Another Life

by Michael Korda

  • • •

  THE STORY on dangerous sports ran without the parachutists, I’m sorry to say, but it taught me the lesson that the simple, functional answer is usually the correct one, even (and perhaps especially) when it comes to sex. It also taught me that women’s magazine editors, ranging from Helen Gurley Brown to Grace Mirabella, have a toughness of mind all their own. From then on, I avoided the Glamour offices but continued to contribute regularly to the magazine and even started to get fan mail. After a couple of years of writing long feature articles, Amy Greene asked if I would like to be Glamour’s movie reviewer. It was not something I had ever imagined myself doing—since almost everybody in my family was in the movie business, reviewers had always seemed to be the enemy, even (perhaps especially) when they were literate reviewers. My Uncle Alex had begun his career at the age of seventeen as the film critic for a Budapest arts weekly, and when he stepped behind the camera as a director for the first time, at the age of twenty-one, he remarked on how much easier it was to criticize a film than to make one. His attitude toward critics did not change over the years. My father’s comment on movie critics was simply, “Vat the hell do they know about it?” Still, it was too good an offer to refuse—not just a regular monthly income, but getting to see movies before everyone else and for free!

  Movie reviewers, I soon discovered, are courted fiercely by the major studios. In those lavish days, every movie company maintained a glamorous, plush screening room in midtown Manhattan, most of them furnished comfortably with big easy chairs or sofas and a staff of people whose only job was to see that reviewers got to see each movie in the most comfortable circumstances possible.

  It was apparent to me from the beginning that Glamour’s readers were not looking for reviews of meaningful foreign films that would, in any case, never play in their towns, nor were they anxious to read slashing intellectual attacks against major movies, still less cleverness for its own sake. Basically, they wanted to know which of the current movies was worth seeing—it was a service column, in short. Gradually, over the months, I hit my stride, and my fan mail, most of it positive, increased sharply—an important fact, since Glamour had an elaborate month-by-month system for determining how many readers there were for each feature and column in the magazine, as well as their age, income, and so on. Fan mail played a part in scoring each writer’s work, so the more letters you generated, the better.

  It never occurred to me that I would go on reviewing movies for nearly ten years—at three movies a week, about fifteen hundred movies—until, in fact, I could hardly even remember a time when my evenings weren’t taken up by screenings. I began by writing a review of each movie I’d seen, but before long it became like the obligatory essay at Oxford: something that was easy to put off until a day or two before the deadline, at which point there was nothing to do but cancel everything else, make a pot of strong coffee, and sit down with clenched teeth to do it. Doing it this way, the hardest part was trying to remember what movies I had seen, since most of them tended to run into a blur. Penelope Gilliatt, the formidable critic for The New Yorker, actually had a tiny flashlight in her purse so she could make notes during the screenings, but I relied on my memory, only to find, by the time two or three weeks had elapsed, that I couldn’t remember a thing except dim recollections of plots. Time after time, the approach of Glamour’s deadline produced panic in me, followed by a late-night session at my typewriter—then it was time to start all over again with another month’s worth of movies. The fact that I had taken on what some people might have considered to be three full-time jobs never dawned on me. I was a successful editor, with increasingly serious responsibilities for major authors, a monthly movie reviewer, and a freelance magazine writer. At the end of the day, I was making enough money to rent a house in Maine for the summer, and to dress fashionably, but I was working more or less constantly without noticing.

