Dick, It's What's for Dinner by James Cox

Ferenc Molnár, the playwright, a delightful lady of - I guess she was about 80 then. The lady who played his grandmother was a Hungarian actress who was Mrs. I didn’t like as much … I did two with Billy, and they were both good one, he played a villain, the other, he was a darling. Matthew Rettenmund: You directed six episodes of The Twilight Zone, including classics like “It’s a Good Life” (1961), “Long Distance Call” (1961) and “I Sing the Body Electric” (1962). What follows are excerpts from our 2015 conversation about a life lived well, with innovation, and adventurously, shared the year he would have turned 100. He told me he had had a good run and was ready. He was in awe of great artistry and still sounded wobbly-kneed over having met Ingrid Bergman at a party and directing Judy Garland and James Dean.īefore he died on March 12, 2016, of prostate cancer at age 95 - less than five months after I met him - Jim called me to thank me for my friendship, for my part in making him happy at the end of his life. He was not a name-dropper so much as he found it incredible himself some of the people he’d met, directed, bedded or simply befriended. He delighted in reminiscing with me about his first sexual experience with another boy in a rumble seat with oblivious passengers in the same car, and in cataloguing some of his more memorable affairs and flings with people of note. Jim agreed to give me a long, frank interview. I believe Jim was reticent about flaunting his libertine ways because he had been married and had sons who had put up with a divorce and with his admission to them, in the ’60s, that he was bisexual, so he didn’t want to dwell on things that might embarrass them.

Jim had published a memoir with BearManor Media in 2008, but while it is an invaluable document of his experience in the early days of TV, it lacks juicy details. He worked for almost exactly 40 years as a TV director, retiring to travel the world on what was at the time a generous Directors Guild pension. After a few years at NBC as a page boy and tour guide, he had worked in radio and had segued into advertising and TV.

He’d been comfortably ensconced there for 25 years, having moved from his heyday hideaways in Beverly Hills and Malibu, back to the city in which he was raised.

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Dick, It's What's for Dinner by James Cox