Hurst seemed lost in contemplation, then recalled my presence. “I come here every day,” she said. “Just to say hello.”
“I see.… And the—ah—letters?”
Hurst looked up at me, her large eyes filling with tears. She took out a lace handkerchief embroidered with—what else?—calla lilies and dabbed at her face. “What letters?” she asked.
“The ones on the bed.”
She looked at them as if they had only just appeared there. “Ah,” she said, “those letters. Well, every day I write to him, you see, and then I come up here and mail the letter to him by putting it on his bed.”
I was touched. Here, surely, was a love that rivaled that of Queen Victoria for Prince Albert—after his death, she had his evening clothes laid out on his bed before dinner every night for the rest of her life. I looked at the bed again, and slowly an entirely irreverent thought crossed my mind. “Ah, how long has he been dead?” I asked, in as tactful a tone as I could manage.
Miss Hurst frowned at the word dead. I wondered if she was a Christian Scientist. “He passed over,” she emphasized gently, “many, many years ago.”
I stared at the pile of envelopes. It was large certainly, but it could not have contained more than a few hundred letters. If he had passed over many, many years ago, there should have been thousands of them on the bed. I pointed this out to Hurst, as gently as I could.
She nodded. “Of course you’re right,” she said briskly. “Every year or so, my editor comes over from Doubleday and gathers them up, then we take the best ones and make a book of them.”
She mused about this for a moment. “They do pretty well, too. Reader’s Digest loves them. The foreign rights aren’t bad either.”
She moved me out of the room and closed the door firmly behind us. “Well, you’re a publisher,” she went on, all business now, “so you know how it is with writers. It never pays to waste anything you’ve written, does it?”
I HAVE often wondered what it must have been like to be the editor assigned to the macabre task of collecting Hurst’s letters to her late husband at regular intervals. Of course, every editor knows that the most important task is to get your hands on the manuscript. It is astonishing how much time an editor spends coaxing pages out of the author’s grip or listening to reasons why the manuscript “isn’t ready to be shown yet.” Of course, in many cases this is intended to conceal the fact that nothing exists on paper, but more often it is a sign of the author’s panic. Most writers work in isolation and seldom show their work in progress to anyone. So long as nobody has actually read the manuscript, the writer can imagine the success, praise, and money that will be lavished on him or her—hence the reluctance to bundle it up in wrapping paper and send it off to the publisher, where, the author may assume, an editor will read it with a cold and fishy eye and demand all sorts of inappropriate changes or even, God forbid, deem it unsatisfactory and ask for the advance back.
In 1963 and 1964, I was sent off on a number of wild-goose chases to persuade various authors to surrender what they had written—if indeed they had written anything. This task was a kind of punishment, akin to bill collecting or process serving, and was invented for me by Henry Simon, who still smarted over what he saw as my defection, and was no doubt intended to strengthen my character. It reached its lowest point when I found myself sitting in a New Jersey roadhouse with the bandleader Paul Whiteman and his agent. Whiteman had been a big man in his heyday, broad shouldered, stout, and beaming as he stood in front of his band, but age had shrunk him, and his clothes—tailored in the garish colors and shiny fabrics that had once been the mark of success in the big-band era—hung off him loosely, like deflated balloons. He had sunk to the point where he was conducting a very much reduced version of his band in shady-looking nightclubs, to audiences whose grandparents had danced to his beat, playing medleys of Cole Porter for kids who really wanted to hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. He still had the pencil-thin mustache and the toothy, gleaming smile of the showbiz professional, but his eyes were resentful and at times bewildered. Once he had played for kings, queens, movie stars, and millionaires; now he was doing one-night stands on the outskirts of Paramus. My presence—reminding him that he had a contract to deliver a book—did nothing to improve his day. We sat at a table near the bar in the stygian gloom of the roadhouse—What, I asked myself, is more depressing than being in a nightclub at noon?—with a tray of stale Danish pastries and a thermos of coffee provided by the management in the person of a swarthy, blue-chinned gentleman who might as well have a sign pinned on him that read, “Member of an Organized-Crime Family.” Whiteman was determined to give me each and every one of the anecdotes with which he had sold Henry Simon on the idea of his writing an autobiography, while my instructions were to return with pages of manuscript.
I finally interrupted the flow and asked if I could see some of the book. No problem, Whiteman said. He nodded to his agent, who produced a stout briefcase, from which he took folder after folder. I leafed through them. They were all photographs, meticulously captioned, showing Whiteman in happier and more prosperous days, most of them with his arm around some celebrity. “These are just photographs,” I said. “What about the text?”
Whiteman sighed and stared into the middle distance, his eyes avoiding me.
“Paul doesn’t respond well to pressure,” the agent whispered to me.
“What pressure? He’s years late. Nobody’s bothered him until now.”
“We figured that was because you guys didn’t care.”
“Of course we care,” I objected.
Whiteman held his hand up for quiet. He gave me a smile. “Listen to me,” he said slowly, even impressively, enunciating every word carefully. “It’s written, don’t worry.” He tapped a finger against his bald head. “You go back and tell them that it’s all here, every word of it. The hard work has been done. Now it’s just a question of getting it all down on paper.”
