Another Life

by Michael Korda

  “Yes, but what are we talking about in numbers? Ballpark figure?”

  A long, resentful sigh. “One large,” he said. “With the lettering and the whatchamacallit maybe a little more. Say twelve hundred.”

  I tried to think of a way that I could explain to my wife why I had spent $1,200 on a gold Cartier watch I didn’t need, with my name painted on the dial and an ankh. I couldn’t do it. “Keep the watch,” I said.

  There was a long silence at the other end. “Make it nine hundred, I’ll throw in the dial,” Sol said. “You pay cash, and we forget about the sales tax.”

  “No.” Even $900 was out of the question, I explained. It was a point of honor. The watch was supposed to be a gift.

  “What am I going to do with the watch?” Sol asked, panic in his voice now. Sell it to someone else, I suggested. “Someone else? My boy already lettered your first name on the goddamn dial! Who I am going to sell a Cartier watch to whose first name is Michael?”

  “Somebody whose family name has five letters,” I said and hung up.

  I was not out of the woods yet, however. The next day, Irving called me from Los Angeles. Jackie was in the bathroom crying her heart out, he told me accusingly, all because I had rejected her gift. I pointed out that it wasn’t a gift. I was going to have to pay for it, after all.

  “She thought you were different from the others,” he said. “She thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends,” I said. “I just don’t want the watch. Tell her company policy prevents me from accepting it.”

  Irving thought about this. He was not an unreasonable man when he was treated like an equal partner. “I’ll explain it to Jackie,” he said, in his best, confidential, man-to-man voice. An hour later, he called back and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Heh, heh, you’re in the clear.”

  And I guess I was. Jackie and I stayed on a friendly basis, even though she left S&S rancorously before her next book, Once Is Not Enough, causing Dick to send her a single rose on the publication day with a note that read, “For us, once was enough.” From time to time I met Irving Mansfield on the street, outside “21,” or on Central Park South, waiting for Josephine to do her business. In a strange way, I was grateful to them: They had taught me, after all, that books could be merchandised, just like anything else, something that a lot of publishers have still to learn.

  I must have been on Jackie’s list of friends, too, for I continued to receive PR releases and even birthday cards. Years later, one night at home, the telephone rang at some ungodly hour. My wife picked up, listened for a moment, and, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, whispered: “There’s a drunken woman on the phone asking for you.”

  I took the receiver groggily and at once recognized Jackie’s voice, not drunk but hoarse and inarticulate with grief. “I just wanted you to know,” she said haltingly, “Josephine is dead.”

  And in some strange way I felt sad—though I had never known Josephine in her prime. To tell the truth, Josephine had never much liked me. I had the impression, in fact, that she didn’t much like men in general, not even Irving, though it was possible that she merely resented being relegated to the background. In the old days, Josephine had been the star, not Jackie, and went everywhere with her owners: restaurants, nightclubs, talk shows. Then, as Jackie herself became the star, Josephine was eclipsed, left behind, loved perhaps but no longer in the limelight, which probably explained why she sulked and occasionally snarled at Irving. Still, with her death, it was as if a chapter of what Jackie liked to call “the book of life” had come to an end, though I couldn’t have guessed Jackie’s own life would end so soon, in 1974.

  In her own way, she changed the course of popular fiction, a prophet without honor to whom John Grisham, Robert James Waller, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Danielle Steel all owe a debt. Jackie, after all, reinvented the woman’s novel, the mainstay of popular fiction, opened it up to a franker sexuality, to a tougher kind of story, to romance with tears and oral sex, to heroes with good looks and icy cruelty. She introduced readers of fiction to a rawer kind of sensation than had hitherto been acceptable to members of the Literary Guild and fiction buyers at the Doubleday bookstores, while, at the same time, introducing into the genre the first big dose of celebrity worship that was to blossom into the full-scale celebrity cults of the eighties and the nineties.

  Jackie was ahead of that curve. More important, she taught everybody in book publishing a lesson: not just that books are merchandise and that nobody who wants to be a good publisher should ever forget that, but also that what most people want to read more than anything else is, quite simply, a good story. The rags to riches, poor little miss nobody in love with her all-powerful boss, the understudy who gets her chance to strut the stage in the star’s role and becomes a star—these are not just clichés, as reviewers would have us believe, but part of the very reason why people buy novels in the first place: to get out of their own lives and troubles by reading about other people’s.

