Another Life

by Michael Korda

  This was even more true in the 1950s, when book publishing was a tighter, more “clubby” business, a small world in which everybody knew each other and in which personal relationships counted for everything. It was well known and understood that certain big-time agents such as Harold Matson, Sterling Lord, and Scott Meredith submitted their books to Peter Schwed, while others, such as Harold Ober and Paul Reynolds, sent their submissions to Henry Simon. Agents who specialized in more “literary” fiction, such as Candida Donadio and Phyllis Jackson, as well as the more showbiz-oriented agents such as Robert Lantz, Helen Strauss, and Irving Lazar, worked with Bob Gottlieb. Indeed, Donadio was so close to Gottlieb that some people thought they were the same person. One simply could not pick up the phone and call one of these people to say, “Hi, I’m new at S&S, but I’m looking for some good books, so why don’t you send me a manuscript?”

  The Literary Market Place (LMP), the book industry’s bible, lists innumerable agents, but a great many of them are only one or two steps removed from the slush pile. I sent off fulsome letters to any number of them and got back a small avalanche of manuscripts, most of them so dog-eared that they had obviously made the rounds of every publisher in New York, not a few of them even containing previous rejection letters. Clearly, it was going to take more than this.

  In the end, my first connection to an agent came about through an old Oxford friend, Bob Livingston, who called to say that a friend of his on the West Coast had had some dealings with a literary agent in New York who was complaining that he no longer knew anybody at Simon and Schuster. That sounded fishy to me, but Livingston brushed my doubts to one side. “This guy is no schlepper,” he said. “He’s Somerset Maugham’s agent.”

  Having paid homage to Maugham myself at the Villa Mauresque with my Uncle Alex and Alexa, I could hardly fail to be impressed. Maugham was the butt of many stories—most of them, unfortunately, true—but he remained, even in extreme old age, one of the most successful English writers of the twentieth century, as well as one of the century’s wittiest and most acerbic misanthropes. Maugham was to grow bitter in his old age and finally lapsed into precarious senility, but in 1959 his was a name still to be reckoned with, so I hastened to call Jacques Chambrun as soon as Livingston had hung up.

  The voice that greeted me was low, rich, obviously French in origin, and full of grave courtesy. He said he would be delighted to meet me, all the more so since my family was one he respected deeply as a European and a man of culture. “We Europeans must stick together, n’est-ce pas?” he said with a sigh, and we chatted briefly in French, in which he was even more impressive.

  I suggested lunch, but after consulting his calendar, lunch proved to be impossible for some time—his engagements were, I must understand, unfortunately unbreakable, since they were with many of the most important people in publishing and the cinema. I suggested that we meet for drinks, but Chambrun, it appeared, did not approve of the American cocktail hour.

  I mumbled my agreement. Dinner seemed like a rather big deal to suggest to an agent as important as Chambrun, particularly since I must be small fry from his point of view. What about tea? he asked.

  We agreed to meet at the Alhambra Room in a midtown hotel the next afternoon. I had happy visions of good china, polished silver, and many plates of gingersnaps, Bath biscuits, and seedcake, so I was surprised when the hotel turned out to look like what the French call un hôtel de passe—that is, one in which rooms are rented by the hour and in which the lobby is full of furtive gentlemen and heavily made-up filles de joie.

  The Alhambra Room was off the lobby, past a stygian bar, and its name seemed to have influenced the rest of the hotel’s decor, which was a combination of early Beverly Hills Spanish and Moorish Gothic. At the entrance I asked the maître d’hôtel—an ancient and poorly shaved European of some kind, dressed in tails so old as to have a shiny green phosphorescence to them—for Mr. Chambrun’s table. He lowered the huge red flocked-velvet menu with faded gold tassels that he had been holding in front of him like a shield, as if I was about to attack him with one of the spears from the wall, and bowed, with a faint air of disapproval. “Monsieur le comte vous attend,” he said in what was clearly not his native tongue.

  Nobody had mentioned to me that Chambrun was a count. I seemed to recall that a Comte de Chambrun had been an eminent diplomat in France at the time of World War One, probably this one’s father, I decided.

