Christopher Robbins was a struggling journalist in London when an ex-pat American hipster masquerading as a German count introduced him to an elderly Irishman, purportedly the "greatest Irish filmmaker ever." Brian Desmond Hurst had made some thirty films in his long career (including A Christmas Carol, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Simba, and Playboy of the Western World), and was close friends with people such as John Ford, Noel Coward, Sean O'Casey, William Butler Yeats, and a slew of other notables - from the exalted, such as Lord Mountbatten, to rather less exalted Guardsmen and rent boys. When the eighty-year-old, gay Irishman Hurst hired the young, straight Englishman Robbins as a screenwriter, an unlikely but profound friendship formed. The hilarious adventures of one of the world's ultimate Odd Couples is described here with humor and insight, tinged with heartbreak.