Lazar let us in and made the introductions. The Reverend Jackson—his followers, as I was soon to learn, referred to him, without humor, as The Rev—was tall, with the build of an athlete beginning to run to fat, beautifully dressed, sported a gold Rolex wristwatch, and gave the impression of a man in a singularly bad mood. This, as it turned out, was entirely due to our presence. Jackson had been persuaded by Lazar, very much against his own instincts, that he should write a book. Now that he was actually here with us, however, he felt a strong resentment against having to put on a show for us—or, as one of his associates later put it, “to audition for whitey.”
Even Lazar’s considerable reservoir of charm failed to produce a cordial atmosphere, nor were matters helped when it was discovered that The Rev suffered from a whole complicated series of food allergies of which he had failed to inform his host, so that there was virtually nothing that he could eat of the elaborate lunch that Lazar had ordered. A tuna-salad sandwich was sent for, while the four of us sat around the dining-room table making uncomfortable small talk. It was apparent even to Dick and Lazar that there was no chance at all of asking Jackson any questions about his life or how much of it he was willing to have committed to print. On the subject of anything more personal than the weather, Jackson put up a stone wall.
Finally, Dick decided to break the ice. On the way over here, he said, he had been reading a newsmagazine and had come upon a fascinating article about teenage pregnancy. Jackson leaned forward, his face blank, an expression of impatience on his face. His eyes—remarkably small and close together for such a broad face—showed nothing, except for a certain sullen suspicion. Dick, not always the most sensitive of personalities, plunged on with his analysis of the magazine story, despite a warning glance from Lazar. Here were girls of twelve, even eleven, for chrissake, having babies! It was an outrage, a really frightening thing, didn’t the Reverend Jackson agree?
The Reverend Jackson nodded. He had not touched his tuna-salad sandwich, I noticed, as if he had decided he simply wasn’t going to break bread with us, but he relaxed a little, now that he had a subject to discuss. He held up one neatly manicured hand to still the flow of Dick’s eloquence. “I know where you’re comin’ from,” he said, his voice low, deep, silky, soft, a voice born for the pulpit. “You are talkin’ about babies having babies.”
Dick’s eyes snapped open behind his tinted aviator glasses (the power symbol of Paramount at that time). That was it exactly, he said. Nobody could have put it better. Jackson had come up with just the right phrase, one that said it all.
I was pleased, but not surprised. If there was anything The Rev was good at (apart from getting money out of the pockets of guilty white folks), it was coming up with the right phrase. Words, after all, had always been the power of black Southern preachers, eloquence their stock-in-trade, the Bible the only book that mattered. The Rev was the inheritor of a long tradition. He might not be able to stop teenage pregnancy, but he could define it in a phrase better and more quickly than any Time editor.
Now that Dick had found his subject, he was not willing to let it go. Teenage pregnancy was a terrible problem, he went on, it blighted lives, both of the mothers and of their children. It was exactly the kind of subject on which Jackson should be speaking out, loud and clear. “The thing is,” he said, looking Jackson intently in the eye, “you ought to be doing something about it, because it’s a problem for your people.”
There followed a hush, broken only by a snort of alarm from Lazar, who had been contentedly eating his shrimp cocktail, his mind on other things. Lazar was not exactly race sensitive, but he had been around blacks in show business long enough to know that your people from the mouth of a white man was fighting words, almost as bad as the n-word, and in fact a euphemism for it.
Jackson’s nostrils flared, and his eyes became very hard indeed—hard enough that Dick became aware he had overstepped the line somehow. Jackson leaned close to him, a broad smile on his face, and speaking very slowly, as if to a child, he said, “Dick, here’s the way it is. Your people, they go to the good schools, colleges, they study hard, they come out they get the good jobs, lawyers, doctors, big business, all that stuff.” Jackson’s voice dropped even lower. “All my people got is—”Before he had finished the sentence, Dick had turned to me and said, “Buy the goddamn book.”
• • •
ONCE WE had reached an accord, the atmosphere lightened considerably. Jackson was jovial, though he still did not touch his sandwich, and Lazar was in good spirits, having made a deal. Occasionally, Jackson glanced at his watch—he had to catch the shuttle back to Washington, and a car was coming to pick him up. He stood up, towering high over Lazar, and we all shook hands. The Rev put a lot into his handshakes—they were warm, firm, and prolonged, and for emphasis he used both hands. “We are going to be partners,” he said, and it was possible to believe it. There was only one small thing on his mind, however, as we walked with him to the front door. “Where’s the—ah—toilet, my friend?” he asked Lazar, and a look of alarm spread across Lazar’s face.
“What time is your plane?” he asked sharply.
Jackson glanced at his watch. “I have about forty-five minutes to make the shuttle.”
Lazar opened the door and endeavored to push Jackson out into the hall. “Traffic is terrible,” he said. “You don’t have time. Wait until you get to the airport, that’s my advice.”
Jackson thought about this for a moment. “I only a need a minute,” he said.
Lazar shook his head. “You don’t know what the goddamn traffic is like, this time of day. You go when you get there.”
Jackson stood his ground, glaring down at his agent. “Irving,” he said slowly, “I want to go to the damn bathroom, now! Where is it?”
