Another Life

by Michael Korda

  Of course there is nothing new to this. Maxwell Perkins’s total reconstruction of Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling novel Look Homeward, Angel is something of a publishing legend, but Perkins was forgiven because he was working on literature. What irked our colleagues at S&S was that Telfer wasn’t a “serious” writer in their eyes and that we were therefore helping somebody who didn’t deserve to be published in the first place. Henry, particularly, felt strongly that we were somehow prostituting the profession. In fact, by the time we had finally finished rewriting and retyping The Caretakers, it had become something of a symbol of the generational clash at S&S and perhaps the most disliked book the house had ever published. Naturally, we saw all this as mere sour grapes, old-fashioned fuddy-duddy thinking by people whose idea of a good read was Will Durant (Max Schuster), Henry Morton Robinson, the author of The Cardinal (Henry Simon), or P. G. Wodehouse (Peter Schwed).

  The truth is that this kind of intergenerational fight is normal in book publishing, even healthy—indeed, its absence is usually a sure sign that an editorial group is ready to be certified brain-dead. Younger editors always want to publish books that trouble their elders for one reason or another, and this is normal, even desirable, or the book industry would still be chugging along happily publishing nothing more shocking than Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling or Felix Salten’s Bambi. It is equally axiomatic that once the Young Turks have pushed their elders out of their corner offices into pasture and taken power themselves, they are likely to become as cautious and conservative as their predecessors were. At S&S, for example, the very same people who had fought to publish books by Jerry Rubin (who caused a seismic stir in the publishing industry by urging high school students to burn down their schools) or the Venceremos Brigade’s account of their adventures in Castro’s Cuba, or Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men—all books that seemed to wiser, older, more cautious heads dangerous, subversive, or irresponsible—found themselves twenty years later making headlines by turning down Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho.

  The Caretakers was not the kind of book that was likely to have any real effect on the culture or on history—though it was the first to portray the lives of nurses, doctors, and patients in a realistic light—but it had a decided effect on S&S. In the hands of Bob Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, the book was talked up outside the house while it was still in manuscript, a process that I had not yet witnessed at first hand, and that I now realized for the first time was a question of focus. Not a phone call or a letter went out from them that did not mention The Caretakers. Extraordinary efforts were made to get the advance bound-galley proofs into sympathetic hands for its first prepublication review in Publishers Weekly. Long before the book was out, people in the trade were already talking as if they had read it.

  As things turned out, not even all these combined efforts could float The Caretakers onto the New York Times hardcover best-seller list (the Holy Grail of book publishing), but to everybody’s astonishment the mass-market paperback rights were bought before publication by Victor Weybright of New American Library for $90,000. It would be as if someone were to pay over a million dollars for the paperback rights of a first novel today, perhaps even more. Anybody might have thought that we had somehow upset the balance of nature by selling the book for such a lot of money. It was as if we had opened the gates and let the Vandals into Rome.

  It was my first experience with being criticized for having succeeded. Within S&S, the general feeling was that selling a sexy first novel for this kind of money was somewhat disgraceful, even shameful. When Henry heard about it, he shook his head sorrowfully and wondered what the world was coming to. Max seemed too embarrassed to talk about it at all, while Leon Shimkin merely wondered why we hadn’t let Pocket Books have The Caretakers if it was so valuable. Inadvertently, we had changed the rules. All of a sudden, first novels seemed potentially valuable, the slush heap a potential gold mine.

  More important, perhaps, the sale of The Caretakers ushered in the age of the high-stakes paperback auction. Up until then, mass-market paperback sales had represented a nice windfall for the hardcover publisher, but the sales of The Caretakers set off a long period in which popular fiction (and even some nonfiction) was sold to paperback publishers for ever larger amounts. We had not only hit the jackpot but raised the stakes for everyone else. Worse still, from the perspective of the old guard, we had drawn the attention of the media and of Wall Street. A business in which an unknown author’s first novel could sell for $90,000 overnight—before it was even available in the stores—sounded to many people more like the movies than their traditional idea of book publishing, and not everybody thanked us for what we’d done.

  Dariel Telfer, far off in Pueblo, Colorado, was grateful, of course (unlike a good many authors, she remained graceful and kind under the pressure of success, although, to our regret, she never managed to write another book like The Caretakers, despite many tries), though slightly puzzled by the fuss. For Bob, this was another step on his way to confirming his reputation as a major publishing figure. He had proven he could publish groundbreaking literature successfully with Catch-22 and “commercial” women’s fiction with The Best of Everything; now he had turned an unpublishable first novel into a record-breaking paperback sale. He seemed to the publishing world like a miracle worker, though inside S&S this new triumph merely hardened the rivalry between himself and his elders. For myself, the paperback sale of The Caretakers had a whole host of consequences. For the first time, my salary was raised to a point where we could actually live on it—up until then, I had been making less money than my wife, who was still working as a secretary. I was moved out of the windowless cubbyhole in which I had been placed as Henry’s editorial assistant and given an office of my own, with a window, though I would continue to work on Henry’s books. Perhaps most important, it moved me firmly over into Bob’s camp and ushered in one of the happiest periods of my career. Bob was not only a natural and gifted mentor, he soon became a close friend with a wonderful capacity for making even the most difficult problem seem like fun and a sense of humor that saw him through even the darkest of publishing crises. If I had felt any secret regrets at not having gone into the movie business, I lost them now in the warmth of being accepted into Bob’s band of friends and admirers. Even without my new office and more money, I would have been happy.

