“Heh, heh,” Irving chuckled. “Isn’t she great?”
“I WANT the name of the girl who put me on hold,” Jackie screeched at me over the phone one day. “I want her fired! Nobody puts Jacqueline Susann on hold!”
There were tears at S&S whenever Jackie didn’t get what she wanted or was made to wait even for a moment. This was a new experience for most of the employees. Book publishing had always prided itself rather self-consciously on being a profession in which good manners prevailed. People in book publishing did not, as a rule, raise their voices or shout insults at each other. Above all, they didn’t shout at people who couldn’t shout back. It simply wasn’t done, not on either side of the Atlantic.
Most of the young women who worked in book publishing (“editorial assistants,” never secretaries) were college educated (often from one of the Seven Sisters) and drawn to publishing by either a genuine love of books or the desire to become an editor or a writer. Shamelessly exploited, they were paid miserable salaries and allowed in compensation to read all the unsolicited manuscripts—the famous slush pile. Many of them were the daughters of publishing executives or well-known authors, unaccustomed to hearing a voice raised at them in anger.
The Mansfields were deaf to these social niceties. So far as Jackie was concerned, the assistants were the help, and therefore she took her anger out on them, if only because they had the least chance of shielding themselves. It was not just being put on hold that made her angry: She didn’t like being told that someone was unavailable or in a meeting or out to lunch, and God help the assistant who didn’t know the answer to any question she might ask, even if it wasn’t her job to know or even her department. When angered, Jackie’s voice rose to the sound of a buzz saw at full throttle—worse yet, she often complained about the assistants to their bosses or even to the top management. She was always asking for people to be fired, and we found the simplest way of handling the problem was to tell her they had been and move them out of sight.
Nor did she always confine her anger to the underlings. According to Barbara Seaman, Jackie once called poor Bernie Geis at three in the morning to complain there weren’t enough books in the stores. When he pointed out the time to her, she replied: “You son of a bitch, I can’t sleep, so why should you?”
No doubt the Mansfields cannot be blamed for the erosion of manners in the book-publishing business, but they certainly heralded a new era in which the old-world charm of publishing, admittedly always a little self-conscious and bogus, gave way to the kind of behavior that had always characterized the movie business. Jackie Susann’s success unintentionally coincided with the decline and fall of the ancien régime and the rise of modern publishing, with its gargantuan mergers, its pretensions to big-business status, its impersonality, and its abrasiveness.
Jackie, to paraphrase Talleyrand’s comment on the Bourbons loosely, neither forgot nor forgave anything. During the planning of the parties accompanying the publication of The Love Machine, Jackie had puzzled us all by warning Dan Green, the S&S publicity director, that no cripples were to be invited. I probed for an explanation. It wasn’t that Jackie had anything against the people now called “the handicapped”—she simply felt that the sight of them depressed people and was therefore counterproductive to good promotion. In vain did Green protest, with a smile, that he wasn’t about to turn one of her parties into a scene from the Cour de Miracles in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, as described by Victor Hugo in his novel of the same name. Jackie was not amused, and she never forgave anybody for putting her down with a reference she didn’t understand. “I don’t care what they do in Paris,” she snapped, staring at him suspiciously with narrowed eyes. Jackie had a sense of humor but not about herself, and she thought that Green was having fun at her expense. “No cripples,” she said firmly. “You heard me.”
We put this down to unamiable eccentricity on her part, but as usual she meant business. Toward the end of the Leonard and Sylvia Lyons party, the first of many (held in their apartment but for which S&S footed the bill), a distinguished older publishing figure arrived late, on crutches, having broken a leg. Jackie flung herself at Dan Green in fury, her talons bared (she favored enormously long and pointed bright red false nails, like those of the Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates, so that both Green and I feared for his eyes), and, pointing at the puzzled guest, cried: “Get him out of here!” She grabbed Green’s tie as if to strangle him. “I told you, you son of a bitch! No cripples at my party!”
