At about noon every day [when I was working for Time], we repaired for martinis to the Crillon Bar, situated in th elegant Crillon Hotel next to the Time bureau. The bar was a hangout for American and English correspondents; Sam White of the London Standard did all his reporting from a telephone in his exclusive niche in the corner. Louis, le barman, was right out of Central Casting, with his patent-leather hair, unctuous smile and flaccid handshake. From there we would go on to La Truite or Madame Albert, where we knocked off a bottle of wine each over a four-course lunch. Only our Time colleague, Fred Klein, deviated from this routine. A cranky, reclusive Swiss, he religiously ate alone at the Rompanneau, his newspaper propped against his carafe of wine. Once, when the maitre d'hotel casually remarked on the weather, Klein stalked out and never returned.

 After lunch we would stagger back to the office to gather for our daily diversion - gin rummy. An obsessive gambler, Klein arranged the game. The regulars, in addition to myself, included Dmitri Kessel, the Life photographer; the head of the Life team, Milton Orshefsky; and Art Buchwald, the Paris Herald-Tribune columnist. Sometimes visitors from New York joined us, like Gjon Mili, a free-lance photographer, and Emmet Hughes, a Fortune editor who was to become Eisenhower's speechwriter. Catastrophe struck in 1952, when Eric Gibbs, a priggish former British army colonel, took over as bureau chief and forbade gin as frivolous. Our afternoons dragged on morosely until one day in May 1954, when we learned that he had died of a massive heart attack while working on a story in Geneva. Klein immediately organized a game - and, as he shuffled the deck, exclaimed, "Thank the Lord for our bereavement."

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