Sidney Kingsley’s very words.
THE NUMBER of times I heard this, or some variation of it, is incalculable. I heard it from Orson Welles—his book was already written, within that massive head, just waiting to come pouring out onto paper any day now. I heard it from Irving Lazar for nearly thirty years on the subject of his autobiography, and I have heard it from a wide variety of people over the years, ranging from Cher to Ronald Reagan. For some reason, celebrity authors always assume that the hard part of writing is the thinking, whereas the truth, as every professional writer knows, is that the actual writing is what hurts—thinking comes easy, by comparison, and nothing exists until it has been put down on paper.
That period, 1963 to 1965, saw a lot of celebrity books, as well as an increasing sense that if you paid out money to an author, however famous he or she was, you ought to get something back in the way of a manuscript—or at least enough pages to prove that work was being done, if only by a ghostwriter. This was a novel idea in most publishing houses and by no means a welcome one. Publishers had always shied away from asking for their money back, partly because gentlemen didn’t do that sort of thing and partly because most publishing houses weren’t efficient enough to do it on any reasonable scale—besides, the thinking went, the sums of money were usually relatively small, and most authors stoutly resisted repaying.
Public sympathy, moreover, was usually on the side of the writer in such cases. This was an attitude largely shared by editors, most of whom were quite used to waiting for years for a manuscript to come in and to treating the delivery date on a contract as infinitely elastic, fiercely resisting any attempt on the part of “the business people” to go after authors for late delivery, however much water had flowed under the bridge since the contract was signed. Bob Gottlieb, for instance, leaped to the passionate defense of writers whom he himself accused of being deadbeats at the first sign of interest in them from the business department.
The gap between “us”—editors, intellectuals, people of a certain sensibility—and
“them”—suit-wearing apparatchiki who went around turning off the lights and didn’t read books—was nowhere greater than at S&S, where the slightest intervention of the business people in editorial matters was seen as part of Shimkin’s long struggle to gain control of S&S and deprive editors of their cherished privileges and independence. Even those who did not like Max Schuster—or dismissed him as a henpecked figure of fun—preferred him to the alternative, which was Shimkin.
IT IS the misfortune of most men that they achieve what they have always wanted at the point when it is too late for them to enjoy it or make good use of it, and Shimkin was no exception. Shrewd and patient, one of the rare figures in publishing who was a businessman first and actually preferred going over the account books to reading the books the company published, Shimkin was to secure complete control over S&S long after his energy and vision had already been eclipsed.
By the time that Shimkin and Schuster were equal partners in S&S (they rotated the offices of president and chairman of the board on a yearly basis), Shimkin was in almost as much danger of becoming a caricature of himself as Max was, despite the fact that he was by many years the younger man. Max’s many eccentricities were equaled by Shimkin’s endless financial homilies—the summit of his wisdom was “Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing,” which he managed to work into every conversation at least once—not to speak of his unconvincing (and undependable) facade of Pickwickian good humor, his unflagging attention to unimportant details, his struggle with depression, and his growing drinking problem. To see the two men together was to be exposed to such a catalog of tics, quirks, manias, idées fixes, and compulsive behavior as to call for the talent of Dr. Oliver Sacks.
By the early 1960s, though Shimkin was in sight of his goal—as Max’s deterioration and declining health began to be obvious—he was an angry and embittered man, no longer in complete control of himself. Already, it was well known throughout the company that there was no point in seeing Shimkin about anything that mattered after lunch, when two or three stiff martinis would have ignited his suspicion and his temper to a white-hot glow. His motherly secretary kept a pitcher of martinis ready in a thermos bottle for the late afternoon, when the ones he had drunk at lunchtime were beginning to wear off. By the end of the day, when he left for home, he was rolling unsteadily on his feet as he stood on Fiftieth Street looking for his car and very often looking for a fight as well.
CHAPTER 16
The mid-sixties were a troubled and uncertain time for everybody at S&S, as they were, by and large, for the rest of the publishing industry. Although on the surface it might have seemed that at S&S the real question was how long Max could hold on to his half of the company, Shimkin’s eventual ascendancy led to the sale of the company to a total stranger—a kind of Pyrrhic victory for Shimkin. In much the same way, Cerf, having brought off an astonishing coup with the purchase of Knopf and having taken Random House public shortly afterward, sold his beloved company to RCA. What had been unleashed throughout the industry was a kind of Gadarene rush to exchange the ownership of publishing houses for stock as fast as possible, before the game was up—a game that is still going on today as many of the bigger houses, themselves the result of numerous acquisitions and mergers, are put on the block for sale by their corporate owners, most of whom never wanted to be in the book-publishing business in the first place.
Shimkin was to be one of the first victims in the early stages of this game of corporate dominos. He could, no doubt, once he had rid himself of Max, have arranged to pass the company on eventually, by gradual stages, to his son, Michael, who had already demonstrated his interest in the business by opening a successful bookstore; or he could have chosen to preserve the company’s independence by other means; instead, no sooner had he secured 100 percent of it than he was trying to sell it—an odd reaction to the culmination of a forty-year-old ambition.