  Though writing itself was a pleasure, seeing my own name at the top of what I had written was the ultimate thrill. I loved opening a new magazine and finding my name in it, even though some of the magazines I found myself writing for were very odd and “special” indeed—I seem to remember doing a piece on fetish clothing (God knows for whom) that brought me into what was then the fairly unknown bondage and S&M underworld of custom leather shops around Christopher Street, and another (possibly for The New York Times) on people who kept their own horses in New York City, which eventually led to my becoming one of them for over a decade. I had, it seemed, the dangerous habit of becoming part of my pieces. A piece on people who swam and surfed right through the winter led me to buy a wet suit, diving goggles, and gloves, and I can vividly recall swimming out to sea from the deserted beach at Robert Moses State Park on a cold and windy Thanksgiving Day—an experience that one day was instrumental in securing the English novelist R. F. Delderfield for S&S. Looking back on it, I seem to have been willing to try anything, including all-night dinners with Gypsies camping out for the winter in the Coney Island amusement park, and swimming in a pool full of dolphins with a woman who was part of a U.S. Navy experiment in communicating with them (an experiment that was later the subject of a best-selling novel by the French author Robert Merle, which I published, which was later made into a movie by Mike Nichols). I went fishing with Paul Newman and target shooting after dinner at an Italian club in the Village with its own pistol range. At one point, I even went to the top of the Verrazano Bridge to watch Mohawk steelworkers perform miracles of balance as they completed the span and learned, in case I had ever doubted the fact, that there are harder professions than editing books. I was, to put it mildly, game for anything, which is a good thing for a magazine writer to be.

  I must have written tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of words, without ever once thinking that I might some day write a book. Writing books was something my authors did, not me. So long as I was merely writing for magazines, I did not have the feeling that I was competing with the people I edited or embarking on a new profession. I told myself that I wrote for magazines as a kind of hobby, except of course that I got paid for it; writing books would be a whole different story. Besides, if you’re used to writing five-thousand-word pieces, a book seems like a monumental task. There was nothing I admired more than the Sitzfleisch required to write a book of 100,000 words or more. I shared Bob Gottlieb’s combination of sympathy and awe for people who could do this. It seemed to require more courage than I had, so I put any desire to do it firmly out of my mind.

  CHAPTER 18

  As the sixties passed by, lost to most of us in hard work, S&S was increasingly divided by the question of succession, most of which hung on the question of what exactly Bob Gottlieb wanted. Even those who thought of themselves as Bob’s friends, like myself, were in the dark. He continued to edit his books, extended his hold over much of the company, and seemed willing to accept the status quo, even though he wasn’t exactly happy about it. Essentially, S&S seemed to consist at the time of two separate entities: the old, traditional S&S, run by Schwed, and the new, more contemporary S&S, orchestrated, if not run, by Bob. Typically, I had a foot in both camps.

  But this was an illusion. S&S was still owned by Shimkin, and in the final analysis, he was to decide what happened. In some ways, the situation pleased him. If he was good at anything, it was at setting one faction against the other and allowing each of them to believe that he favored their side. He feigned sympathy to Gottlieb and his followers (particularly Nina Bourne, the advertising director, and Tony Schulte, who dealt with marketing), and let it be known that they were the future of S&S; he was equally sympathetic toward Schwed, and let him know that he represented the solid, day-to-day financial reality of S&S, which was what really mattered in the long run. Both sides had his ear, and both sides might have thought, from time to time, that they had his backing, but in fact Shimkin merely hoped to buy time by keeping Bob at S&S for as long as possible without having to give up much, if anything, in exchange. He was a mas
ter of retreat by small, slow stages, the Marshal Kutuzov of book publishing. One came away from him with a tiny raise, possibly a new title, some small concession—anything that would keep one from asking for major changes or a big raise. He was always happy to give away what he didn’t mind losing in the interests of peace. His expression at such times was that of the Buddha, serene and benevolent, but it was deceptive. The truth was that Shimkin, having eliminated most of his partners, was for the first time in full control of both Pocket Books and S&S and not at all sure what he wanted to do with it all. He talked about taking the company public and dropped hints both to Seymour Turk, his chief financial officer, and to Dick Snyder that they were being groomed to succeed him. No Ottoman sultan ever divided his court with more subtlety or better ensured that his son and heir remained powerless.

  Since all this was being played out against a background of trendy publishing successes and at a time when Wall Street’s interest in book publishing was raising even the most second-rate of publishing houses to the level of interesting investments, Shimkin had good reason to be cheerful. All he had to do was make sure nobody rocked the boat.

  The boat, however, was about to be rocked more severely than anybody could have guessed by Bob Gottlieb. As the sixties passed by, Bob’s reputation as a wunderkind had grown by leaps and bounds. He seemed capable of anything, from securing, via Tom Maschler, the U.S. rights to John Lennon’s book A Spaniard in the Works to publishing a whole string of “commercial” best-sellers. Then he announced the news that nobody—least of all me—had expected: He was leaving S&S to go to Knopf.

