Hollywood

An extract from Sidney Sheldon's rather disappointing autobiography:

One day, Dore Schary called a meeting of the producers on the lot.

When they were all seated in his office, Dore said, "We have a problem. I just bought a play called Tea and Sympathy. It's a big Broadway hit, but the censorship office won't let us make it because it involves a homosexual. We have to come up with another angle. I want to hear your suggestions."

There was a thoughtful silence. Then one of the producers said, "Instead of a homosexual, we could make him an alcoholic."

Another producer said, "He could be on drugs."

"He could be a cripple."

A dozen different ideas were floated around the room, none of them satisfactory.

After a silence, Joe Pasternak spoke up. "It's very simple," he said. "You keep the play exactly as it is. He is a homosexual." And then he added, triumphantly, "But in the end, it's all a dream."

That was the end of the meeting.

Actually, I shouldn't have been reading the book at all. Disgusted by all the trash I had been consuming, I had been making an effort to attack George Eliot's Middlemarch but, try as I might, I couldn't get into it. Disgusted in turn by the Sheldon book, I resolved to make one more stab at the Eliot, and lo and behold! Middlemarch suddenly took off! Perhaps it's like adapting to classical music after a diet of pop? Not that I think pop music is any way inferior to the so-called "serious" stuff.

I can think of only one other book of substance that took so long to get going - An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd.