Barbara Corday’s writing partner was also her best friend.
She said, “Barbara Avedon and I had a great partnership. My
daughter used to say that what we did for a living was laugh,
because every time she called the office we were laughing. For
eight or nine years we were not only collaborators and part-
ners, we were best friends. We raised our children together,
and went on vacations together, and our families were very
close. It happened coincidentally to be in the early days of the
women’s movement, and I think that was an interesting time to
go through together. We each went through a divorce and a re-
marriage with the other, we each went through the child rear-
ing with the other. We really had a very special time. And I
loved it.”
Given this, it seems fitting that the Corday-Avedon relation-
ship produced “Cagney and Lacey,” the long-running and
highly acclaimed TV series about a pair of policewomen who
were close friends as well as partners. The series was not only
the first hit show to feature female buddies, but the first cop
show to focus as much on the personal lives of its protagonists
as on their work.
During John Sculley’s tenure at Apple, he found both inspi-
ration and friendship in his own field from Alan Kay, one of the
polymath gurus of the computer age. “Alan Kay is sort of my
spiritual leader,” Sculley said. “He doesn’t look like a leader or
dress like a leader, but if you believe in the power of ideas, he’s
a fountainhead, a wonderfully inventive person who’s able to
skip across an intellectual landscape comprising many disci-
plines.” Computer whiz Kay played a kind of Merlin to Scul-
ley’s Arthur.
Groups, gatherings of friends or associates, sometimes sim-
ply sustain and encourage their members, as with old school
Knowing the World