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Steve Sondheim was at Williams when I was there, and....Oh, I love to say I sang and danced in Steve Sondheim’s first musical. It was called All that Glitters, which we did at Williams. This was long before Steve was famous. Now, he's a part of Americana. We’re still pals, Steve and I. We live on the same street in New York.
Williams during my time was a waspy, rich boys’ college, and there were very few Jews there. There was a quota system, and the ones that I remember were Steve Sondheim and Edgar Bronfman. I mean they were very elite. It’s amazing that that happened, isn’t it?
Steve and I were always close at Williams. He
was always talking about Uncle Okie. Uncle Okie was Oscar Hammerstein,
and he was the first person to realize that Steve was going
to be somebody. He was an enormous influence on Steve’s life. Steve
would say, “Gosh, Okie’s upset because Gertrude Lawrence can’t reach
this note and they’re gonna have to re-...” I just loved all that
kind of talk. You know? It was backstage stuff and dishy, and so
I owe a lot to Steve for taking me to all those things. I mean, it
was about as far from Hartford, Connecticut as you could get.
He started taking me to things which were natural to him. I went to the final run-through of South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, which became one of the greatest hits in the history of Broadway, and I went to, in New Haven, the opening night of The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brenner, but that was all Steve. I said, “This is it. I gotta be in this kind of light.”
Anyway, I got out of Williams. I acted a lot at Williams and I thought at one time of being an actor. I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse, and it was Sandy Meisner, then alive, the great acting teacher, who said to me, “You know, you’re too small to be a leading man. If you’re a character man, you won’t make it until you’re forty or something.” And he said, “You’re so ambitious, go behind the camera.”
I was devastated, but, of course it was great advice and through
this fluke, this utter fluke of life, I was sent to NBC. TV was so new, we didn’t even have a set. A man had written the first book about television, and they [the publishing company] wanted me to find out about the book for the jacket notes. A man called Pete Barnum [NBC Vice President] had written it, and I went in there to get the information. Barnum took a liking to me, and I’m with my little notepad saying, “Where were you born?” And he said, “How would you like to work in TV?”
I was making $35 a week in this little publishing business—a temporary job then—and I went to $75 a week at NBC. Well, it seemed like a fortune at the time. And I became the stage manager for The Howdy Doody Show.
 It
was really thrilling because there was a whole bunch of us who started
at the same time [in TV], Arthur Penn—I mean people who became just
absolutely famous—John Frankenheimer. He was at Williams, too. They
all became well known. Bud Yorkin.
Anyway, after I’d been at Howdy Doody for about two years, Robert Montgomery, the MGM star, moved to New York and started a television show called Robert Montgomery Presents. I don’t know how, but he asked me to be his stage manager. Every week the show—that’s where I started meeting all of the Hollywood people—he’d bring in a different Hollywood star to try this new thing called television; live TV. We had a drama every week. I can’t tell you how much I loved it. I loved, loved, loved every minute. And let me tell you who I knew as undiscovered people: Grace Kelly. I knew her before fame. I knew Paul Newman before fame. I knew Steve McQueen before—all these kids, we were all the same age, all doing the same, and I was the stage manager. I loved every minute of that.
It was in Studio 8H at NBC, and each week the show would open with me saying, “One minute, Mr. Montgomery.” And he’d be up in the balcony and he’d say, “Thank you, Nick, and good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight’s show.…” I was a celeb. And then the word got out that I was a great stage manager. I truly was, and from the beginning I had this ability...I understood movie stars. I don’t know, I just understood them. And they felt safe with me guiding them through live TV, because once you started you couldn’t stop. There was no stopping, and if a mistake happened…you know.
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DD:
But it made me something else. It made me kind of a celebrity. And
then, of course, from the OJ trial on it was the constant television
that just upped the thing. And that’s when the college kids, who
started following the OJ case, got interested in me, started
buying my novels in paperback, and they all had to be re-released
because I got a whole new audience for my novels through the OJ
case. 