  Pledged to secrecy during his negotiations, the news that he was leaving was a bombshell that rocked not only S&S but the industry. There were those who saw it as a crippling blow to S&S, particularly since he was taking Nina Bourne and Tony Schulte with him, and others who felt that it would spell the end of Knopf as a kind of icon of quality publishing. As it turned out, neither of these predictions was correct, but certainly for a moment it seemed as if S&S had been torpedoed and was fast sinking.

  I felt, perhaps more sharply than most, a certain wistful sense of betrayal. Bob was my friend. We had been close, both at work and away from it, and although we were very different in many ways, we shared a great many things: We were both omnivorous readers (Bob was better read in literature, while I had read more history), we shared the same kind of sense of humor, and much the same view of the world. I was deeply apprehensive about what life at S&S would be like for me without Bob and also felt hurt that he had not asked me to join him at Knopf. This clouded our relationship during the transition period, since it seemed to me that I had been judged and found wanting. Bob, to be sure, broke the news to me with infinite tact and rightly pointed out that his departure offered me a great opportunity and that it was time for me to take on more responsibility and succeed on my own. I was quite incapable of taking this in, however, and for the longest time simply felt a numb resentment at having been left out.

  Fortunately for me, the hysteria surrounding Bob’s departure soon swamped my regrets. It is hard to describe the furor that his move created. Until that point, editors tended to stay with the same publishing house for their whole career—Maxwell Perkins, who stayed at Scribner’s until he died, was fairly typical. What is more, frequent job changing was discouraged—a lingering effect of the Depression in the minds of those who remembered it or whose parents had lived through it. Nothing was more precious than keeping the job you had, however green the pasture might look on the other side of the fence, and loyalty to the company that employed you was assumed to be both owed and rewarded. The notion that a job was simply a stepping stone to the next (and better) job, or that the company might regard its employees, even the key ones, as essentially dismissable and replaceable cogs in the machine had not yet penetrated to the publishing business. In the circumstances, the fact that Bob was transferring himself and his key collaborators to Knopf (and by extension, to the rival Random House camp) was as if a Cambridge don had defected to Oxford or the admiral commanding the Naval Academy at Annapolis had put on an army uniform and taken command of West Point.

  Of course, the more praise was thrown at Bob, the more S&S seemed to be lost without him, and very soon it became apparent that unless we acted quickly and carefully those of us who were left behind might be stranded. It was a strange and rapid change of mood. At first, people were overcome by the sense of loss, and wished Bob well, but almost overnight the tears and lamentations gave way to outright fear, as agent after agent called to say that this author or that one wanted to go to Knopf with Bob. Worse, they threatened never to send S&S another book if we made a fuss about it.

  The extent to which Bob himself stirred up this incipient exodus is hard to guess, and it is perhaps a measure of the strength of his personal relationships with his writers that so many of them wanted to jump ship. Still, the effect it had on S&S was dispiriting and alarming.

  Nobody was more shaken by Bob’s departure than Peter Schwed, though his emotions on the subject seemed to me conflicted. Schwed was an intensely ambitious man, with a prickly pride, and it can hardly have escaped his attention that Bob and his followers were mildly dismissive of the kind of books he liked, and in general thought him better suited to run the rights department than to take on the role of publisher. So long as Bob was there, Schwed, whatever his title, was overshadowed by Bob’s mere presence and undercut by Bob’s feline wit. On the other hand, Schwed was a sentimental man, with generous impulses and strong, old-fashioned loyalties, and he felt a great debt to Bob, who had been at S&S almost as long as he had. Though Schwed was fiercely competitive on a personal level—indeed, it was the dominating characteristic of his personality—he had a certain ancien régime attitude when it came to publishing, perhaps the legacy of a youth spent at Lawrenceville and Princeton, where competition was reserved for the playing fields and gentlemanly behavior was encouraged off them. For whatever reason, Schwed was determined to behave like a gentleman at this first major test of his authority, as if what he sought from authors and agents—and perhaps from Bob—was some kind of recognition that he acted like the Princeton man he was. Fond of Kipling, whose work he could recite in large chunks, Schwed set out to keep his head, when all about him were losing theirs, and thereby made the mistake of his career.