Many years later, she and I briefly chatted about old times. I mentioned Dan Green’s name and her eyes blazed. “He’s the one who tried to ruin Sylvia and Leonard’s party for The Love Machine,” she said fiercely. “He invited a cripple just to spoil the mood.”
“Heh, heh,” Irving chuckled from the background. “Isn’t Jackie great? She never forgets a thing.”
TO AN outsider, the curious thing about Jackie was that she and Irving seemed to have no private life. The Mansfields were totally wrapped up in keeping Jackie famous. They were always on the telephone, Jackie selling her book, Irving making deals.
The truth was that Jackie’s big secret was her private life, and her success was in part a way of concealing it and in part a way of escaping from the pain of it. Far from being invulnerable and tough, as she liked to portray herself, she was a woman of great passion with a deep capacity for friendship, both supportive of her friends (most of whom led lives pretty much like the women in Jackie’s novels) and dependent on their support. The secret was that in 1962, the year Jackie wrote Every Night Josephine!, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. A mastectomy had failed to halt the spread of the cancer, and Jackie led the rest of her life in secret pain and on painkillers, struggling with a disease she refused to share with the outside world. Perhaps more painful still, the Mansfields’ son, Guy, was autistic, a fact that they also managed to conceal from the world at large.
That perhaps explains the feeling that their lives together appeared to be a kind of facade, put together artfully for the purpose of being photographed. To be with them was to have the feeling that these two people existed only for the outside world, but it was an illusion. Jackie and Irving were living out a tragedy as painful as any in her books and putting on a show to cover it.
“Jackie is a trouper,” Irving once told me, when she went on a talk show suffering from laryngitis, but it was far more true than he or Jackie ever revealed. She was a woman of her time, who not only believed that the show must go on but also felt that the public wanted celebrities to show happy faces, whatever might be going on in their private lives. Today, of course, the public expects to hear about all the sordid details of people’s private lives, but in Jackie’s day that wasn’t so, and she lived in fear that her public would find out she wasn’t just rich, happy, and successful. “I hear he’s got cancer,” I once heard Irving say about someone in show business, then, totally without irony: “When they hear about that in Hollywood, he’s dead.”
Jackie feared the same. The truth simply wasn’t an option.
THE MANSFIELDS were, as far as I know, the first people to plan a whole new wardrobe as part of the campaign (plum-colored sequins were a memorable feature of Jackie’s formal wear) and try to get the publisher to pay for it all, right down to the shoes. Their attention to detail was incredible. They lived and breathed “launch,” as they called it.
The launch—another concept new to publishing—of The Love Machine was accompanied by incredible ballyhoo. The Mansfields might have their comic side, but when they moved into high gear it was impressive to behold. It was Jackie, after all, who virtually invented the idea of forging deep, personal connections between an author and the people who actually sold books. Hitherto, bookstore managers, let alone bookstore clerks, had been ignored, by both publishers and authors. An author visiting a store might shake their hands, while his publisher’s sales rep whispered their names in his or her ear (“That’s Faith, that’s Angela, the one
with the thick glasses and the pens in his shirt pocket is Ted”), but that was about it. Jackie had been around stars long enough to know that wasn’t enough. If these people were going to sell her book, she loved them, and she would make them love her. She not only remembered their names without coaching, she had a huge Rolodex, lovingly kept up-to-date by Abby Hirsch, with their birthdays and the names of their mother or husband or cat. On their birthdays and at Christmas they received loving, personal notes, handwritten by Jackie, and well before publication they got signed books, gift-wrapped and boxed, each with a personal message, not to speak of all sorts of ankh jewelry, ranging from pendants and rings to tie clasps and cuff links.
What she was doing, of course, was making the booksellers part of her team, to be used if necessary against her publisher, for she was not above mobilizing the booksellers to lobby for a bigger printing, a lower retail price, more ads, or further printings. She brought grassroots activism to the formerly staid business of selling a book, in some ways a more important contribution than the dazzle and the hype she also introduced.
