radio equipment. Not one of the people who sat here a year ago is with us. They’re up in the gallery, and happy to be there because we’re all here for one reason, to help bring peace to a troubled world.”
I went on like that for five minutes. When I’d finished, Winchell thrust out his hand and said: “I’d like to congratulate you. I couldn’t have done that for the life of me.” And so we made up, and we’ve been good friends ever since.
Fourteen
Every time I go out on the town twisting, I murmur a silent apology to Elvis Presley. I realize that I’m indulging in the same gyrations that pushed Sir Swivel Hips along the road to fame. I told him in a note not long ago: “You’ll be surprised to know that I’m now doing the twist. Not as well as you, but I’m doing it. I have taken one inch off my waist and two off my derrière. Now I know how you keep so thin.”