Beyond the fact that Cerf, Shimkin, the Knopfs, and any number of others wanted to cash in their chips, there was no real reason for the wave of mergers and sales that began to hit the publishing industry in the sixties and continued through the seventies and eighties at an accelerating pace. Once the process had started, it was impossible to stop. The bigger publishing houses became, the more they enjoyed “economies of scale”—the ability to buy paper in larger quantities at lower prices, for example, or to share the cost of the sales force and the accounting department between a number of different imprints. In theory, the larger a publishing house became, the more profitably it could be operated—hence the logic of Random House’s acquisitions of Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Ballantine, and, eventually, innumerable British publishing houses, or S&S’s eventual acquisitions of Prentice-Hall and Macmillan (which had already acquired Atheneum and Scribner’s). All this lay far in the future in the mid-sixties, but the seeds were already sown for the stronger houses, with more powerful financial backing, to swallow the smaller and weaker ones.
Shimkin could read the writing on the wall, but he was not in any position to take advantage of that ability. Schuster was still his partner, and the last thing Max wanted to do was expand S&S or acquire other houses. On the contrary, Max’s sole ambition was to hang on by his fingernails for as long as possible—or, perhaps, for as long as his health would permit him to do so. There were days when it must have seemed to Shimkin that Max’s health was better than his own—say what you like, at least Max wasn’t immobilized by episodes of depression.
Max’s deterioration, by contrast, was undramatic and by small degrees. Those who worked close to him noticed, for example, that the shaking that had always affected his hands was growing more severe, that he often left large patches of his face unshaved, presumably because he could no longer hold a razor steadily enough to reach them, that his gait was more and more unsteady, so that in motion he resembled a windup toy—one had the feeling that a gentle push would send him backward out of control until he fell over. These were the signs, I recognized, of Parkinson’s disease, from which my maternal grandfather, Octavius Musgrove, had suffered during his last years, and the one thing I knew about Parkinson’s was that it didn’t get better.
I have no doubt that Max knew it too, but he never mentioned his illness and took great pains to ensure, even more than before, that nobody saw him coming or going in the halls by arriving early and leaving late. Seated behind his desk, all one noticed was the trembling hands, and Max tried to hide that by clutching the arms of his chair as if he were holding on for dear life—as in a sense he was.
Given this weak and divided authority at the top, it is hardly surprising that there was a certain amount of not very discreet jockeying for power below. This resulted in the resignation of Henry Simon, ostensibly for reasons of health but actually because he had been badly outmaneuvered by his peers. As Max declined, Henry must have had every expectation of getting—at long last—a chance to wield some kind of power. But by the time Max got around to relinquishing some of his powers, Henry was old, cranky, embittered, and simply too tired to take on a real fight against younger, hungrier men. Peter Schwed was promoted over him to become de facto publisher, while Bob Gottlieb made his peace with Schwed and became managing editor.
What this meant, in practice, was that the two people who most disliked Henry Simon were now running exactly those parts of the company that affected him most closely. The bottom line was that his books were neither exciting enough nor profitable enough to reward him with the kind of position he craved. Bob had brought in a whole roster of new talent, while Schwed was responsible, despite his London trips, for a solid list of sports books and fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. In the final analysis, in book publishing nothing really matters but the books, and Henry had simply been outpaced by his rivals.
I had long since switched, with whatever pangs of conscience, to the winning side, and Henry knew it—and he wasn’t about to forgive my defection. When I said good-bye to him as he was leaving his office, he shook
my hand limply, an ironic smile on his gaunt face. “Good luck,” he said. Then, with a bitter expression, he added, “but I don’t think you’ll need it.”
Shortly afterward, Bob moved into Henry’s corner office, I moved into Bob’s, and Dick Snyder moved upstairs to join us on the twenty-eighth floor.
I was perfectly content and assumed that there would be no more changes for a long, long time. In fact, they had only just begun.
PUBLISHING, DESPITE a lot of humbug to the contrary, is a reactive business—which is to say that publishers and editors do not as a rule make taste or determine people’s political opinions or effect major social changes. In the final analysis, they adapt, however unwillingly or hesitantly, to the demands, taste, and opinions of the marketplace or they go under. That is not to say that there are no exceptions. From time to time a book published in a spirit of stubborn contrarianism—written and published against the flow, so to speak—will become a major bestseller, but in retrospect this has often been because it accidentally tapped some nascent change in public opinion. To take a famous example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of American publishing, is often credited with having created in its many millions of readers a revulsion against slavery that led directly to the Civil War—even Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, remarked that she was the little lady who had written the book that had begun the big war—but the truth is that the book capitalized on feelings that were already there. The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin merely signified that there were more people opposed to slavery—and to any compromise on slavery with the Southern states—than politicians, including Lincoln, had hitherto supposed; indeed, had the bestseller list existed in the mid-nineteenth century, Southerners might have viewed the success of Stowe’s novel in the rest of the country—and the civilized world—as a good indication of the overwhelming number of people ranged against their cause.
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