What had happened was -- I found out later -- there was nobody at the airport in New York City. Nobody met him. He had no shoes, no money, he didn't know anything about New York. The Scanlan's office was closed, he couldn't even get in there, nobody answered the phone. He borrowed ten dollars for the cab from a bartender on Forty-fifth Street. . . By this time his mind was coming apart. I talked to one of the people in the hotel that Scanlan's used and they remembered this strange, wild-eyed Britisher pacing around the lobby, kicking the walls with his bare feet and cursing everybody who came near him. Finally, he remembered some editor -- a friend of a friend, I think -- that he had some connection with. By this time his face and head had turned completely purple, his feet were bleeding. It was about twenty-four hours after he arrived that he finally got to this editor's apartment somehow, in a state of shattered nervous hysteria. She sort of nursed him back to health, and I think he had a return ticket -- he never leaves home unless the money and a ticket are all brought to the house and handed to him. He has no faith in expense reimbursement, which I think is very wise.

ED.: Have all his experiences in America been like that?

HST: Well, he fled Miami after two days. He came over to cover the Democratic Convention, but he couldn't handle Miami.

ED.: He also covered the Republican Convention. . .

HST: No, he watched that on television in London. He refused to come back to Miami, for any reason.

ED.: Why?

HST: He couldn't stand Miami Beach. The shock was too great. There's a drawing in the book that explains why. . .

ED.: Why does he submit himself to this kind of rape?

HST: I think he gets a perverse kind of kick out of it. His best drawings come out of situations where he's been most anguished. So I deliberately put him into shocking situations when I work with him. I've always found that that's when he does his best stuff. . . I took him into the Watergate hearings completely drunk. And then we had to sit down at a press table in an aisle where the senators came in and out during the voting breaks. Ralph leaped up during one of the intermissions with a beer in his hand and knocked Sam Ervin off his feet. He almost got my press pass pulled, almost got us thrown out of the hearings permanently. Sometimes he seems unconscious of the things he's doing. People think he doesn't quite know what's going on. The real trouble he generates comes later, when people realize what he's done.

ED.: When they look at his drawings.

HST: Yes. When they realize they were very nice to him, and then they see themselves horribly caricatured. . . He did that to my brother once.

ED.: Your brother?