Another Life

by Michael Korda

  I bore it in mind all the way through the lobby of the Mansfields’ building—in which there was a fountain with fresh gardenias floating in it, the first of its kind I had seen outside Beverly Hills—and up the elevator to their apartment, where Jackie herself opened the door. My first thought was that Truman Capote was onto something: She did look a bit like a truck driver in drag, or at least there was something very mannish about her appearance. She was tall, broad shouldered, large bosomed, with the deep, husky voice of a longshoreman, and she wore stage makeup that looked as if it had been put on with a trowel and then baked. Her face was an improbable dark tan, her lips a glossy bloodred, and her spiked eyelashes, striking on TV, were truly alarming close up. Her eyes were dark, bright, and very, very shrewd and tough. She offered her cheek, and I kissed it. “Irving’s out walking Josephine,” she said. She appraised me carefully. “Christ, I thought I was going to get a top editor,” she said. “You look just like a kid.”

  “And you look just like a girl,” I said, stealing Milton Greene’s line to Marilyn Monroe.

  It had worked for Milton on Marilyn, and it worked for me on Jackie. She gave a big grin and took us into the tiny kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Dom Perignon. I was interested to see that except for a can of dog food and an empty jar of cocktail capers, the refrigerator was bare. The Mansfields were not homebodies. She handed me the bottle and said, “Pop it, kid.”

  I popped it—a European education pays dividends sooner or later—and the three of us sat down in the living room, where glasses were already waiting on the coffee table. I noticed that they were from the Beverly Hills Hotel, as were the cocktail napkins. The Mansfields, as I was to discover, expected to be comped everything. When they stayed in a hotel, they left with a supply of soap, toilet paper, and Kleenex.

  I struggled to sit upright while I poured. Jackie’s upholstery—mostly some kind of shimmery gold fabric with a nubby weave—was protected by transparent plastic slipcovers so slippery that it was hard not to slide off the furniture. We were just toasting each other when the door opened and Irving came in with Josephine on a leash. Mansfield was a promoter and hustler and prided himself on being a tough guy, though all he was, in fact, was Jackie’s spokesman—she was the tough one, not him. His ambition in life was to be a Broadway “character,” to which end he had mastered the gruff voice, the sharp clothes, the hat cocked at a rakish angle, like Walter Winchell’s, the “don’t fuck with me” stare and the shameless chutzpah of that vanishing breed. He never quite brought it off, however—in some hard-to-define way he always looked like a small-timer, though he was deeply suspicious of being taken for one. I had the impression, then and later, that most of his life consisted of hanging around with his hands in his pockets telling people, “Jackie will be down in five minutes.”

  “Did Josie do her business, honey?” Jackie asked, with genuine concern.

  “Yeh, yeh,” Irving said, with the look of a man who hadn’t noticed. He put Josephine in the bedroom, came back, and poured himself a glass of champagne. “So what do you think of Jackie?” he asked. “Isn’t she great?”

  As we were soon to discover, this was Irving’s refrain. Whatever Jackie said or did, Irving chuckled and, as if he were her impresario, said, “Isn’t she great?”

  Great or not, it soon became apparent that as far as her books were concerned, Jackie was a pro, just as Irving had promised. The pink paper was not a whim. She typed each draft of her manuscript on a different color paper—pink was for her first, rough draft. What is more, though Irving liked to insist that she never needed nor accepted editorial advice, Jackie herself was a realist—she took what seemed useful to her and understood perfectly what her special strengths were. “I write for women who read me in the goddamn subways on the way home from work,” she explained. “I know who they are because that’s who I used to be. Remember Stella Dallas? My readers are like Stella. They want to press their noses against the windows of other people’s houses and get a look at the parties they’ll never be invited to, the dresses they’ll never get to wear, the lives they’ll never live, the guys they’ll never fuck.” Jackie—a chain-smoker—exhaled out of both nostrils like a dragon. “But here’s the catch: All the people they envy in my books, the ones who are glamorous or beautiful or rich or talented, they have to come to a bad end, see, because that way the people who read me can get off the subway and go home feeling better about their own crappy lives and luckier than the people they’ve been reading about.”

