Stanley Kubrick was a friend of mine, insofar as people like Stanley have friends, and as if there are any people like Stanley now. Famously reclusive, as I’m sure you’ve heard, he was in fact a complete failure as a recluse, unless you believe that a recluse is simply someone who seldom leaves his house. Stanley saw a lot of people. Sometimes he even went out to see people, but not often, very rarely, hardly ever. Still, he was one of the most gregarious men I ever knew, and it didn’t change anything that most of this conviviality went on over the phone. He viewed the telephone the way Mao viewed warfare, as the instrument of a protracted offensive where control of the ground was critical and timing crucial, while time itself was meaningless, except as something to be kept on your side. An hour was nothing, mere overture, or opening move, or gambit, a small taste of his virtuosity. The writer Gustav Hasford claimed that he and Stanley were once on the phone for seven hours, and I went over three with him many times. I’ve been hearing about all the people who say they talked to Stanley on the last day of his life, and however many of them there were, I believe them all.

Somebody who knew him 45 years ago, when he was starting out, said, “Stanley always acted like he knew something you didn’t know,” but honestly, he didn’t have to act. Not only that, by the time he was through having what he called, in quite another context, “strenuous intercourse” with you, he knew most of what you knew as well. Hasford called him an earwig; he’d go in one ear and not come out the other until he’d eaten clean through your head.

He had the endearing and certainly seductive habit when he talked to you of slipping your name in every few sentences, particularly in the punch line, and there was always a punch line. He had an especially fraternal temperament anyway, but I know quite a few women who found him extremely charming. A few of them were even actresses.

Some Americans move to London and in three weeks they’re talking like Denholm Elliott. Stanley picked up the odd English locution, but it didn’t take Henry Higgins to place him as pure, almost stainless Bronx. Stanley’s speech was very fluent, melodious even. In spite of the Bronx nasal-caustic, perhaps the shadow of some adenoidal trauma long ago, it was as close to the condition of music as speech can get and still be speech, like a very well-read jazz musician talking, with a pleasing and graceful Groucho-like rushing and ebbing of inflection for emphasis and suggested quotation marks to convey amused disdain, over-enunciating phrases that struck him as fabulously banal, with lots of innuendo, and lots of latent sarcasm, and some not so latent, lively tempi, brilliant timing, eloquent silences, and, always, masterful, seamless segues—“Lemme change the subject for just a minute,” or “What were we into before we got into this?” I never heard him try to do other voices, or dialects, even when he was telling Jewish jokes. Stanley quoted other people all the time, people in the industry whom he’d spoken to that morning (Steven and Mike, Warren and Jack, Tom and Nicole), or people who died a thousand years ago, but it was always Stanley speaking.

When I met him in 1980, I was not just a subscriber to the Stanley legend, I was frankly susceptible to it. He’d heard that I was living in London from a mutual friend, David Cornwell (b.k.a. John le Carré), and invited us for dinner and a movie. The movie was a screening of The Shining at Shepperton Studios a few weeks before its American release, followed by dinner at Childwick Bury, the 120-acre estate near St. Albans, an hour north of London, that Stanley and his family and their dogs and cats had just moved into. Stanley wanted to meet me because he’d liked Dispatches, my book about Vietnam. It was the first thing he said to me when we met. The second thing he said to me was that he didn’t want to make a movie of it. He meant this as a compliment, sort of, but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t getting any ideas. He’d read the book several times looking for the story in it, and quoted bits of it, some of them quite long, from memory during dinner. And since I’d loved his movies for something like 25 years by this time, I was touched, flattered, and very happy to meet him, because I was of course fairly aware that it was unusual to meet him. Stanley wasn’t someone you ran into at a party and struck up a relationship with.