Written By: Richard Rodgers

There was more to Diahann [Carroll] than vocal ability...she looked like she had just stepped off the cover of a fashion magazine. Her singing and her appearance immediately gave me the idea of starring her in a musical in which she would play a chic, sophisticated woman of the world. She would not represent a cause or be a symbol of her race, but a believable human being, very much a part of a stratum of society that the theatre thus far had never considered for a black actress. Such casting, I felt, would be more effective than anything strident or preachy in breaking down racial stereotypes that had persisted for too long on Broadway...

Early that summer Dorothy and I went up to Sam [Taylor's] place in East Blue Hill, Maine, where we discussed various aspects of the story. Diahann would play an American model living in Paris who meets and falls in love with another American, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who is now just another expatriate bum sponging off wealthy tourists. The girl helps restore his self-confidence and his desire to resume writing, but the distractions of the affluent life around him are too much. He can only work if he returns home to Maine -- Sam's only autobiographical touch -- but when he asks the girl to go with him they both realize that it could never work out, and they part.