With the piece in hand, Lynn Nesbit managed to persuade Nan Talese, then an editor at Random House, that she should commission me to do a book on the subject. With considerable misgivings, but won over by Lynn’s enthusiasm and Nan’s quiet confidence in her own judgment, I agreed. I did not ask anybody at S&S what they thought about my signing a book contract with Random House—the whole idea seemed to me so unreal that I didn’t take it seriously. Editors sometimes wrote books, I knew—Hiram Haydn, then at Atheneum, had written a novel, and it was not unknown for an editor to write a book about a subject that interested him or her, stamp collecting, or photography, for instance. Mostly, however, when editors wanted to become writers, they resigned, as Justin Kaplan had done when he decided to write a biography of Mark Twain. The general feeling was that an editor should be one thing or another and not “play both sides of the street,” as it were, but I couldn’t see what harm it would do, and in any case, despite Nan’s optimism, I took it for granted that the book, like most books, wouldn’t go anywhere.
Of course, that was underrating both the subject and my own nascent ability to attract media attention, which had so far been hidden under a bushel from everyone, myself included. No sooner was Male Chauvinism published than I was swept into a whole new world, about which my only knowledge was vicarious, gleaned from people such as Jackie Susann and Connie Ryan—instead of organizing a book tour, I was doing one. The subject of male chauvinism was hot enough to get me on Today, Merv Griffin’s show, Irv Kupcinet’s show in Chicago, and even The Tonight Show (then starring Johnny Carson), not to speak of radio talk shows that I hadn’t even heard of. To my surprise, I did not suffer from stage fright—I was not my mother’s son for nothing, it appeared. Fame, it turned out, was transitory—twenty-four hours after doing Tonight, total strangers in the street recognized me on sight; forty-eight hours after doing it nobody gave a damn or could remember my name—but it was heady while it lasted.
I had stumbled across the idea of writing about power, thus fulfilling Carlos Castaneda’s prediction, because S&S was as fertile a ground for observation of the uses (and misuses) of power as it was for watching male chauvinism at work. The phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” could well have described S&S at this period, and it was no great leap to depict this in a book for the general reader. The book I had in mind was similar to one by the English humorist C. Northcote Parkinson, whose most famous book, Parkinson’s Law, was a tongue-in-cheek business manual, full of clever observations but not intended to be taken with an entirely straight face.
Nan Talese, who loved this idea, had no sooner bought it for Random House than, in a crosstown shuffle that was to become familiar, she moved to S&S and handed me over to Jim Silberman (who would later follow her to S&S himself).
Silberman liked the idea of a book about power, too, but his intention was for it to be taken seriously, as a guide to getting ahead, in the American tradition of self-help books. Had he told me this outright, I would probably have refused to do it or claimed that I didn’t know how. Very fortunately, he did not approach the problem frontally but merely led me by indirection (and by very clever editing and packaging) away from the fairly broad humor of Parkinson toward something that might be taken seriously by an ambitious junior executive. I thus found myself launched on the road again, this time in the role of an expert on power. Silberman had calculated shrewdly that the time was right for the subject. The self-help career-advice book, a staple of American publishing since the days of Benjamin Franklin, had reached a kind of temporary peak with big best-sellers such as Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No and Winning Through Intimidation. The old tried-and-true message that had made Dale Carnegie famous (and Leon Shimkin rich) with How to Win Friends and Influence People had given way to more threatening and aggressive formulas.