  It was, needless to say, Dick Snyder who brought my mind sharply to bear on the realities of the situation, a day or so after Bob’s decision had been announced, by plunking himself down beside my desk and opening his mind to me. He looked tired and irritable.

  “Nice guys finish last,” he said, by way of greeting.

  I agreed that this was certainly what most people believed in the United States. The general opinion in England is the reverse, but I saw no point in mentioning that.

  “I blame Shimkin most,” Snyder went on. “He should have given Bobby what he wanted. Shimkin nickel-and-dimed him instead and look what happened.”

  I agreed that Shimkin was penny-wise and pound-foolish, and not only when it came to Bob. However, I found it difficult to believe that money was the only reason why Bob was moving to Knopf. There he would be, in effect, his own publisher as well as editor in chief, the heir apparent and chosen successor to the Knopfs. At S&S, Schwed was publisher, and it was not a marriage made in heaven, despite Schwed’s belief to the contrary.

  Snyder grimaced. His facial appearance seemed to change so often that it was something of an adventure seeing him at intervals. At one point his hair was short, and the frames of his glasses dark, thick, and of executive caliber; at the next, his hair was transformed into a thick, wild tangle of curls, like Medusa’s, while he sported tinted aviator glasses. He even grew a mustache for a while. It was as if he were trying out different personae in the hope of pinning down the one that would take him to the top. “Who would you rather have running things?” he asked. “Schwed or Bobby? Shimkin should have bitten the bullet and made the choice between them. Still, it’s lucky
for you, isn’t it?”

  I must have looked puzzled and naive. “Come on,” he snapped. “Don’t tell me you haven’t worked out that his job is yours if you go for it. You don’t have any competition. There isn’t anybody else here who can take the job, and just at the moment nobody in their right mind wants to come here. They all figure we’re done for, going down for the fucking third time, losers.… You may not know it yet, but you’ve got S&S by the balls.”

  I thought about this, and it gradually dawned on me that Dick might be right—indeed, when it came to this kind of thing, he was almost always right.

  Of course, even then Dick, like most people, credited me with Machiavellian deviousness, fueled by fierce ambition, a misunderstanding of my character that I had always found puzzling. Bob, trying to explain his own success at S&S, had once told an interviewer that although his was a competitive nature, he was too busy to have time left over for ambition, a statement that was widely ridiculed as naive and self-serving by those who didn’t know him well but seemed to me right on the mark, not only about himself but about me. A person who is compulsively busy is unlikely to have much time left over for plotting his or her rise. I was often in the right place at the right time, but I had made no particular effort to find my way there, so I was momentarily baffled and even frightened by Dick’s assumption that I not only coveted Bob’s title but was planning how to get it. The idea had simply not crossed my mind.

  Now that it had been placed there, it was hard not to think about it. In ten years, I had gone from an assistant editor to executive editor (one step below editor in chief on the publishing totem pole, at least theoretically) and was doing more books than any other editor except Bob—too many, in fact. My immediate reaction was that nobody else at S&S seemed any better qualified for the job than I was—whatever the job might be, for the truth was that the very idea of having an editor in chief was something of a puzzle. Max had assumed the title for most of the company’s history but in the past had delegated it briefly from time to time to such varied personalities as Quincy Howe (later to find greater fame as a writer of popular history), Wallace Brockway (who went on to become a noted anthologizer), Clifton Fadiman, Jr. (who gave it up to become a book reviewer and book-club judge), Jerome Weidman (who resigned from S&S to write a long list of best-selling novels, the best remembered of which was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a book that was rejected by S&S because it made Max uncomfortable but eagerly acquired by Cerf for Random House), Joe Barnes (who gave up the title almost as soon as it was conferred on him), and Jack Goodman, who was best remembered for having hired Bob. Max reclaimed the title after Goodman’s untimely death and relinquished it reluctantly, first to Henry Simon then to Bob, who liked to pretend that he had never wanted it.