A worm’s-eye view observer of the proceedings was the seventeen-year-old Stephen Sondheim, whom Oscar had hired for the summer as a $25-a-week gofer after his first year at Williams College, fetching coffee, typing scripts, and soaking everything in. “It was a seminal influence on my life, because it showed me a lot of smart people doing something wrong,” Sondheim would remember. The experience would also haunt his own creative work. “That’s why I’m drawn to experiment,” he would say. “I realize that I am trying to recreate Allegro all the time.”