Power! had seemed pretty funny to me when I wrote it, but it didn’t seem to me to have the makings of a best-seller. That, however, was exactly what it became. Reviewed everywhere (often with outrage), Power! leaped onto the New York Times best-seller list just as Silberman had predicted. It was as if a blast-furnace door had suddenly opened, blinding me with the brightness within. Male Chauvinism had been a heady experience, but Power! was on an altogether different scale, a brief taste of what media celebrity is like, a ride on the uphill curve of a roller coaster. Time and Newsweek consecrated long articles to the book, media pundits wrote serious think pieces about what the book’s success portended for our society, I was lampooned and parodied by countless humorists, bitterly attacked by Richard Reeves in The New York Times Book Review—my first experience of being savaged as a person, as opposed to merely having my work savaged—and caricatured by cartoonists all over the country, even in The New Yorker (fame indeed!). I appeared on every possible talk show—in one hilarious encounter, Johnny Carson tried to move his desk into the “power position” as we tried to psyche each other out. I had—rather cavalierly—chosen blue as the “power color,” mostly because I have always been partial to blue when it comes to suits, shirts, and ties. If there was going to be a power color, I decided, why not blue? Soon after the book was published, people started having their offices painted blue and ordering blue carpets and upholstery, even at S&S and Random House, where one might have supposed people would know better than to take my word for it.
Men bought blue power ties, wore power shoes (four eyelets, plain toes, highly polished), and rearranged their office furniture overnight to produce the power look. Businesswomen went for their kind of power clothes, hired male secretaries (at that time the ultimate power symbol for a woman), and bought the right kind of power briefcase. As for Power! itself, it zoomed up the best-seller list to number one.
• • •
NOT EVERYONE shared my pleasure at this unexpected success. A good many of my authors sounded very frosty indeed when they called me, and who can blame them? Who wants an editor whose book is number one when one’s own book hasn’t even hit the list? Some of my colleagues were equally distressed, even more so when I was attending a literary cocktail party and Mildred Marmur, formerly of S&S, then director of rights for Random House, arrived with the news that the mass-market paperback rights for Power! had been sold for $485,000, a sum that would probably have to be multiplied by ten to reach its equivalent today. “Well,” Snyder said, giving me a bear hug as I looked at a lot of glum faces, “there’s nothing like success for teaching you who your friends are.” The same is true of failure too, as we were both to discover.
My feet hardly touched the ground—literally, for Random House kept me out on the road selling the book as long as they could, from city to city, until, finally, I reached some kind of apotheosis at a gathering of self-help stars in some huge arena in Dallas. The heavyweights of the self-help trade were there, so my appearance came rather late in the program, behind such stars as Robert Ringer, author of Winning Through Intimidation, and old troupers such as Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Joe Girard (“The World’s Number One Salesman”). There wasn’t an empty seat in the house. The audience was mostly white males in their forties and fifties, with the slightly desperate looks of men who never quite made it in whatever job they had and believed passionately that there existed somewhere a formula that would change their lives.
I was already mildly uneasy at the thought that I was about to tell these people how to change their lives for the better when the speaker before me, a robust, red-faced cleric of some Southern fundamentalist offshoot church, wearing a suit that appeared to have been made from parachute silk, a white Stetson, and alligator cowboy boots, rose to his feet and approached the podium. He grabbed the mike, walked to the front of the stage, threw his Stetson at the front row, and in a voice that would have woken the dead had there been any in the audience, cried out, “Jesus wants you to be rich!”
There was an uneasy stir in the audience, while he repeated this, louder each time. “I mean he wants you to be rich, my friends. No doubt about it. But you’ve got to want
it too. So I want each and every one of you to get on your feet right now and shout after me, ‘Jesus wants me to be rich!’ ”
A few people stood and mumbled, “Jesus wants me to be rich,” with rather shamefaced expressions.
The preacher cupped his ear. “I cain’t hear you,” he complained. “And if I cain’t, he sure cain’t. Heaven is a lot further away than this stage. You got to get to your feet and holler so he can hear you. You got to shout it out like you believed it. Now let’s go!”
