“Always do it in the daytime, because at night your heart takes over. Take her to lunch, to a very chic place like Le Pavillon or The Colony, where she will see famous people and where it is against all the rules to cry or scream or throw crockery. Buy her a big drink, and then tell her that the train has reached Chicago and you’re getting off at Chicago and you’re getting off at Chicago. Tell her you’re not the marrying kind, but she deserves a home and kids and candlelight. Tell her she’s the most wonderful woman you’ve ever known. Then buy her a great lunch, and let her absorb the news as she eats. Afterward, you can walk out into the sunshine a free man. It never fails.”
James T. Aubrey (quoted in Richard Oulahan and William Lambert, “The Tyrant’s Fall That Rocked the TV World,” Life, Sept. 10, 1965)