Word: gunthers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first day there, Gunther briskly informed a startled Intourist official that he had no intention of making only the rubbernecking rounds of collective farms and model factories. Boomed Gunther: "I want to see a really good lunatic asylum, an academy where young artists are trained, and a musician." He saw them-as well as ballets, church services and plays (including a "stunning" Macbeth). He foraged busily from Moscow's P.S. 151 to a children's nursery where they had never heard of diapers. He reached some of the top brass on the merry-go-round of diplomatic receptions...
...Manhattan in January 1957 with 30 crammed 3-in.-by-5-in. notebooks and a mountain of loose notes, he immediately went to work in the yellow-walled, fourth-floor office of his 80-year-old brownstone on East 62nd Street, catercorner from Eleanor Roosevelt's apartment. (Says Gunther: "Mrs. Roosevelt's lights and mine are the last on the block to go out.") After writing one 14,000-word magazine article on his trip, he dug in for the 14-month task of shrinking Russia...
Methodically as a mason, Gunther laid out a foundation wall of multicolored manila folders for every chapter and subsection. Into the room-long row of folders he piled notes, clippings, dozens of scrawled, yellow-paper memos-"Why so much education?", "All small talk in modern Russian novels is about nuts and bolts." Settling down at his battered Smith-Corona typewriter, across from a child's map of the world, Gunther started out with the inside chapters on the Kremlin hierarchy, plowed through what he calls "the picture stuff," i.e., travelogue chapters, tackled science and education, wound up writing...
After at least one rewrite of each chapter, Gunther and his wife checked it for accuracy, shipped it off for closer scrutiny by a Russian scholar. Whole sections had to be updated after Zhukov's ouster (though Gunther had foreseen Bulganin's eclipse). Near press time he had to turn out a new, unexpected foreword: "The Sputniks and the Future." In the last feverish months, he spent up to 14 hours a day at his desk, catnapping occasionally on a grey day bed in his office...
Caviar & Cognac. Despite his $1,000,000-plus earnings, Author Gunther is perennially strapped. He was forced to interrupt work on Inside Africa to pick up much-needed fees from a lecture tour. Last fall he was so short that he did something he had always staunchly refused to do: an Inside blurb for an advertiser. Hired by a pharmaceutical manufacturer, he ground out a 5,000-word piece called Inside Pfizer ("Before I visited Pfizer, I did not know the difference between an antibiotic and a housefly"). Typically, Gunther earned his fee (more than $12,500) by traveling...