My respect for Mr. Shawn was so deep that I thought, for a time, I must have misunderstood what was said, or that my memory had completely failed me—so radically at odds were some of our conversations with what I thought had been said, or agreed, a few days, or even one day, before. I began to write scripts for myself, on the nights before I went to his office. When I got home from a visit, I would write down what I thought he and I had just said. There was no doubt about it. Sometimes the differences were just shadings. Often they went well beyond distortion to an almost comic contradiction
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