  Maybe Jackie picked that up from her mother, a great reader, or maybe she picked it up from being around her father, in what passed for the Philadelphia Jewish version of la vie de bohème, or maybe it was just all those hours as a kid reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but wherever it came from, she knew it better than anyone before or since.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Love Machine sold more copies than any work of fiction S&S had ever published and even garnered some good reviews, including perhaps the most selling review ever to appear in the staid, stuffy, and august New York Times Book Review, in which Nora Ephron called it “a long, delicious gossip column” and summed it all up by writing that “it shined like a rhinestone in a trash can.” Perhaps for the first time in publishing history, a book’s editor was quoted in a Times review (up until then, editors, like valets and tailors, remained silent). “You have to push this book beyond regular book buyers,” I said (correctly), “to people who haven’t been in a bookstore since Valley of the Dolls was published.” Ephron noted that we had paid $250,000 for the book (a fortune in those days) and that Twentieth Century–Fox had offered a million dollars for the movie rights (which the Mansfields turned down)—the first time that the grubby subject of money had been raised there—and also brought up the hitherto taboo subjects of masochism, nymphomania, and incest. She also quoted me as saying, in regard to the competition between Philip Roth and Jackie Susann for first place on the best-seller list, “It’s wild! You have these two books out at the same time, and their merits aside, one of them is about masturbation and the other is about successful heterosexual love. If there’s any justice in the world, The Love Machine ought to knock Portnoy off the top simply because it’s a step in the right direction.” (This comment was to cause me untold grief when the wheel of life turned and cast me, years later, as Roth’s editor.) Newsweek compared Jackie to “an Egyptian love goddess,” called the book “an engaging sex-power fantasy,” and compared her (unfavorably) to Thomas Wolfe.

  There were two immediate consequences. The first was that Dick and I were proven right. We had gambled big and won, and there could henceforth be no doubt that I belonged in the editor in chief’s office or that Dick’s ascent to the top would be seriously delayed, least of all by Peter Schwed. The second was that having been quoted again and again in the press on the subject of Jacqueline Susann, I glimpsed, for the first time, the possibility that an editor need not necessarily be mute and invisible—that he or she might become as much of a celebrity as the best-selling authors were. Reporters, reviewers, professional deep thinkers called, one replied to their questions, and lo and behold, the next day there were one’s words, appearing in print all across America and, for that matter, around the world. That this might turn out to be a two-edged sword had not yet occurred to me, but in the meantime Jackie Susann and Irving Mansfield had dragged me all too willingly into the limelight, and I was reluctant to fall back into the shadows.

  In a curious way, The Love Machin
e sharply changed the stakes for both Dick and me. In the first place, we had proven ourselves as a team—a fact of more importance to us than to the rest of the world—and in the second place, perhaps more important, Dick had demonstrated his skill as a publisher in conditions of extreme stress. Successfully articulating the publication of a big book is the test of good publishing, involving the ability to keep in one’s head not only the numbers and their daily fluctuation but the harmonious synchronizing of publicity, manufacturing, advertising, and sales—departments often run as independent fiefdoms. Dick established immediate control over the whole process and won universal respect (if not affection) by his absolute recall of even the smallest bit of information and by the fact that he was usually a step ahead of everybody else. Whatever the subject was, he knew the right questions to ask and also knew when he wasn’t being given a straight answer. When a book is selling fast and in big numbers, the publisher has no option but to go back to press blindly for more printings of the book for fear of running out of stock, with the result that when sales start to slow down or stop, there is still a torrent of books coming in from the printer. Many best-sellers end up losing money for the publisher because of overprinting, while, of course, uncounted best-sellers that might have been fail to happen because the publisher prints too cautiously or fails to respond quickly enough to demand. (The adoption of the computer was supposed to cure this problem but has made no difference at all—returns of unsold hardcover books still run at a crippling 35 to 40 percent—which is proof that it is really a question of Fingerspitzengefühl rather than lack of information.)

