Another Life

by Michael Korda

  Shortly after I had turned in the manuscript, which was very long, Milly Marmur called me to tell me in confidence that the Book-of-the-Month Club judges loved Charmed Lives and might well take it as a Main Selection, except that they felt it was too long. In those days, a Main Selection of the BOMC was a very big deal indeed—they picked only eleven books a year—and made a real difference in sales. But the thought of going through the manuscript and cutting it one more time made my heart sink. “Listen, bubbi,” Milly said firmly, “I’m ordering in, you’re coming over to Random House, and we’re going to cut this book together, every night this week if we have to, so they can have a clean, cut version back on their desks by next Monday. It’s now or never. They need a selection, but something else could come up, and that’s it for you. Are you on your way, darling?”

  I was on my way shortly. Milly and I spent the next few evenings huddled on the floor of her tiny office, cutting, pasting, retyping, renumbering until we had a tighter, slimmer manuscript ready for the BOMC. The BOMC took Charmed Lives as a Main Selection, which set the tone for its success in hardcover, and later in paperback, but it wouldn’t have happened if Milly had not intervened forcefully.

  It was a bravura performance but not atypical of what was happening everywhere in publishing. Rights directors knew what was happening, and knew how to make things happen. “Ask Joni what Rights thinks about it,” Dick said more and more often before making a decision on a book. It did not take long before Joni moved out of the rights department and began to acquire her own list of authors, for she had formidable editorial talents too. Not only that, it became apparent to those in the know that she and Dick were a couple, a change that not only had a major impact on S&S but, in its way, on the whole publishing business. A relationship between two strong-willed, ambitious people, both of whom lived, breathed, and talked publishing and worked in the same office was bound to be unusual. Further, he was her boss, and not an easy or forgiving one at that; once they were married, their private and their public lives became almost inextricable, which was not always a blessing. Dick began by boasting that he was never bored because they could talk about publishing all the time, but this attraction eventually palled and became a subject of complaint rather than satisfaction.

  • • •

  IN THE meantime, however, the Snyder/Evans relationship ushered in a new era in book publishing. Dick-and-Joni, as they came to be known once they went public—even to people who had never met them—or the Snyders, as they became once they were married, not only liked to live well, they liked to flaunt it. Their relationship made the gossip columns (albeit at first in harmless ways), partly because they liked to give large parties in their glamorous digs (first a duplex penthouse at the top of the St. Moritz Hotel, overlooking Central Park, then a town house in the East Sixties) and partly because they were publishing books that made news. At first, it was hardly noticed, but gradually it became apparent that book publishing was in the process of becoming glamorous. The Snyders, for a time, epitomized the change, indeed were in part responsible for it—the Prince Charles and Lady Di of the book business.

  For the first time, book publishing became not just fashionable but chic. The National Book Awards, which, under one name or another, had schlepped on year after year, arousing no interest at all beyond a narrow circle of book publishers and authors who attended it, was transformed from a typical book-business get-together, in which men in tweedy suits and odd footwear and young women in off-the-rack dresses lined up at the bar in a fog of cigarette and pipe smoke and elbowed their way forward to clamor for drinks in plastic glasses, into a formal black-tie banquet with exactly the same people, needless to say, only now in dinner jackets and evening gowns. The black-tie banquet of the Literacy Volunteers, in part the brainchild of columnist Liz Smith, actually managed to mix book people and social celebrities at one yearly event, as if the book itself had become an object of fashionable charity. Journalists, credulous as ever, took all this at face value and began to treat publishing as a “hot” business. Book parties, which had once been equally tweedy and small-bore in social value, blossomed into full-scale extravaganzas, complete with celebrity guests and coverage in the newspapers and local television news. Editors, publishers, and writers who had hitherto labored in decent and often well-deserved obscurity were themselves presented as glittering celebrities, and their doings were chronicled in the gossip columns and in fulsome magazine articles. (I myself appeared on the cover of New York magazine, riding a motorcycle and smoking a cigar, and in The New York Times Magazine, riding a horse.)