  My mind was therefore not on my surroundings as my Bela Lugosi look-alike led me through the gloom to a tiny table set for two. My host was not in sight, so I sat down and looked around. Only now did I notice that there was an orchestra on a platform decorated with immense ferns. On a small dance floor, a number of elderly citizens were, in fact, dancing a spirited tango. Around me, the people taking their tea were older still. Some of the men actually wore spats, and not a few of the ladies rested their heavily beringed and arthritic hands on silver-handled canes.

  The music stopped and one of the dancers, a short, rotund gentleman in a well-cut double-breasted suit, made for my table. He had a bald head and the well-fleshed features of a gourmand. It was an ugly face, pendulous and lumpy, as if molded from plaster that had sagged before drying, but the ugliness had a certain charm and elegance to it. Like many fat men, Chambrun moved gracefully on small feet. His shoes were unusual: narrow, expensive, and well polished, with high-buttoned tops to them in some kind of black stretch material, the sort of thing that Proust might have worn. Everything about him gave off an aura of prosperity and good-natured joie de vivre.

  I rose, and we shook hands. I apologized for not having used his title. He waved the matter aside with one hand. The heat of his exertions on the dance floor had sharpened the odor of his eau de cologne and brought a slight beading of perspiration to his brow. He dabbed at it with a silk handkerchief. “We are here in America,” he said pleasantly, with an air of noblesse oblige. “One does not bother about such things. I am perfectly happy to be Monsieur Chambrun, plain and simple.” (I was eventually to discover that he was not even remotely related to the French noble family and as much entitled to be called “Count” as I am.)

  Over a pot of tea—brewed with tea bags—and a plate of rather dry-looking petits fours, Chambrun told me of the many sales he had made for Maugham over the years, of his passion for new and exciting novelists, and of his close connections with the leading magazines. Certainly working with a great writer like Maugham was an honor—and a profitable one—but the real pleasure lay in discovering new young talent. He kissed his fingertips. He was discriminating, as he could see that I must be—after all, were we not both Europeans? The kind of books he liked were often special, I must understand, not for everyone. He himself was a passionate reader of fiction, in love with the written word. Even so, only if a work of real quality caught his eye did he send it on to a few favored editors who shared his tastes.

  That sounded good to me. I did not aspire to be Maugham’s publisher yet, after all. New young talent was exactly what I was looking for. Would I like to dance with any of the ladies? Chambrun asked. I declined. Chambrun clearly wanted to get on with his dancing—his feet were tapping in time to the music—so I made my adieux, and he promised to send me the work of a few of his very best writers. We should do business together, he hoped, very soon.

  Shortly afterward, a steady stream of manuscripts began to arrive from Jacques Chambrun. Strangely enough, they did not seem very different from the ones in the slush pile; some of them, in fact, I even recognized from the slush pile. Most of them showed signs of having been mailed out many, many times, despite being accompanied in every case by a letter assuring me that I was the first editor to have the pleasure of reading the book. I had, in fact, the ungenerous impression that he might simply be passing along manuscripts without reading them at all.

  There is hardly anything more depressing for a young editor than turning a book down when it has been sent to him by an agent. Chambrun took no offense at al
l at my sending his books back with long, apologetic letters explaining exactly what was wrong with them. In fact, he even called and invited me to lunch with him at the bar of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, where, apparently, he ate every day. I happened to mention where I was going to Henry Simon, and he raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Chambrun?” he asked, with an unpleasant chuckle. “The so-called Count? Is that charlatan still in business?”

  He was not only in business, I said with some heat, but he was sending me manuscripts. Besides, he was Somerset Maugham’s agent, which surely counted for something. Henry shook his head gravely, like a doctor confronting a terminal illness. “He was Maugham’s agent for a while—God knows how. Maugham fired him eventually. It turned out that Chambrun was selling magazine rights to Maugham’s stories all over the world without telling Maugham and kept the proceeds for himself. And that’s not all …”

  “Not all” involved a long discussion of agents who actually charged writers for reading a manuscript. This custom had been invented by Scott Meredith, who eventually had a stable of poorly paid readers working for him, busily sending back form letters that purported to tell the writer what to do to make his or her book salable to a publisher, for a fee. This practice was anathema to conventional agents, who felt that it was roughly tantamount to stealing pencils from a blind man’s cup. Many publishing houses simply refused to do business with Chambrun, Henry said.

