My parents got divorced when I was ten, and I went to live in Pennsylvania with my mother, who got custody of me, and she cultivated the Hammersteins, and they had a son my age, and so by the time I went to George School, when I was 13, I was already interested in imitating Oscar. He was a surrogate father. I liked my father a lot, he was a swell fellow, but I didn’t see him very often because my mother was bitter about him and did everything she could to prevent me from seeing him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see them. I didn’t know it, but my mother was lying to me about how often I could see him. It was very unpleasant. So Oscar was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn’t see my own father.