  Dick had the guts to go for a major reprint when he thought it was the right moment and—far harder—to risk going out of stock rather than reprinting when he felt that the sales curve was descending. The latter strategy drove the Mansfields wild with rage, and they called at every hour of the day and night, threatening, cursing, begging, and demanding for more printings. The book was number one on the Times list, they saw it running out of the stores, and the possibility that we might run out of books petrified them. But Dick, a cooler player by far, could sense that sales had peaked and also understood that there were plenty of books in the pipeline, even if they were invisible to the Mansfields or to S&S’s own sales department. There were books at the jobbers, books in trucks and in transit all over the United States, and cartons of books in the storerooms of bookstores that could be moved to stores where the demand was stronger. Dick was determined not to give back the profit S&S had made by ending up with a warehouse full of returns or, worse still, of overprinted books.

  When the Mansfields complained bitterly to Shimkin, Dick still refused to give in, with the dual result that we had very nearly a “clean sale” of The Love Machine and that the Mansfields never forgave him. “If I could say no to Jackie and Irving, I could say no to anyone,” he said later, summing up a crucial learning experience, but what in fact mattered even more was that Dick gained absolute faith in his own ability and the sense that he could control the process, as well as the loyalty of everybody at S&S who had been involved. He always argued that it was better to be lucky than smart, but for the moment he was lucky and smart—a hard combination to beat.

  We had taken S&S from the shame and ignominy of defeat to a dazzling position of success. We were suddenly a hot house, with the number-one best-selling novel and, simultaneously, the number-one best-selling nonfiction book, The Last Battle, Cornelius Ryan’s account of the fall of Berlin in 1945. Many of the agents who only a few months previously had been doubtful about sending us manuscripts at all were now on the telephone offering us their major clients.

  It was a curious time. In keeping with his familiar techniques of personnel management, Shimkin had not as yet rewarded us in any significant way for bringing S&S back from the brink. Apparently having failed to learn from Bob’s departure, he seemed to feel that the excitement of working long days and nights was all the reward we needed and would serve as an incentive to work harder still. In a sense, of course, he was right. Dick often said (though not to Shimkin) that he would have paid for the privilege of working at S&S in those days, and it was not much of an exaggeration. To be in one’s mid-thirties and suddenly successful is heady stuff—there is probably no other period in life when success means as much or when it is so much fun, before one’s lifestyle makes success mandatory, before one gets old enough to feel the hot breath of younger competitors, before the price of all those long hours and easy temptations has to be paid in failed marriages and broken promises. All that was still ahead, and in the meantime, for one glorious moment, we had grabbed the brass ring. Everything we did seemed to turn to gold, and if we did not have the big salaries or stock options or bonuses that were later to assume such importance (life expands inevitably to absorb income, however high), we were working hard, the office was full of pretty girls (at a time in which it was not yet a provocation to use the phrase), and every moment of the day seemed exciting and full of promise.

  With what little could be pried from Shimkin in the form of raises, the Snyders moved to a large apartment on Central Park West, while Casey and I moved to an apartment near Sutton Place. Between the hours and the temptations of the workplace, the Snyders’ marriage was beginning to unravel, and, though it was not immediately as apparent, so was mine. At this long distance it is hard to assign blame—and hardly necessary—but like so many of our contemporaries we were paying for a whole slew of mistakes: of marrying too young, of giving more thought to work than to marriage, of sowing wild oats once one was married rather than before, of being perhaps the last generation to look at marriage in the old, conventional way. It had not dawned on any of us as yet that this was an arrangement that guaranteed that the woman felt stifled, while the man felt he was being taken advantage of, and that offered the maximum opportunity to both for resentment and infidelity.