A group of attractive young women, rather like football cheerleaders in matching green sweaters and short but demure white skirts, appeared onstage behind the preacher, smiling with perfect teeth, and added their voices in chorus to the chant. By now, the audience was whipped into a kind of frenzy, shouting “Jesus wants me to be rich!” over and over again to shake the rafters, their faces suffused with passion and belief. It was beginning to dawn on me in a panic that I was going to have to follow this act with my little talk on power, which was bound to come as something of an anticlimax, when the preacher reached into his pockets and began to pull out thick wads of dollar bills, which he flung out toward the audience. Bedlam ensued as people struggled for the bills floating down in the hot, still air of the auditorium while at the same time keeping up the chant, accompanying it with pounding feet in time to “JE-SUS-WANTS-ME-TO-BE-RICH!” over and over again, with the ear-splitting, repetitive effect that had characterized French supporters of the Algerian colonists in the 1950s, who liked to sound out “L’AL-GÉ-RIE-FRAN-ÇAISE!” on their car horns all through the night.
By the time the preacher had finished, wiped off his face, and handed the mike over to me, I had already decided that this was not the profession for me. I had neither the shtick nor the passionate zeal that was called for if one wanted to make a living in the self-help trade, and perhaps more important, I wasn’t myself a true believer in my own formula, nor quite cynical enough to go on selling it from city to city despite that. It was a relief when the dark night of the soul caught up with me at last, at midnight in the Albert Pick Hotel in Cleveland, during a Shriners’ convention, with middle-aged men in funny costumes and gold-laced fezzes raucously chasing women up and down the halls as bells rang and the fire alarm pealed incessantly. I had finally had enough. I called Selma Shapiro, the Random House publicity director, and said, “For God’s sake, get me home!”
• • •
IN YEARS to come, I have often met people (mostly, but by no means only, men) who tell me, often in terms of the greatest sincerity and gratitude, that reading Power! changed their lives. This happens not just in America, either, since the book has by now been translated into almost every conceivable language (and is currently having a new lease on life in Eastern Europe, where the fall of communism has made it necessary for a whole new generation of readers to learn where to put their desks or what the power color is). To this, I have always been able to answer, with perfect sincerity, that it changed mine too.
Not immediately, however. Because of the endlessly slow way in which authors receive money (they wait until the end of a six-month royalty period, only to find, as a rule, that rights income from a mass-market sale will be reflected on the next statement, so the money tends to trickle in over a long period of time instead of in a single gusher, like movie sales) I did not feel immediately rich, which was probably just as well. I did feel what the French call dépaysé, as if I had lost my bearings. For a brief, perilous moment it seemed as if I might actually have to choose between the two professions. Very fortunately, Dick Snyder told me not to even think about it. I could write as many books as I liked, he didn’t care. Snyder still knew how to crack the whip, however—indeed, one reason for my dark night of the soul in Cleveland was that I had inadvertently missed an appointment with Paul Gitlin and Harold Robbins, obliging Snyder to fill in for me. I was still working for S&S, he had reminded me in a brief, curt message, and it was time to cut the crap and come home.
The real problem was not at work, however, but at home. While success was not the only reason for the slow deterioration of my marriage to Casey, it certainly didn’t help. As is so often the case, the first person to become dazzled by fame was the person who had become famous. While I was to write later that successful people are generally nicer than those who are not, I’m not sure that I fit into that category. With so much of my attention focused on S&S and what remained of it directed toward writing and promoting my books, domestic life got short shrift. It was a condition I had observed often enough in my authors’ lives, not to speak of my own family’s, so I should have known better. My father and his brothers seldom came home from the studio until late at night, worked seven days a week, and were often on location for months at a time. They considered this normal and did not connect it to the domestic complaints and unhappiness that greeted them on the rare occasions when they were home.
In any event, my sudden and bewildering emergence as a self-help guru coincided with a period in which my marriage took a turn for the worse. It does not seem particularly surprising, in retrospect. As if there were a contagious epidemic of flu, everybody’s marriage seemed to be collapsing in the early seventies, even those of people whose marriages had seemed to outsiders as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar—it was no doubt partly the logical aftermath of the sixties, when, for a decade or so, everything had seemed permissible.