  I took all this with a grain of salt. Most of the really interesting people one meets in life are rogues, and it did not shock me that Chambrun might be one of them—indeed, it was part of his charm. At the Sherry Netherland bar, where Chambrun was ensconced in a corner banquette, I chose not to bring up the unflattering portrait that Henry had drawn of him. After all, the man was sending me manuscripts, even if they were unpublishable. Other agents might have a better reputation for honesty, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.

  Whatever else might be phony about him, Chambrun was at least genuinely French. A fastidious eater who did not believe in the American ideal of the light lunch, he ordered elaborate dishes, sent them back to the kitchen when he wasn’t happy with them, and took his time over dessert. He did not stint himself on the petits fours that were served with coffee and even wrapped the remaining ones frugally in a paper cocktail napkin to take home. When the check came, we both stared at it for a while, then Chambrun pushed it toward me firmly and without apology and popped a digestive mint into his mouth. He had taught me a basic rule of book publishing, never since forgotten: When an editor has lunch with an agent, the editor always picks up the check.

  The flow of manuscripts continued, until one day, to my astonishment, I read one that actually excited me. I was so surprised that I had to read it twice. Even on a second reading, the novel still held my attention. What saved it from being an automatic reject was the fact that the author, Dariel Telfer, was a natural storyteller, with a real subject that she cared (and knew) a lot about: nursing in a big city hospital.

  Henry wouldn’t want S&S to buy a book from Chambrun, and it was just the kind of novel he hated: unformed, unpolished, raw, and full of sex scenes. It would have to be rewritten, replotted, and reconstructed to make it work, and that was just the kind of thing Henry didn’t approve of. Not knowing what else to do with it, I gave it to Bob Gottlieb to read.

  Bob had a kind of split personality as an editor: He pursued high culture and low culture with equal intensity and seemed to enjoy both. More extraordinary, he was good at both. Apart from skill, shrewd judgment, complete confidence in his own taste (and willingness to submerge it in the interests of commerce when necessary), what Bob had above all was enthusiasm. When he liked something, he wanted the whole world to like it, which is what publishing is really about.

  Like me, Bob was a fast reader, and the next day he appeared in my windowless cubbyhole cradling the manuscript in his arms, dark eyes blazing with excitement, Napoleonic forelock plastered low on his noble brow. “It’s just great,” he said. “We have to buy it.”

  I noted, with pleasure rather than dismay, the we. I had been longing to work with Bob on something, rather than just looking on, my nose pressed against the windowpane. Bob had much the same effect on me as Irving Thalberg had had on F. Scott Fitzgerald when Fitzgerald went to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood: His energy, boldness, attention to detail, chutzpah, and intelligence set him apart from anyone else at S&S.

  Where had the book come from? Bob asked. When I told him, his face darkened a bit, and he bit his lip thoughtfully. “Not so good,” he murmured. Then he brightened. I would deal with Chambrun, while Bob would take care of getting the book past Henry and Max.

  It needed a lot of work, I suggested. Bob beamed. It needed everything, of course, but it had the two things that really made popular fiction sell: energy and sincerity. Dariel Telfer’s prose was often muddled and always verbose, but she cared about the nurses and patients in her book and somehow knew how to make the reader care along with her. “If a novel doesn’t have that, you can’t fix it, and if it does, the rest is easy to fix,” he said, with the intensity of a real teacher. “It needs to be shorter, of course. And clearer. And it needs a new beginning, and a new end.… And of course a title.”