  “Isn’t she great?” Irving said with a chuckle.

  In fact, I soon decided, in her own way, Jackie was great. Leavis could not have put it better in all the volumes of Scrutiny. She understood exactly what she was doing. In those days, when the TV industry was still glamorous, she had elected to write a novel about television, to this day the only successful one and the best. “The love machine” was not only the nickname for Robin Stone, the fabulously successful television executive who was the book’s hero (and who was based on Jim Aubrey), but was also Stone’s name for the television set itself. Jackie already understood that the television set was like a kind of lover, always present in the bedroom, available twenty-four hours a day, establishing a new kind of intimacy with the viewer. She didn’t need Marshall McLuhan to teach her that. It was one of the reasons she was such a good promoter on television: She was, as she herself described it, “a natural on the boob tube.”

  Dumb she wasn’t. She even had a theory about popular fiction that, so far as I am concerned, has yet to be bettered and that, if followed with a certain amount of energy, can hardly fail: a love story with a heroine every woman reader will identify with (in those days a pretty victim), a powerful man torn between his work and his love, and a cast of characters who are almost identifiable as celebrities.

  She was also a phenomenally hard worker. She absorbed our notes and, with a total lack of prima donna behavior, carved out, with our help, a plot and structure that sounded pretty damned good and with any luck might even sound OK the next morning. I was impressed and relieved.

  (Years later, at an ABA convention in Washington, D.C., I mentioned this to Bob Gottlieb, and he sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it’s true. Jackie was a pro. But you must be wary of thinking that’s a good thing for a writer to be.”)

  I asked Jackie if she thought she could meet our deadline. She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You bet your fucking ass,” she said.

  “Heh, heh,” Irving said. “What did I tell you? Isn’t she great?” Did we know that Jackie could also sing? Irving wanted to know. We shook our heads. He produced a tape and played a recording of Jackie singing “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” in a flat, harsh, totally tuneless baritone. It was, apparently, her theme song. We heard it twice, in awe, while Irving kept time with his right hand, clearly having the time of his life. Later on, people were to tell me that Irving used Jackie, but I knew better. No man ever loved a woman more than Irving loved Jackie. Only love could explain his listening to that recording for the umpteenth time with unfeigned pleasure.

  “Am I right, or am I wrong? Isn’t she great?” he asked. He gave us each a copy of the tape as a souvenir. “Let’s go eat.”

  Dolger, eyes rolling, pleaded another engagement and went home with a bundle of manuscript, his notes, and his tape of Jackie singing, but the Mansfields were not about to let me escape that easily. I was to have dinner with them—they would hear of nothing else, otherwise Jackie’s feelings would be hurt. Abby Hirsch, Jackie’s publicity assistant, whose salary had been a source of endless kvetching during the contract negotiations, since the Mansfields were determined that S&S should pay it, turned up from the bedroom, where she had presumably been baby-sitting Josephine, and booked a table for us at Danny’s Hideaway. Abby bore a remarkable resemblance to a younger and prettier version of Jackie—it was rumored that she wore the same dress size as Jackie and could therefore try on clothes for her, saving Jackie the trouble of shopping
.

  Before we left, however, Jackie was determined to change my appearance. At the time, in keeping with what was then the publishing tradition, I wore an old tweed hacking jacket from my Oxford days, with suede leather patches on the elbows. Jackie looked at me critically. “You’re a big-shot editor,” she told me, “but you dress like a bum.” Irving was wearing a brand-new dark blue cashmere blazer, cut in the Hollywood, Sy Devore style, with dramatic wide lapels and gold buttons engraved with an ankh. The ankh, an ancient Egyptian good luck symbol, was Jackie’s latest obsession. It was to play a major role in the plot of The Love Machine, and we created ankh pendants on gold chains for important lady booksellers and ankh rings for men, and we put gold-stamped ankhs on everything in sight. Some people involved with the book soon wore so many ankhs that they clanked and jingled like Gypsies at every step. We eventually came to refer to the ankh as “the ancient Egyptian symbol for schlock,” though never within Jackie’s hearing. She took the ankh seriously and made Dick Snyder spend thousands of dollars of S&S’s money at her favorite L.A. jewelers for ankh items.

