I was new to Beverley Hills. In fact I was new to Los Angeles.  I was on six month sabbatical from my job with an Australian magazine and was fortunate enough to be hired by The Hollywood Reporter to help put out their edition of the Reporter “Blu Book”.

I was a stranger in town and armed only with a few names and telephone numbers of friends of friends.  I was fearful but within six months I came to love The City of Angels.

And   — In The Beginning:

We followed the music, Rosalyn and I.   It was a balmy smoggy afternoon on Rodeo Drive.  A mandolin was playing Dixie to a crowd trickling inside a smoke-filled bar.  The poster outside read “ The Beverley Hills Unlisted Jazz Band” with photographs of the players, one of whom I recognised as the actor George Segal, smiling his toothy smile.

I had chummed up with a physiotherapist named Roslyn, a friend of an Australian friend, and what she lacked in beauty she made up for in Chutzpah.  She was a nuggetty-framed girl with a mane of long thick hair tied back and a swagger.  We knew the Jazz group played every other Saturday on Rodeo and featured a duo of movie stars one on mandolin, Conrad Janis on Sax. What I was later to discover much to my advantage was that the lure of seeing stars in the flesh led me to the finest friend I was to make in the USA.

Luckily we found a table in clear view of the band, across a small round dance floor. The band played with enthusiasm. It was here, through a haze of smoke that first I glimpsed the friendly round moustachioed face of Sheldon Keller whom I was later to learn was one of the finest comedy writers in America. He had a shock of wiry grey hair and moustache to match.  He was solidly built verging on plumpness and was dressed in jeans and a black blazer over a chequered shirt. He wore heavily tinted glasses. He strummed on a double bass like his life depended on it.  In front, strumming the mandolin in frantic accompaniment was George Segal – his handsome face flushed with excitement.  Conrad Janis was on Trombone. Conrad’s smooth baby face billowed like a balloon as he blew that horn. They were playing “Sister Kate”; I was later to learn this was Sheldon’s signature song.  I was about to enter a friendship that I treasure to this day, even though Sheldon has long gone to that place over the rainbow to make the angels laugh and the world is emptier for it.

Roslyn was bouncing in time to the music while I enjoyed my star-struck moment. After all I was new to Beverley Hills. I kept repeating to myself – be calm, they are only people!!!

When the band stopped for a break Roslyn headed for the bar and Sheldon headed for me.  He sat down beside me and introduced himself in gravel voice. When he heard I was from Australia, then heard I was Jewish, and single that fixed it for him. He had served in the Pacific Theatre in the US Army Signal Core and had been stationed in New Guinea with Australian troops. Meeting Sheldon and him taking me under his wing played a major part in my life over the two years following and the adventure that was yet to happen.

I was Jewish, I was single and I had nowhere to go for Shabbat dinner. That was not to be, Sheldon saw to that.

He asked me for lunch for the next. I was to meet him at the Studio where he was working with Steve Allan on a comedy series.  Sheldon wrote comedy for and with an amazing array of stars.  Mel Books, Allan Sherman, Joan Rivers, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar to name just a few and the list seemed endless.

At the appointed time I arrived at the studio and asked for Sheldon. Sheldon was on a lunch break, which only allowed us to grab a bagel at a nearby deli and arrange to have dinner Friday night with Sheldon’s friends Bernice and Howard Albrecht. Somehow it seemed important to him that I get to meet them. He gave me his address in iconic Hollywood Hills where we were all to meet for drinks before dinner. His house, a clone from an English country garden, complete with ivy-covered walls, was called “Break Winds” He lived there with what seemed like a dozen dogs of various shapes and sizes.  We were all to become firm friends, Sheldon, myself, the canines and Bernice and Howard Albrecht.  Bernice and I eventually collaborated, together with Jim Menzies (who was a far more experienced screenwriter than we were) on the writing of a screenplay, which like many screenplays I have since written, landed unproduced in my bottom drawer.