There had been moments, in the sixties, when even the world of book publishing, outwardly one of the more conventional occupations, was touched by the craziness of the era. Sales conferences, which had usually been held in New York, began to take place in Florida or the Caribbean islands or the Georgia seacoast and rapidly developed a wild, permissive, anything goes tradition—at S&S and Random House, certainly. Once defined by heavy drinking, marathon poker playing with the sales reps, and an occasional bit of bottom pinching in the “hospitality suite,” these twice-yearly events took on the appearance of a saturnalia, with rock music blaring at all hours of the night, the smell of marijuana drifting through the corridors, and an atmosphere of sexual license that shocked many of the older generation—not that sales conferences hadn’t always caused a few knowing winks among publishing executives and editors and given heartburn to any number of suspicious spouses, but in the sixties the partying got serious the moment the last slide of the day had been shown to the reps and the torches were lit for the luau cocktail party in the hot, moist, tropic air. Some kind of peak was to be reached when an S&S all-girl singing group, composed of Joni Evans, Susan Kamil, assistant art director Judy Lee, and several other executives, fêted Dick with a rendition of “My Guy.”
The American Booksellers Association convention, often held in Washington in the middle of the summer—surely the most hot and uncomfortable setting imaginable for a convention outside of hell—became another place for licensed play, perhaps because it was closer to New York and attended therefore by more people from the home office, particularly since most of them had nothing to do there except cruise the booths of rival publishers picking up freebies. I remember a party in the S&S hospitality suite in a Washington hotel when a young assistant editor, dancing in an abbreviated dress, did a high kick and accidentally sent a lamp shade flying, to land on the head of the wife of the then heir-apparent, Michael Shimkin. With the air conditioner overburdened in the August heat of Washington, the buckets of ice melting on the table, and half a dozen sales reps smoking cigars and playing cards in the bedroom, it was like dancing in a sweat bath, and shortly after the Shimkins left there was a nasty fistfight, quickly settled by Snyder, over the young editor. And that was before the fun really started.
It was a period when anything seemed possible. Dick Snyder’s marriage had already faltered, Bob Gottlieb left his wife, Muriel, after God only knew how many years, to marry the actress Maria Tucci, beautiful daughter of one of his authors; Tony Schulte’s marriage ended; Jim Silberman left his wife, mass-market publisher Leona Nevler, for Selma Shapiro, causing such a scanda
l that they were both obliged to leave, Selma to set up her own publicity firm and Jim to begin an imprint of his own at S&S.
In the early seventies, the publishing business was following in the wake of the country’s flirtation with sudden social change. The old certainties seemed dead and buried, all hell had broken loose, and the ties that people had supposed were bound for life came suddenly undone.
People not only made strange (or at least unexpected) life decisions, they made even stranger career decisions. In a move that surprised everyone on both sides of the Atlantic (but was to set something of a pattern for the future), Tony Godwin, the mercurial and much-admired joint managing director of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, in London, came to New York to become editor and publisher of his own list of books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. One of the statelier and more ponderous old-line New York publishing houses, HBJ was then undergoing an ambitious (and ultimately unsuccessful) face-lift at the hands of its testy and demanding chief executive, Bill Jovanovich. Jovanovich, a maverick himself who wanted to control every aspect of his publishing house right down to the smallest detail (and considered himself qualified to do so in any area), had picked an equally maverick personality in Godwin, whose passion for detail was exceeded only by his determination not to be bossed around by anyone (including Jovanovich) and his total ignorance of the United States.
Godwin, who had left his wife and children and seemed to be beginning a whole new life virtually from scratch, had started as that rarest of creatures, an enthusiastic and unorthodox bookseller. He founded the famous Better Books store on Charing Cross Road just after the war, and later revived Bumpus, one of the more revered of London’s bookshops. Picked by Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, to modernize Penguin’s fiction line, Godwin’s innovations astonished the London literary world and eventually led to a clash with Lane, who was alarmed by the far-reaching changes Godwin was making in one of Britain’s most respected cultural institutions, and more than a little jealous of the younger man as well.
Another Life Page 42