  The title came, almost immediately, from Nina Bourne—The Caretakers—but it took a good bit longer for Bob to persuade the editorial board of S&S to let us buy the book. It wasn’t just that Jacques Chambrun was the agent, it was more a question of the book itself. Dariel Telfer was as forthright and frank about sex as Grace Metalious had been in Peyton Place, though in a slightly more clinical way, inclining one to believe that she was a nurse herself. Nobody but a nurse, in fact, could have written in such detail about what goes on in a big hospital with such authenticity. Still, nurse or not, her sex scenes, tame as they would soon seem in popular fiction, were a source of much concern and heartburn among our elders. Max was deeply opposed to censorship and a passionate defender of the First Amendment, but when push came to shove, he wanted no part of sexually explicit books himself and retreated into mumbling, trembling paralysis when asked to read one. Like his colleagues, he fell back on Voltaire’s famous aphorism, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A fine sentiment, but from the mouth of a publisher the equivalent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. What, after all, is the use of backing the First Amendment, if you haven’t got the guts to use it? Bob and I found ourselves asking this more and more often as publishing moved with many misgivings into the era in which books such as The Story of O, Lolita, and Portnoy’s Complaint were to become big, popular bestsellers.

  Frightened as the older generation was by the kind of language that Telfer used in her novel, they were more frightened still of being thought out of touch with the modern world. Enthusiasm—however ill placed—has always been the currency of book publishing, and Bob’s was irresistible. He did not exactly erase the doubts in the minds of those who supposed that he reported to them, but they gave him conditional approval, not quite daring to refuse it. We were to proceed cautiously, he and I, and offer Chambrun a $5,000 advance, on the promise that we would tone down the graphic sex scenes and keep S&S at an arm’s length from her agent. Normally an agent receives all the money that comes in, keeps his 10 percent, and forwards the balance to the client. In this case, given Chambrun’s reputation, we were to insist that S&S would pay the author directly and send Chambrun his commission separately.

  I had anticipated difficulties from Chambrun over this, but he didn’t seem at all concerned when I told him, over another luncheon, nor were his feelings hurt. “Très bien,” he said. When could he have the contract and his check? It occurred to me that his sangfroid might come from the simple fact that he had no shame.

  Up until then I had mostly edited nonfiction. With nonfiction, there was only so much that you could do. You could rewrite it, cut it, sometimes reshape it, but the book was essentially defined by the subject, which you couldn�
��t change without destroying the whole thing. With fiction, however, the only limits are set by the editor’s energy and the author’s willingness to live with big changes. Character, motivation, and plot can be changed, subplots and minor characters can be thrown out, whole scenes eliminated or created from scratch. After all, why not? It works in the movie business, where stories go through countless metamorphoses and countless hands before reaching the screen. Apart from his shrewd judgment and his ability to know the difference between salable trash and real quality (something that often gets hopelessly blurred in editors’ minds), Bob’s real talent was that he had no compunction in applying to a novel the methods of the movie business.

  Telfer turned out to be a plump, gentle woman from Colorado who had fallen into Chambrun’s hands by accident and was willing enough to let Bob and me tear her manuscript apart and to write endless new scenes to replace the ones we had cut. It is, I discovered, always much easier to do this with first novelists, whose major anxiety is whether or not their book will ever get published at all. Step by step, we reconstructed Telfer’s book into what it ought to have been in the first place: a strong, shocking “commercial” novel with a simple story line and a lot of sex. The key, as I learned from Bob during many evenings in his apartment working on the manuscript, was to keep what was best about the book—its obvious sincerity and the author’s righteous anger about the way the system treated decent nurses and patients—and eliminate what wasn’t needed or didn’t make sense. I had admired from afar the way he had revamped Catch-22, but now I was doing it myself, at his side, and could see that what was emerging, draft after draft, was a much stronger book. Since then, I have done this, with others or by myself, a hundred times and always found that nothing in publishing gives me more satisfaction if the book works. Some of these editorial reconstructions led to enormous best-sellers such as Shirley Conran’s Lace or Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine, others—many—were a lot of work for no result, but the fascination has never worn off. It is my substitute for Scrabble or crossword puzzles and perhaps explains why I do neither.