Irving Mansfield was a master at the arcane art of “column planting,” almost unknown in book publishing and now a vanished art. In those days there were still plenty of important columnists, not just Liz Smith, and even those outside New York counted for something, like Herb Caen in San Francisco or Irv Kupcinet in Chicago. The Mansfields were always busy planting items. Anything one said to them was fair game, however innocently it had been shared, since the rules of column planting were simple: In return for you supplying gossip about other people, the columnist would run your own plug. The Mansfields plugged The Love Machine relentlessly, and it paid off. The book soared onto The New York Times’s best-seller list and stayed there for months.
Perhaps the high point of the whole campaign was reached at the party given for the booksellers at the ABA convention in Washington, D.C. This had been carefully designed by the Mansfields to capitalize on the affection the booksellers felt—or were purported to feel—for Jackie. Dinner was to be served at intimate little candlelit tables for ten in the big ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel, and each table was to have one empty chair, rather like that reserved for Elijah at a seder, so that Jackie could move from table to table throughout the meal. The lighting was kept low, the orchestra played romantic music, and the booksellers filed past Jackie and Irving in the receiving line, where Jackie displayed her phenomenal memory, greeting each of them by name, not to speak of remembering the names of their dog or cat. “Heh, heh,” Irving whispered to me. “Isn’t she great? She could run for president!”
The only fly in the ointment was that each bookseller, as they left the receiving line, was served a “Love Machine” cocktail, a potent, sweet concoction involving, among other things, curaçao, Pernod, vodka, crushed ice, and a lot of fresh fruit, served in big tumblers. Snyder took one look at it and growled to a waiter, “Bring me a scotch,” a wise decision, which I followed. The Love Machine was the kind of drink that is served in Florida resorts in a coconut shell or a hollowed-out pineapple, and it was predictably lethal. Very shortly, we had several hundred booksellers in various stages of inebriation, and the noise level was out of control. Dan Green, aghast, slipped up beside me and whispered, “What are we going to do?”
“Serve dinner?” I suggested.
Green nodded. We had the lights dimmed and brightened to signal that it was dinnertime. Nobody paid any attention except Jackie, who was furious.
We finally persuaded the waiters to start serving, and gradually, with many falls, bumps, and the crash of tipped-over chairs, the guests started to sit down.
“Look on the bright side,” I told Green. “At least there are no cripples.”
Nevertheless, it was touch and go. Jackie had envisioned a perfect party—a kind of Kennedy White House state dinner, with her as Jackie Kennedy and her book as the center of attention. There were copies of the book on each table, with pens, so that she could sign them. Each table also had a huge, gold ankh, designed so that a bookseller could stick his or her head through the loop and be photographed with Jackie standing next to him or her holding up the book. A drunken brawl was not what she had in mind.
The menu had been chosen, perhaps mistakenly in retrospect, with flamboyance in mind, and included a lot of flambé dishes, which Jackie, who wasn’t interested in food, liked because of their drama. Great bursts of flame lit up the room, with the occasional smell of singed hair, illuminating, as in hell, Jackie, as she made her way from table to table. Booksellers were making paper airplanes of the promotional material and sending them flying through the room. Amoretti di Sarono, the small, round Italian biscuits wrapped in tissue-thin paper that had attained, at the time, a certain chic, had been placed on each table, and people were setting fire to the wrappers to watch them float slowly in flames to the ceiling. Jackie could be seen smiling fiercely, while attempting to shield her wig from flames in only partially disguised terror. At any moment, I expected the fire marshals to arrive. Green, wisely, I thought, was keeping well out of her line of sight. Setting fire to Jackie’s wig would be a lot worse than inviting a cripple.
At last, the meal dragged to an end. There was a rousing fanfare. The lighting dropped from dim to dark. A hired singer sang The Love Machine theme, while four waiters descended a flight of stairs bearing a spotlit cake in the shape of a giant copy of the book. The whole room stood—unsteadily—to applaud as the cake moved slowly toward Jackie, but before it arrived, disaster occurred. One of the publicists slipped and fell into the cake.
