If you are over thirty it would be presumptuous of me to ask if you had ever heard of Leander Starr. Anyone with any pretensions to culture could answer immediately that he was once — and perhaps still is — America's greatest director, ranking with Robert Flaherty, Maurice Stiller, Erich von Stroheim, and half a dozen others. There can be hardly anyone (past the age of thirty) who has not seen his great religious extravaganza Ruth in the Alien Corn, still considered to be the model for all great Biblical pictures. His wordless documentary, Yucatán Girl, involving a deaf-mute Mexican beauty, a lot of Indian ruins, and the Vienna Philharmonic, has only to be mentioned in certain circles to bring on a full minute of reverent hush. And, of course, his witty, brittle, sophisticated soufflés cooked up for such late and great comediennes as Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow are still gems in the revival repertoire.

If, like me, you are beyond forty, there is no need to tell you that Leander Starr's stage work was regarded with nothing short of wonder. His direction of comedies for Gertrude Lawrence, Ina Claire, Francine Larrimore, the Lunts — to name only a few — was magic. Nor did he bow out at the drawing-room door. He could take the most impossible plays of such improbable authors as Marlowe, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Garcia Lorca, Beckett, and Brecht and turn them into real Standing Room Only hits. No easy trick.

However, if you are under thirty — and half of this nation is — Leander Starr may take a bit of explaining, for unless you are one of those eager movie buffs who haunt the Museum of Modern Art film showings and the flea-baggiest of cinema art houses, you are not likely to have seen many examples of his superb work. For some years — and for many good reasons — Mr. Starr has preferred to live outside the boundaries of the United States. His work has been sporadic: a couple of pictures filmed in Italy; a psychological Western made in, of all places, the south of France; an all-star historical epic concerning Richard Coeur de Lion at Walton-upon-Thames; and half of a very literate B.B.C. television series based roughly on the Wolfenden Report. Topnotch work, all of it, and still proving that the old master has never lost his touch. But Starr has since seen fit to abandon Italy, France, and England as well as his native shores. In recent years he has been At Liberty more often than not.

While the name Leander Starr spells truth and beauty to many, it spells financial ruin, indebtedness, and bad checks to quite a lot of others. Cut to the bone, his great documentary Yucatán Girl runs exactly four hours and fifty-two minutes and is unsalable to the average motion-picture theater. His sparkling comedy, An Affaire, may have won four Academy Awards, but it was so ruinously expensive to produce that it broke even only because it generally was shown on a double bill with Blondie Has a Baby. Even though his great historical pageant, The Euphrates, filled the old Hippodrome to capacity for two full years, it did so at a loss of twelve hundred dollars a week — not including the veterinarian's bills. The first and the fourth Mrs. Leander Starr still scream loudly, publicly, and regularly for back alimony. To my certain knowledge he owes for food and lodging — and very elegant lodgings, too — at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Ambassador East, Hampshire House, the Plaza, Claridge's, the Ritz (London), the Ritz (Paris), the George V, the Hassler in Rome, and the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The Department of Internal Revenue is especially anxious to confer with Starr over a small matter of many, many thousands of dollars' worth of back income taxes if he should ever be unwise enough to touch on American soil. He even owes money to me.

I first bumped into Leander Starr — both literally and figuratively — almost twenty years ago in the Edward Hotel in Durban, South Africa. It was during World War II, and I was on my slow, circuitous way to Egypt. In fact Durban was full of people who were all heading to or from some place else. The small resort town had become a sort of halfway house for everybody — rich refugees en route to South America, troops bound from England to the Middle East and India, hospital ships plowing back and forth from God-knew-where to God-knew-where. Everybody's principal occupation was waiting around for whatever ship or plane or train would take them wherever it was they thought they were going and getting a suntan while doing so. And there were worse places to wait.

As everyone was in the same boat — or, to be more specific, waiting for the same boat — there was a kind of hectic gaiety about the town. There were the beaches in the mornings, the races and cricket in the afternoons, and bottle clubs like the Stardust in the evenings. The hills around the town were thick with villas named things like Sans Souci or Mon Repos where patriotic English colonials entertained everything and anything that showed up more or less in uniform. The most unlikely people started up the most unlikely flirtations and friendships simply because they knew — or hoped — that the relationships would be fleeting and that if and when the next P&O boat hauled anchor they would never even see one another again. As I say, it was a pleasant break in the long trip to war, and I passed a convivial month of total idleness there, housed very nicely at His Majesty's expense as a volunteer in the American Field Service.

As for flirtations, I had done worse than most. The redhead in whom I had invested a great deal of time and money had suddenly produced a strapping and hitherto unmentioned husband in the person of a lieutenant commander off a British troop ship. I had been left holding the bag and my temper while she introduced me to him as "darling Dulcie's Ammedican fiancé, darling" and whizzed off in a smart right-hand-drive Packard to resume domestic relations with the Royal Navy.

Looking lean, leggy and— I thought — rather dashing in my British officer's shorts and outsized pith helmet, I strode dramatically into the Edward Hotel, intending to drown my sorrows in gin and lime. It was teatime and the place was thronged. I chose the only available table, a small one in a dim corner, rather regretting that in the darkness my tragic mien was all but lost on the rest of the customers, while noticing with some pleasure that the surrounding gloom somewhat enhanced my tan. (I was very young and could be forgiven a certain theatricality.) However, I was not allowed to brood over my gin for long. The doors flew open and a youngish blonde, very beautiful and rather disheveled, raced in. She gave a wild, hopeless look around the crowded room and made straight for my table. "May I?" she said, and all but fell into the empty chair opposite mine.

"Charmed," I said suavely, rising to my feet and sending that damned pith helmet rolling crazily across the floor.

"Sit down, you fool!" she hissed.

"But my hat ..."

"I'll buy you a new one. Just sit down and don't be conspicuous."

"Well, when it...