  “Give him your blazer, honey,” Jackie told Irving. For once, Irving rebelled. The blazer had just arrived from his tailor that morning, he was devoted to it, it had eighteen-karat gold buttons—all to no avail. Over his protests (and mine, for it was the last thing I wanted), Irving was forced to relinquish it. As I tried it on, I noticed that the lining was embroidered with ankhs too—the Mansfields never did things by half. I wondered in whose promotion budget the cost of Irving’s blazer had been buried, the movie company’s or ours? Unfortunately, Irving and I were different shapes. He was much bigger around the waist and had long arms, like those of a chimpanzee, I thought, as I surveyed myself in Jackie’s mirror, draped in folds of blue cashmere. With some relief, I pointed out that it didn’t fit.

  Jackie was not to be contradicted, however. “It fits fine,” she said, bunching the material up behind my back. “It looks great on you, doll. Maybe you should get the sleeves shortened a bit, but it’ll do fine for tonight.” I protested that I couldn’t take it from Irving. “He wants you to have it,” Jackie said firmly. And poor Irving, tears in his eyes, recognizing defeat, said, this time sadly, without the chuckle, “Isn’t she great?”

  DANNY’S HIDEAWAY was one of those quintessentially dark New York steak boîtes that cater to celebrities. By the time we sat down to dinner, our party consisted of Jackie, Irving, Abby Hirsch, myself, Myron Cohen (the borscht belt/Las Vegas comedian), Peter Lawford, and Lawford’s date, a stunningly beautiful young woman whose eyes were thickly glazed, like homemade pottery. Lawford himself was drunk and seemed to have been captured by the Mansfields without knowing who they were. At times, he slept, noisily, his face on the table. At other times, he was rude and hostile. He alternated between quarreling with his girl and sticking his hand under her dress or his tongue in her ear, while she tried feebly to fend him off. “I could use a piece of that,” Cohen said wistfully—he too seemed to be unsure what he was doing at the table, but like most comedians he wasn’t about to refuse a free meal.

  By now it was late, at any rate for me—well past ten o’clock—and I was starving. Every time the maître d’ came over, bearing vast, gold-tasseled red velvet menus the size of doors, Jackie shooed him away and ordered another round of drinks. I had consumed the entire basket of breadsticks and rolls and was feeling queasy before Jackie finally allowed us to have menus. I didn’t even look at mine. I ordered a steak and a baked potato and prayed for its swift arrival. In the meantime, Irving Mansfield had been regaling us with the story of his shoes: He had gone to his shoemaker in Beverly Hills and ordered a pair of slip-on loafers in alligator hide, the most expensive shoes he had ever owned. How much had they cost? Cohen asked. Two hundred and fifty bucks, Irving replied. Cohen shook his head. He had a pair of shoes that cost more than that, made for him in Vegas in baby Cuban caiman hide. He took one of them off and passed it to Irving, who examined it with envy, then passed it around the table so each of us could examine it in turn. When it got to Lawford, Lawford glanced at it with contempt, took off one of his shoes and banged it down in the center of the table. “Unborn baby turtle,” he said. Five hundred dollars a pair and worth every penny. You didn’t even know you had shoes on, they were so comfortable. Myron Cohen and Irving Mansfield looked as wistfully at Lawford’s shoe as they had at his girl. Each of them carefully wrote down the name of Lawford’s shoemaker as the food was served.