  Nothing could be more extraordinary than the way in which book publishing was swiftly transformed into a glamorous occupation—so much so that Irving Lazar, who had for years been considered a movie agent who dabbled in books, refashioned himself almost overnight into a book agent who dabbled in movies. The book business was where the action was, or at any rate where it was thought to be. Book deals, hitherto mostly of interest to the small circle of people who read Publishers Weekly on a regular basis, began to be reported on in the big-time media, and publishing news became a hot item, and book publishers, most of whom had hitherto eaten at rather modest restaurants, swiftly took over the new Grill Room of the very expensive Four Seasons restaurant, making it a kind of exclusive club. It is a measure of what was happening that when Random House regretfully gave up its old digs in the Villard Mansion, on Madison Avenue, it moved to a modern, glass-fronted skyscraper on the East Side. When S&S moved into its own building in Rockefeller Center, Dick hired a noted architect, James Polchek, to design luxurious new offices that included a private dining room, with its own kitchen, for the CEO, carpets with the S&S logo (Millet’s sower, chosen long ago by Max Schuster to symbolize the dissemination of knowledge) woven into the design, hallways lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and decorated with valuable antique American quilts, and a conference room that doubled as a screening room. Dick’s personal chef, his private dining room, his executive gym, the Mercedes with a chauffeur that waited for him downstairs, and his use of a G+W jet came to symbolize the ambitions and the freewheeling lifestyle of book publishing. When we flew down to Washington for John Dean’s publication party, we did not take the shuttle as ordinary human beings did; we were driven out to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in the Mercedes, then flew down to D.C. in a Learjet, with the refrigerator stocked with Dick’s favorite brand of vodka, caviar, and black bread.

  The expensive, glamorous surroundings seemed appropriate to the ambitious plans that were being made in the executive offices of publishing houses all over town. It is some measure of just how futile these ambitions were to prove to be that at both Random House and S&S dramatic hallways have been filled with secretarial cubicles, big offices have been partitioned into smaller ones, then partitioned again, palatial dining rooms and well-equipped professional kitchens are now filing rooms. The spirit that created these ambitiously designed premises has long since departed; the present is more spartan, utilitarian, pessimistic, the future uncertain.

  Of course, nothing is more common among celebrities than making the mistake of believing their own press clippings. Those who were, however briefly, touched by the wand of glamorization in the mid-seventies not only believed they had earned it—and that it was going to last—but confused it with growth. That was the case in book publishing, where despite a thin layer of glamour at the top and a lot of hype in the outside world, the business was still pretty much the same as ever. People weren’t reading or buying more books—the action was in buying up rival book companies and “consolidating” them into larger and larger companies. It was growth of a kind, to be sure, but forced rather than natural. The same authors were still writing the same kinds of books, which were still being sold in much the same quantities. The book itself was still a fully returnable item, so that nearly two books were printed for every one that sold, and its ultimate destination was either to be “remaindered” for sale at a dollar or less a copy, or
“pulped” to make more paper products. Efforts were made to make this cumbersome and ancient process look well thought-out, streamlined, and efficient for the benefit of the shareholders of the big companies that now owned most of them, but most of it would have seemed familiar enough to Gutenberg. Add to this that the basic product of this particular slice of the media business was still being created in large part by people banging away at typewriters on kitchen tables and it is easy to understand why the glossy public image of the publishing business was so misleading.

  NINETEEN SEVENTY-THREE was a crucial year for me. For years, I had been an avid horseman, though I contented myself with renting horses at stables all over New York City, until I finally settled down as a regular customer at a stable at Clove Lake, on Staten Island, where I rode every Saturday and Sunday, as well as on Thursday evenings, when my son, Christopher, and I practiced as part of their “parade team,” doing figure eights at a canter and more complicated movements with twenty or so other riders, to the accompaniment of waltzes and marches over a loudspeaker.