  The only person, in fact, who didn’t do well out of The Caretakers was Jacques Chambrun. At first, he was happy enough—even astonished—that a submission of his should have made so much money, but then he began to brood, no doubt on the fact that all he was getting from us was his 10 percent. It must have seemed to him unjust that we had given him a great success and at the same time taken away his chance to exploit it.

  He invited me to his apartment for a drink—a strange place in which the elevator, run by an elderly man in shabby livery who looked as if he might be an extra in a horror movie, took me straight up to Chambrun’s apartment. The elevator opened with a crash, depositing me straight into his living room, which seemed to have been furnished with leftovers from a theatrical warehouse. Chambrun was on his feet, as nattily dressed as ever, opening a bottle of champagne; lounging on his sofa was a lush young woman—young, at any rate, in comparison to Chambrun—dressed in a kind of kimono or wrapper and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder. Chambrun introduced her as his secretary, though from the length of her lacquered fingernails I judged this to be a euphemism.

  We toasted our mutual success, but there was an air of sadness to the proceedings. Now that The Caretakers was making so much money, Chambrun said, perhaps we would like to reconsider our arrangement and return to the conventional author/agent relationship? I said no as politely as I could. Chambrun was not surprised, but there was a certain lowering of the temperature in his voice, a sense that between one gentleman and another I had somehow disappointed him.

  I left sooner than I had expected to and never got another manuscr
ipt from him again.

  CHAPTER 8

  I was soon getting them from other agents, however. Success breeds success, in book publishing as elsewhere. One book that works encourages other agents to send books—a process that is reversed when failure sets in. I was beginning to put down roots at S&S —framed photographs on the wall, pipe rack and tobacco humidor on the desk, just the kind of domestic touches that I had always despised in other people’s work spaces. Indeed, I was inadvertently in the process of doing what so many other people my age were: I was making my work the center of my life.

  The process was so gradual and natural that I scarcely noticed it; like so many others, I told myself that I was working to make a living, putting in long hours to jump-start my career, doing it all for Casey’s benefit in the long run, but of course none of that was really true. S&S simply seemed to me a far more exciting and fulfilling place than home; I dreaded weekends and holidays when the office was closed and put aside as much of Saturdays and Sundays as I could to read manuscripts and edit, missing the camaraderie, impatient to get back to the office on Monday morning.

  The word workaholic had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon was almost as widespread in publishing as alcoholism, and only too frequently (though not in my case) the two went hand in hand. But the people I liked and admired most were those who stayed in the office the latest, and I simply fell into the habit of being one of them. I very often found myself walking home with Bob, who lived about two blocks away from us, after the cleaners had driven us out of our offices. Our standing joke revolved around S&S’s treasurer, Emil Staral, who had been appointed by Shimkin and was in the habit of walking around the office at five-thirty every afternoon to make sure the lights were turned out. If you weren’t in your office and the lights were on, he turned them off and left a little note on your desk so you would know he had been there. If you were in your office, he would pause at your door and with a frown explain that almost no work done after hours was likely to be worth the amount it cost in terms of wasted electricity—he knew, he had done the calculation. Staral, like Shimkin, was of the old school: A penny saved was a penny earned, and no expenditure, however necessary it might seem to others, was ever a good idea. If it had been up to him, we would have bought no books at all.

  Looking back now, I am not so sure that Staral, who was in every respect a character straight out of the pages of Molière, was not right after all. Most of the people I knew in the late fifties and sixties ended up divorced in the seventies, and by the time the eighties rolled around they were busily trying to find in a new marriage the domestic happiness they had fled from when they were just starting up the career ladder. I was no exception.

  It was, in retrospect, a strange period, the sunset of the Fifties, before rock and roll, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and women’s liberation changed all the rules we were living by. One’s own photograph from that time now seems to be one of a complete stranger. It is hard to summon up a world so different in so many ways from the present and yet so close, a world where manual typewriters were still in use, in which the orders were counted by a couple of gray-haired ladies, the accountants still used ledgers, and there was a real, live telephone operator with a switchboard on the premises. In the age before the photocopy machine, carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner’s blackened skin.