One look at Jackie’s face was enough to tell me what the right thing to do was. I went back to my hotel and told the operator not to put any calls through. The next morning, I got up at dawn and took the train back to New York City.
I never regretted it.
STILL, I remained friendly with Jackie, who fell out with everyone else at S&S until she had nobody else but me to talk to. Some time after she had finished touring for the book, she invited me to dinner at Danny’s Hideaway again, just to say good-bye, for the Mansfields were leaving for Los Angeles the next morning to work on the screenplay for The Love Machine.
Jackie was in a benevolent mood; even she could not deny that the book had worked, though it was already apparent to me that nobody else at S&S was up to doing another book with Jackie, however many copies it was going to sell. About halfway through the dinner, she glanced at my wristwatch and shook her head. “You know,” she said, “for a kid who’s going places in this business, that’s a pretty crappy-looking watch.”
I shrugged. It was an old Rolex, which I had worn through the Royal Air Force and the Hungarian Revolution. It had belonged to one of my father’s assistants in the art department at London Films, Philip Sandeman (of the sherry family), who had been instrumental in getting me into the Royal Air Force in the first place and had left it to me after being killed in a flying accident. I was mildly attached to it and said so.
Jackie dismissed all that. I should have a look at Irving’s new watch.
Somewhat nervously—I think he was afraid that Jackie was going to give away his watch as she had his blazer—he took it off and passed it to me. It was a Cartier tank watch, with his name spelled out instead of numbers—“I-R-V-M-A-N-S-F-I-E-L-D”—and a small gold ankh beneath the Cartier signature. The deployant buckle had an ankh engraved on it. I admired it and, to Irving’s great relief, handed it back.
“You know,” Jackie said thoughtfully, “your name would fit. It has twelve letters.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but she was right, as usual.
“You ought to have a decent watch,” she said. “Like Irving’s.”
I demurred. I liked Jackie, but I had no desire to be in her debt for a gold watch. Soon, however, we were in a shouting match, with Irving accusing me of turning down Jackie’s gift out of ingratitude and Jackie accusing me of having insulted her. The more I thought about it, the more stupid and puritanical my resistance seemed. God kn
ows I had earned a Cartier watch, with or without my name on it. Why should I not accept one when it had been offered to me? I caved in as gracefully as I could, and we embraced and parted company, the Mansfields for their cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, me for home.
The next day, as I was sitting at my desk, my assistant buzzed me on the intercom to say that there was a man on the telephone who had to speak to me about a watch.
Expecting that it was Cartier on the telephone, asking for my address, I took the call. A rich, deep, vibrant voice, gravelly, hoarse, with a distinct Brooklyn accent, told me it wasn’t anybody from Cartier. “You Mike Korda?” he asked. “Irving and Jackie’s friend?”
I acknowledged both facts and asked who he was.
“This is Sol,” he said. “I’m down on Forty-seventh Street. It’s about your watch.”
“My watch? I don’t get it. Isn’t it coming from Cartier when it’s ready?” In those days Cartier still delivered jewelry by hand on request, with a solemn messenger wearing a gray chauffeur’s uniform, with breeches and leggings, and bearing the pale blue Cartier box. I had expected my watch, eventually, to arrive like that.
Sol snorted with impatience. “Hey,” he said, “it has to be hand lettered. I got to put on the whatchamacallit? The fucking ankh.”
“You do this for Cartier?”
“Cartier, Shmartier. You’re getting a real Cartier watch, with the dial hand lettered—are you ready for this?—at wholesale! How do you like them apples, bubbi?”
There was a silence while I worked this out in my head. However I juggled them apples, what I was looking at was that I was apparently buying the watch, not the Mansfields. How much was this going to cost me? I asked.
I could tell from Sol’s rasping voice that he was offended. “Cost? What are you talking about, cost? They asked me to give you the best deal I could. You tell me where you can beat wholesale on a Cartier watch?”
Another Life Page 33
