below her chin. “I and a producer, Sarah Pulling, had spent five days in Albania, shooting one of those in-country, documentary-type features for the network. Needless to say, we’d had to use an Albanian film crew, and, needless to say, we could film only what they wanted us to, when they wanted us to, and how they wanted us to. However, getting any film, any story out of Albania was considered a coup; it had taken months of diplomatic back-and-forth. Of course they had to accept me as an on-camera person, and I figured if I kept my eyes and ears open I’d be able to add plenty of material and additional comments to the sound track once we got back to New York.
“Despite their ordering us this way and that and putting us up in their best hotel, which had the ambience of a chicken coop, I think they tried to be kind to us. They offered us so much food and drink so continuously, Sarah said she was sure it was their way of preventing us from doing any work at all.
“So things went along fairly well, under the circumstances. We hadn’t much control over what we had on film, but we knew we had something.
“The night we were leaving, we packed up and were driven to the airport by some of the people who had been assigned to be our hosts and work with us. It was all very jolly. There were even hugs and kisses at the airport before they left us to wait for the plane.
“Then we were arrested.
“After we had gone through all the formalities of leaving Albania, most of which we didn’t even understand, and were actually at the gate, ready to board, two men approached us, took us out of the line, said nothing until everyone else had passed us boarding the plane, until all the airlines personnel had gone about other business—all those eyes carefully averted from the two American women standing silent and somewhat scared with two Albanian bulldogs.
“After everyone had left, they took us by our elbows, marched us through the airport, and into a waiting car.
“We were brought back into the city, stripped, searched, dressed in sort of short, loose cotton house-dress kinds of things that allowed us to freeze, and put in individual, rank, filthy jail cells. Fed those things that look like whole wheat biscuits in pans of cold water, three a day, for three days. No one official ever saw us. No one spoke to us. We were never questioned. Our protests and efforts to get help, get something official happening, got us nowhere. The people who brought us our biscuits and removed our pails just shrugged and smiled sweetly.
“Three days of this. Have you ever been in such circumstances? It’s an unreasonable thing. And you find yourself reasoning if they can do it for a day, they can do it for a month. Two days, why not a year? Three days, why not keep you in jail the rest of your life?
“I was sure the network would be yelling at the State Department, and the State Department doing whatever one does under such circumstances and, yes, all that was happening. It was a big news item in the United States and Europe. The network made plenty of hay out of it. They pulled their hair and gnashed their teeth on camera; they made life miserable for several people at the State Department. However, they didn’t do whatever was necessary under the circumstances to get us out of jail.
“The afternoon of the fourth day, two men showed up in the corridor between Sarah’s and my cells. One of them was an Albanian national. The other was the chief of the Rome bureau of March Newspapers. You know what he said? He said, ‘How’re ya doin’?’
“Someone unlocked our cells. The two men walked us out of the building, without a word to anyone, and put us, shivering, filthy, stinking into the backseat of a car.
“At the airport the two men shook hands.
“The March Newspapers bureau chief sat in the seat behind us, on the way to Rome, never saying a word.
“At the airport in Rome, all the other passengers were steered into Customs. An Italian policeman took the three of us through a different door, into a reception area, and there, seated in one chair, working from an open briefcase in another chair, was Walter March.
“I had never met him before.
“He glanced up when we came