Yaphet Kotto - welcome

Bitterness was all that was left in me. The humiliation of having been set up boiled me from head to toe. The other Black actors and stuntman who were aware of what went down, pushed me to do something, say something about it, but I declined " Fellas, let’s just finish this picture, let’s not turn the set into a civil rights thing, that’s what the enemy wants. One day we fight, but this is not that day. We know who the enemy is, just watch out for him. He’s going to face God one day and that’s what he’s afraid of. Going straight to hell" I said, hoping to run into my enemy in private somehow so I could do God’s work for him by kicking his punk ass.
For the first time I knew how the Bond villains felt when they’d say.

Kill Bond!

I sat and simmered that evening with Cubby Broccoli in the pitiless heat of those words. He said he knew who set me up, but cautioned me to continue being a professional and he would talk about it with Arthur Krim chair of the board of United Artist Corporation. Mr. Krim had sent David Picker UA vice president, would eventually become president of the film company, and came to the set of across 110th street to tell me in private that I had been cast in Live and Let Die.

The shooting schedule the next day after the fist raising incident, said I was on holiday for two weeks.

Harry Salzmann introduced me to a wealthy English woman in his home at dinner with the idea in mind that I should think seriously about marrying her and living in England, America was not my home, he repeated. Even though I was born in Harlem. He felt that I was courting disaster by staying, as bad as things were in the U, S; it wasn’t in me to go to another country and start banging my own nation. I couldn’t outright tell him to piss off, he was the producer and I didn’t want to make him an enemy I tuned him out and wouldn’t listen at the time.