  I even took up fox hunting, having been introduced to the sport by Jane McIlvaine McClary, one of the doyennes of Middleburg, Virginia, horse society, whose novel, A Portion for Foxes, I not only published but presented to a sales conference while dressed in full hunting regalia, including boots, breeches, a white stock, a gold-buttoned pink coat, and a top hat. (The Warwick Hotel, greatly to my disappointment, firmly vetoed my plan to ride into the conference room and present the book from horseback.) Jane McClary was a foxhunter of international fame and was so pleased to have a horseman for an editor that she overestimated my skills by a considerable factor. On my first visit, she proudly informed me that she had secured permission for us to go over the Middleburg Gold Cup steeplechase course in the morning, and, despite my feeble and terrified protests, I found myself being carried over the biggest fences this side of Aintree on one of Jane’s horses, my eyes closed, both hands grasping the horse’s mane for dear life. The same horse carried me over immense stone walls and terrifying embankments on my first day with the Middleburg Hunt, until I was eventually neck and neck with the master, my stirrups flapping as I hauled desperately on the poor animal’s mouth, while the master shouted indignantly at me to slow down and fall back behind him. (A valuable lesson is never to ride a horse you don’t know who is named Black Devil, as this one was, or anything similar.)

  As a result, I acquired an entirely unjustified reputation as something of a daredevil rider and was not only asked back many times but soon invited out to the kind of black-tie dinner where the gentlemen retire to the library after dessert to drink brandy, smoke cigars, and tell anti-Roosevelt stories.

  It definitely wasn’t my milieu, and if I kept at it long enough I was dead certain to break my neck, but once again it got me out of the house. In fact, between riding, flying down to Middleburg for the weekends to hunt, work at S&S, and writing my books and magazine articles, I was very seldom home, and almost always reading or writing something when I was. Having set out determined not to be like my father, I ended up doing the same thing.

  IT HAD always been my ambition to have my own horse, instead of hiring one at a livery stable, and with the publication of Power! there seemed no good reason not to do so. I purchased a large, elderly gelding of uncertain breeding and temperament, whom I renamed Malplaquet (after the most famous of Marlborough’s battles), and decided to keep him at the venerable Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, near Central Park, where I had taken to riding early in the morning almost every day. It was thus that I first saw Margaret Glinn, the wife of the well-known and very successful Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. She was a blond, beautiful woman, with the grace of a born rider, extravagantly dressed, trotting a big, handsome chestnut Thoroughbred (Tabasco, whom she was later to purchase) around the Central Park reservoir. For a very long time she did not seem willing to look at me, while I glanced at her surreptitiously—which would have been hard not to do, since she was perhaps the most striking woman I had ever seen. A long period ensued in which we circled the reservoir every morning in opposite directions, saying “Good morning!” to each other as we passed, until finally, some months after our first encounter, we went around the reservoir in the same direction together for the first time.

  Now that we were at least riding in the same direction, we were able to talk. It transpired that we were both English, though Margaret’s Englishness, unlike mine, was of the pure, nonhyphenated kind—she was the only daughter of a Gloucestershire farmer and had ridden since the age of three or four. Sophisticated, glamorous, and alarmingly well-traveled, she retained an English country girl’s dislike of the city, although she seemed to me to be the supreme example of a fashionable city-dwelling woman. She had married an officer in the Kenya police while in her teens, gone to live in Kenya, where the marriage swiftly dissolved, lived for a while in Paris in the motion-picture world, then met Burt Glinn and soon followed him to New York. Glinn had used her as a model, and initially they had lived together in a big apartment that he shared with his old friend Clay Felker. It was a typical bachelors’ digs, which sounded, as she described it, like that in The Odd Couple, with layers of newspapers on the floor and the smell of cigars in every room.