  IN THE meantime, there was no sitting on our laurels, such as they were. The main disadvantage of success is that it has to be repeated. I had the good fortune to have inherited from Bob the English writer R. F. Delderfield, whose enormous multigenerational family sagas, set for the most part in the English countryside, suddenly acquired great popularity in the United States. This started a vogue that lasted for more than a decade for huge novels in the Trollopian mode, usually wearing on their dust jackets wraparound paintings in full color of the English countryside, with a pair of riders cantering along a country lane on the front. God only knows why Bob had not taken Delderfield with him to Knopf—perhaps, for once, he had merely guessed wrong and underrated the potential of this hitherto obscure writer, who seemed able to dash off a thousand-page novel almost overnight and whose productivity was alarming. In addition to other works of his, we published The Green Gauntlet with enormous success—a perfect example of being lucky rather than smart, since nobody had predicted that the book would sell—and went on to do God Is an Englishman, which established Delderfield as such a major best-selling novelist that it was thought necessary for me to go to England to meet him, lest he decide to follow Bob to Knopf now that he had vaulted onto the best-seller lists. R. F. Delderfield (Ronnie, as he was known to those close to him) lived outside Sidmouth, a small English seaside resort between Torquay and Lyme Regis, and indicated that he would be delighted to see me.

  I flew to London, rented a car, drove down to Sidmouth and checked into the Hotel Victoria Regina, a vast red-brown nineteenth-century brick structure that combined the potted-palm grandeur of the late Victorian age—it actually had an all-girl string orchestra playing in the palm court at lunchtime—with the pervasive odor of furniture polish, mildew, and Brussels sprouts peculiar to English provincial hotel keeping. The empty promenade and the shingled beach on this gray afternoon in late October were windswept and wet with rain, even the seagulls huddled miserably for cover beneath the empty band shell on the pier. Through rain-lashed plate-glass windows I could see the English Channel busily demonstrating why Napoleon and Hitler had hesitated to
cross it—slate-gray swells several feet high, crowned with plumes of wind-driven white sea spray, came pounding in one after another to crash on the rocks and shingles of the shoreline. This was familiar country to me. Not far from here was the school to which I was evacuated at the beginning of the war, when it had been assumed that London would be reduced to rubble overnight by the Luftwaffe. As it turned out, my school was one of the first places in England the Germans bombed, and I can still remember the excitement of watching the bombs fall one by one onto the beach, sending up plumes of sand, until the last one blew up the school’s brick gardener’s shed with a satisfying bang. During my national service, I had taken the same road to go back and forth to London on weekends from my training camp at Bodmin, riding the motorcycle my Aunt Alexa had bought me over my father’s strong objections.

  Having been invited for tea, I arrived at the Delderfields’ cottage just before four in the afternoon and was greeted by Mrs. Delderfield, who led me into the sitting room, where we sat on either side of the much-needed fire. The cottage was just what I had imagined the home of the author of The Green Gauntlet would be like: low, timbered ceilings, mullioned windows, dim, old, chintz-covered, cozy furniture, dogs and cats everywhere, a grandfather clock ticking away, the sound of a kettle boiling in the kitchen. May Delderfield was a bulky woman wearing a purple cardigan that she appeared to have knitted herself, who spoke with a gentle North Country accent, entirely unaffected by her husband’s success. Ronnie, it appeared, was still working in his study but would be out promptly at four. The grandfather clock whirred and groaned, chimed four times, and on the fourth ring Delderfield appeared, rubbing his hands jovially, to greet me. He was a big man, close to six feet tall, and broad with it, with the build and the hands of a manual laborer. He had a bluff, honest countryman’s face, red cheeked and contented, and an engaging shyness, as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune. Clad in a heavy sweater and corduroys, he sat down in an armchair and lit his pipe, while May bustled after tea. Delderfield apologized for keeping me waiting, but he always worked until four on the dot, he said. He believed it was important to treat writing like any other job and put in a good day’s work. He was particularly happy to see me here today, he went on, because it was something of a red-letter day. In what way? I asked. Delderfield beamed. At exactly three o’clock this afternoon, he said, he had finished his new novel. I congratulated him as May poured tea and passed around plates of biscuits and cake. I nerved myself to ask, If Delderfield had finished a new novel at three, what had he been doing from three to four? Ah, Delderfield said, just what he always did. As soon as he ripped the last page of the novel out of his typewriter, he put a fresh piece of paper in, typed page one, chapter one, and started a new novel. Time and tide, he said, in his soft countryman’s voice, waited on no man.