  I was reminded of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, but my hunger was so great that I didn’t care. I picked up my knife and fork and prepared to eat my steak, but Jackie, noticing what I had ordered, was upset. I could get a steak any fucking where, she said. Danny’s was famous for its lobster Fra Diavolo, which she had ordered, or its calf’s liver Veneziana, which Irving was having. I could not eat at Danny’s without giving them a try. She took a big spoonful of her lobster and dumped it on top of my steak, then put some of Irving’s calf’s liver on top of that. I glanced sadly at the mess on my plate, while Irving said, cheerfully again this time, “Isn’t she great?”

  I decided to go home and raid the refrigerator. I made my good-byes, pleading work to be done, my wife’s health, a sick child, a headache. Luckily, by this time, neither Jackie nor Irving tried to stop me.

  As I was collecting my briefcase from the hatcheck girl, the maître d’ came running after me, anxiety written large on his face. I was afraid that Jackie was demanding my return. Instead, he handed me the check. “Mr. Mansfield says you’re the publisher, so you’re paying,” he said. I glanced at the bill. It was the largest restaurant check I’d ever seen. I signed it boldly, added a humongous tip, and told him to send it over to S&S. A few days later, when somebody from the accounting department called to ask if I was out of my mind, I told him to charge it to the Mansfields’ promotion budget.

  S&S, like all publishers, was mildly conservative about expense accounts. Nobody made much of a fuss on the subject, but it was understood that you didn’t splurge or spend more on a meal than Max would have spent, and he was a cautious spender, except where Ray was concerned.

  That was about to change, along with much else. We were in show business now.

  SHOW BUSINESS had swept into the S&S promotion and publicity departments with a bang. Where, formerly, a spot on the Today show and a modest cocktail party at the Schusters’ apartment had been about par for the course for launching a book, we were now orchestrating huge parties on both coasts, sending out gift ankhs in plush-lined leatherette presentation cases shaped like books (accompanied by a personal note from Jackie on special Love Machine stationery), and ordering cakes in the shape of the book, with the cover to be reproduced in icing. For the first time in publishing history, the author’s photograph seemed to be as important as the contents of the book, and hitherto unheard-of sums were spent on brand-name photographers and, inevitably, retouchers. While much of this did not concern me—I was busy transforming Jackie’s scrawl into prose and engaging in a daily “story conference” to work out the plot—I was soon thrust into the role of S&S’s ambassador-at-large to the Mansfields, since almost from the word go they had quarreled violently with Dick, whose role in the enterprise was to say no to their more extreme demands. No was not a word Jackie was accustomed to hearing, and while Irving had heard it often enough in his lifetime, he was reluctant to pass it on to Jackie. “You go back and tell Snyder that this is a deal breaker,” I heard several times a day.

  Of course, plans for the cakes had to be placed on hold until we had a dust jacket for the bakers to copy. This was no easy task. The Mansfields had strong ideas about what they wanted. Poor Irving came to jacket meetings with color swatches Jackie had given him, from which it was apparent that pink was her favorite color. Most authors, even major ones, took very little interest in their book jackets in those innocent days. In the case of very important authors, the publisher might show him or her the sketch for the jacket, but there was seldom any quest
ion of the author’s approval. The Mansfields had it written into their contract and took it seriously; packaging, a concept that had not yet come into widespread use among book publishers, mattered to them, a lot. They sent every jacket suggestion to Hollywood, where, as they put it, there were people who really knew packaging, pros at the game instead of amateurs like us. Eventually, however, after much argument, angst, and innumerable flare-ups of temper by our art director, a theme was decided upon. The cover of the novel would resemble a movie poster (surprise, surprise!) featuring a man’s hand touching a woman’s, each of them wearing—what else?—gold ankh rings. Irving instructed us to get the best hand models in New York for the shot, which Frank Metz, our art director, did. When Jackie saw the proof, though, she didn’t like it—she thought the hands were ugly. We explained that we had hired the best hand models in New York, just as Irving had instructed us. Jackie didn’t miss a beat. “Get me the two second-best hand models in New York,” she snapped.