  Burt might have been happy enough to stay there forever—he liked the comradeship and the sense of la vie de bohème, but Margaret, who was tired of communal life and living out of unpacked suitcases, eventually got him to move into a glamorous apartment of their own, with big windows overlooking Central Park, where they entertained lavishly and frequently. Years of traveling around the world with her husband as he worked had taken their toll—Margaret had decided to stop traveling, an act of independence that baffled Burt and of which Tabasco and her morning rides were a symptom. Just as the young had cried out, “We ain’t marching any more,” Margaret had put her foot down and refused to travel, except during the winter, when she and Burt usually rented a house in Cuernavaca with the Halberstams, John Chancellor and his wife, JFK’s favorite photographer, Stanley Tretick, and his wife, Mo, and other media figures.

  It sounded like such a glamorous life, in fact, that I was at once envious and somewhat overawed. Admittedly, I had been brought up surrounded by glamour and I was used to moving in fairly glamorous circles as an editor, but Casey and I lived rather simply. For several years we had rented a succession of immense old summer houses in Dark Harbor, Maine, on an island in Penobscot Bay, but we tended to live quietly up there, too.

  Dark Harbor was a curious and unlikely place to choose for the summer, and perhaps if my mind had been less fixed on my work I might have wondered why Casey had chosen this remote island, where most of the tiny community of summer people were far richer than ourselves.

  Dark Harbor might have been a place in which to repair whatever differences had begun to pull us apart, but as is so often the case, it had the opposite effect. Rather like Margaret’s travels with Burt, the more Casey and I were together, the further we drifted apart, and there didn’t seem anything to be done about it. By the time I met Margaret in Central Park, the thing we had most in common—though I didn’t know it then and resisted the notion for a long time—was that our marriages had drifted beyond the point of no return.

  Oddly enough, the four of us became friends almost at once. Hardly a weekend passed that we didn’t go out to dinner together. Casey and I became frequent guests at the Glinns’ apartment, and we eventually even made plans to go away on a vacation together, renting a house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a third couple, despite the fact that Margaret and I had long since become lovers.

  When Margaret’s marriage finally exploded (the only word that can describe the event), followed a year or so later by my own (which was more of a collapse than an explosion), it was as if we had known each other for a lifetime. After all, our balancing act had gone on for almost five years before we were finally able to go downtown to City Hall and tie the knot, during which time I h
ad nevertheless somehow managed to write two books and maintain a successful career, which is a tribute to either my single-mindedness or Margaret’s patience.

  Whichever, it was a period of great excitement and happiness for Margaret and me and for Dick and Joni, who had married before us. It seemed, for a time, as if anything was possible, not just in our personal lives, but at S&S.

  CHAPTER 28

  Bluhdorn liked growth. It was the lifeblood of his empire, and he lived to make new acquisitions. Had Dick been content to sit around buying books and increasing the company’s sales, Bluhdorn would have lost interest in him quickly and possibly in book publishing too. Fortunately, Dick saw his own future and that of S&S as one of growth by acquisition, so Bluhdorn was not disappointed. Shimkin had sold S&S to Bluhdorn in 1976 for $11 million, most of it in Gulf + Western stock, which wasn’t bad for a company that had been launched in 1924 with capital of $25,000 and that was grossing about $50 million a year at the time of the sale. In 1974, when S&S celebrated its first fifty years, it was a major publishing house, but that was no longer enough. The outline of the future was easy enough to perceive, as one by one, with a few exceptions, some of the most famous and illustrious names in publishing—most of them, it was true, poorly managed and short of capital—surrendered their independence. The big fish swallowed the small, without it crossing the minds of the biggest ones that they too might eventually be swallowed.

  Size, of course, does not protect a publisher from failure. On the contrary, the bigger you are, the easier it is to make expensive mistakes—and to hide them. The late Ronald Busch, at one time publisher of Ballantine Books, which was bought by Random House in 1973, and later the publisher of Pocket Books, part of S&S, was quoted as saying that buying the big books got easier as the company got larger. “With all the conglomerate money today,” he said, “it’s like playing Monopoly. If we had to use our own resources, we’d think twice about bidding as much as we do.… But with a parent or a conglomerate that has annual sales of two or three billion dollars and up, with two or three million shareholders, what’s the risk?”