  Wives still stayed home while their husbands went off to work, and they went away with the kids for the summer while their husbands stayed in town during the week, and everyone tried as hard as they could to lead the same kind of lives their parents had, or at least one of which their parents might approve. Rebellion was unthinkable, and what little there was of it took place furtively, in the form of heavy drinking and the office affairs that often accompanied it. Men still ran the world, unquestioned (except at home), and although there were more women executives in book publishing than in most other businesses, real power remained in the hands of men. There were exceptions—a couple of the more powerful agents were women: Helen Strauss of the William Morris Agency, Phyllis Jackson and Kay Brown at the Ashley-Famous Agency (eventually to become International Creative Management), as well as a handful of important publishing executives.

  S&S had a few of what were then known as “ballsy” women, including the head of the production department, who, when Emil Staral’s even more penny-pinching deputy tried to end an argument with her by stepping into the men’s room, followed him in and continued it, while he stood in the urinal, fly halfway unzipped, shocked into silence. On the whole, though, it was still thought of as a man’s world, even though much of the useful work in it was done by women.

  A publishing firm like S&S or Random House or Knopf was still small enough physically that all its major components except warehousing and shipping could be contained in one place, sometimes, as in the case of S&S, on one floor. This meant that every department was within reach, and that department heads were constantly in and out of each other’s offices. In the days when Dick Simon had been active at S&S, he liked to open his door and shout when he wanted to call his troops together for a quick meeting, and Max could still have done so, had he been of a mind to, which he wasn’t, being more concerned with hiding from his troops than gathering them. The advent of big news—a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a new best-seller, the delivery of an important or eagerly awaited manuscript—was signaled by a sudden burst of noise and activity in the hallway, which brought everyone running to find out what was going on. When Bob had something in hand that he really liked, he would read aloud from it in the hall and was quickly surrounded by people urging him to buy the book or, on some occasions, to turn it down. Enthusiasm not only was held to be the life force of book publishing but also was instantly available and rapidly communicated to everyone in the company, right down to the clerks, accountants, typists, and mail-room boys.

  The sales conference, at which the sales reps (who were then referred to, altogether accurately, as “the men”) were introduced to the next season’s list of books by the editors, was held in a New York hotel in one day, as opposed to the present custom of spending the best part of a week at some lush Florida resort hotel. Back then, the sales force of a major publisher consisted of perhaps a dozen men, most of them grizzled veterans of weeks on the road touting the list to skeptical smalltown bookstore owners who mostly wanted new editions of the Bible.

  PROGRESS IN book publishing sometimes seems erratic and accidental, perhaps because book publishers are almost always surprised by their own successes. None of us could have guessed that one of the biggest books in S&S’s history would come from one of our fellow editors, Joseph Barnes. Once a speechwriter for Wendell Willkie, editor of P.M., and former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Barnes was editing a long and much-delayed history of Nazi Germany. Barnes himself was something of an exercise in deliberate obscurity. In the days of his association with Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate nominee who was referred to in the Democratic press as “the barefoot boy from Wall Street,” Barnes had been in the limelight, but his leftist views, mild as they had been, eventually made him unemployable, except in book publishing, which had not seemed like an important enough industry to merit the attention of the witch-hunters during the McCarthy era. Since Shimkin had been Marshall Field’s éminence grise during the period when Field was launching P.M., it is possible that Barnes’s job as an S&S editor represented the payment of an old debt, or perhaps some residual guilt on Shimkin’s part at the abrupt closing of P.M., but whatever the reason, Barnes sat in his small office every day, chain-smoking as he went over galleys with a skeptical eye. He was a tall, well-dressed, debonair, and deeply dignified figure, full of old-fashioned but rather remote courtesy and richly cynical in the manner of newspapermen the world over. Every day he sauntered off to lunch at the Overseas Press Club, a dashing brown fedo
ra cocked over one eye, and a well-worn foreign correspondent’s trench coat draped over his arm. He returned at three, his cheeks slightly rosier from the two martinis he invariably drank before lunch, for another afternoon of silent absorption in his galleys. He did not attend meetings or join in the noisy commotions that exploded from time to time in the hallway, nor join the group of Young Turks in Bob’s office. He was like a man who carried some dark tragedy on his shoulders that separated him from ordinary mortals, which was, in fact, not very far from the case, for Barnes had been close to power until Willkie’s defeat and the rising tide of McCarthyism washed him up in a small office at S&S, with a part-time secretary he shared with another editor.

  The book that Joe Barnes was working on with such monastic devotion—and which was growing larger and larger every day—was being written by his old friend and colleague William L. Shirer, who had been a noted foreign correspondent for CBS until his leftist ideas and connections made him as unemployable as Barnes. From time to time, Emil Staral would bring Shimkin’s attention to how late the manuscript was, and Shimkin would order Staral to cancel the contract and get the company’s $25,000 back, but every time this happened, Barnes put on his jacket, went downstairs to see Shimkin, and returned with a reprieve of six months for Shirer. Whatever Barnes had on Shimkin, it was enough to keep Shirer writing the book that would eventually become The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.