I sold those letters to various autograph dealers, first in New York City, and was soon branching out across the country and abroad-for seventy-five dollars a pop. Putnam’s Sons had given me to do my first book, a biography of Tallulah Bankhead. A room with a view not of Alpine splendor, but of brick and pigeons, a modest flat I took in the spring of 1969 with the seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance that G. you would be wrong.Įvery letter reproduced here, along with hundreds like them, were turned out by me-conceived, written, typed, and signed-in my perilously held studio apartment in the shadow of Zabar’s on New York’s Upper West Side in 19. I f with that last letter you pictured the urbane playwright in Switzerland, cigarette-holdered and smoking-jacketed, dashing off a letter in the 1960s from a cozy nook high up in Chalet Coward-the house he bought in the Alps to take advantage of Switzerland’s kinda gentler tax laws-located at Les Avants, Montreux, just down the mountain from the David Nivens at Château d’Oex, where Coward entertained guests that included Marlene, Garbo, George Cukor, Rebecca West, and a group that Elaine Stritch once called all the Dames Edith . . .
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