Memories I Should Have Had Part 8 New York: Sardi’s/St. James Theatre 21 May Lunch with Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. Vincent Sardi buzzes around the table supervising the waiter making the eponymous salad for Kit. Sardi is distracted and the waiter serves it. Kit takes one bite and stage-whispers…

Memories I Should Have Had Part Seven New York, Midtown 10 November Oscar Levant is in town for the Jack Paar Show. He’s in a bad way. Even for him. Fortunately, I round up Betty Comden and Adolph Green for moral support. …

Part 6 New York/Leningrad 4-6 September I’m having too many drinks with Lucius Beebe at El Morocco. He introduces me to a classmate of his who once helped him try to take the shoes off John Harvard. I ask Lucius, if he means the statue in Harvard Yard. Beebe’s pal…

Memories I Should Have Had Part Five 29 May New York, Lower East Side Out on the town with George Jean Nathan, Julie Haydon, William Saroyan, Carol Marcus and the Broadway columnist, Louis Sobol. We end up at The Old Roumanian. Nathan tells me that if I don’t fall in…

Part Four 7 March Washington, D.C. Joe Alsop calls me at the Hay-Adams, where I’m staying, and asks me if I’ll drive a cherry tree over to Arlington National Cemetery where Stewart, his brother, will plant it by William Howard Taft’s grave. …

Memories I Should Have Had Part Three 10 October New York, Toots Shor’s, Hotel Elysée Walking down 51st St. past midnight, after a long dinner at Toots Shor’s with Joe DiMaggio, Marianne Moore, and Jackie Gleason, who passes out midway through, with his head on my shoulder. A cab pulls…

Part Two 1 June Blue Harbour, Jamaica Noël Coward invites me to his place in Jamaica. In his invitation he reminds me of a “morbidly delightful conversation” we’d had the night we snuck out of Somerset Maugham’s villa with Jean Marais to hit the St. Tropez waterfront. I barely remember…

Part One Tom Connolly My life has always been particularly interesting to me. Through the years almost every time a friend has mentioned someone famous, I recall a time that I wished I had met that celebrity. I know that there are so many occasions when if I had been…

Breaking Bad, Dostoevsky, and Marketplace Morality Tom Connolly From the perspective of the television series, Breaking Bad’s anti-hero Walter White is not just an “angry middle-aged white guy.” He represents the repressed rage of America’s ill-used PhDs. This is why “he is the danger.” White has lived his life according…