Lazar gave way reluctantly and pointed toward the bathroom. Jackson went off, did what he had to do, returned in a moment, shook hands again, and was gone.
We were about to take our own leave of Lazar, but he asked us to wait—he had something urgent to do. He, too, went to the bathroom, but as the minutes ticked by I realized that he wasn’t there for a call of nature. I could hear the sibilant hiss of an aerosol container, so I walked down the corridor until I could just see through the half-opened door.
Lazar’s bathroom was mirrored, floor to ceiling, and had a marble floor. Lazar, grimly determined, was on his knees by the toilet with a towel and an aerosol container of lemon-scented Lysol, vigorously spritzing every surface in sight.
• • •
OF COURSE, Lazar’s germ phobia was well known—likely he would have been just as alarmed if Dick or I had used his bathroom. In any event, I think Jackson would probably have been more amused than annoyed had he caught Lazar at it. Over the years that followed, in which The Rev tried out ghost after ghost (including, improbably, Ben Stein, a Jewish conservative), I had ample opportunity to observe that Jackson was tolerant to a fault. He was willing to give anybody a chance if he thought it might be in his interest to do so, and moral judgments on others did not come easily to him, despite the fact that he was an ordained minister.
His book never got written—I finally came to the conclusion that it was not so much the choice of writers that gave him pause as some deep inner doubt about the whole idea of putting his life down on paper. Jackson was a gifted teller of anecdotes, most of them having to do with his own life, and no doubt had embellished them over the years. He had used stories about his life to make points in sermons, in political speeches, and in conversations, but the idea of sitting down with somebody who was actually going to weigh his stories against the known facts was perhaps something he did not relish.
It was impossible to be around Jackson for any time and not like the man. My assistant Nancy Nicholas and I spent many, many hours together waiting for The Rev, who liked to set meetings at the last minute, usually late at night on weekends, and who was invariably hours late. We never held it against Jackson, and the pleasure of seeing him, when
he finally arrived, was always genuine.
Short of Ronald Reagan, nobody staged arrivals better than Jackson—the long wait, often in hotel lobbies, or his suite, the arrival of messengers bearing news of his whereabouts and revised ETA, finally the bustle as the Reverend Jackson’s advance staff swept in, the more important ones bearing cellular telephones, others his briefcase, raincoat, even his minister’s robes, splendid in purple and black, in a transparent plastic garment bag, then, at last, Jackson himself, always on the run, surrounded by a few favored journalists and a couple of stout bodyguards.
His hotel suites contained all the chaos of a presidential campaign; indeed, Jesse Jackson’s life was like a permanent presidential campaign—the rows of cellular phones charging on the floor, the serving tables piled high with food and soft drinks, buckets full of melting ice, the television sets all switched to the news, with the sound off, and at least a dozen people packed into the living room, while Jackson himself huddled behind a closed door in the bedroom with a visitor or took a nap. The atmosphere was always one of crisis, even when—especially when—nothing was happening. When he was in good form, Jackson’s eloquence was formidable. He once came to S&S to talk to the CEOs of a couple of dozen major corporations about defense spending and what it was doing to the black community, whose needs were being sacrificed to the military-industrial machine. His audience, which began as hostile, was so mesmerized that it stayed an hour longer than intended and emerged—for the moment at any rate—converted to Jackson’s view. When he was tired, however, or when things weren’t going his way, he could be mulish, impatient, and monosyllabic, though never discourteous—his Southern upbringing prevented that.
The only time I ever saw them together, I was struck by how greatly he and Bill Clinton resembled each other, but by that time Jackson had assumed an elder-statesman stance, Clinton having preempted The Rev’s role as the party leader and communicating with blacks for himself, much to Jackson’s discomfiture. It was impossible to think of them as black and white—they were merely two Southern boys, spoiled by their mamas, gifted students who had made good just the way they were supposed to, each of them married to a woman considerably stronger than himself, and each of them sharing the same ability to charm, the same attraction for the opposite sex, and the same sense of entitlement. The only difference was that Clinton was president and Jesse Jackson wasn’t, but Jackson had managed to carve out a role that transcended the presidency, with his own foreign policy, his own constituency, and his own blueprint for the future. Still, I could see in Jackson’s eyes that he wasn’t happy. If there was one thing about him that I learned during the many years of working on various versions of his book, it was that the Reverend Jackson liked to be the center of attention.
WELL, WHO doesn’t? you might say. Indeed, in the eighties most of us fulfilled Andy Warhol’s prophecy by becoming the center of attention briefly, starting with Dick Snyder and Joni Evans. Joni’s career path took the shape of a neon zigzag. Dick decided that despite the difficulties, he needed Joni Evans as publisher of S&S again, so Linden Press (much to my regret as a Linden author) was closed down. After that, however, their marriage began to falter, and Joni left to run Random House, replacing Howard Kaminsky, a diminutive dynamo of a man. Kaminsky went to Morrow, while Joni was moved crosstown to head a new Random House imprint, Turtle Bay Books (named after the area in which the imprint’s brownstone lay), which was soon closed down, leaving Joni jobless until she changed gears and reemerged as a William Morris agent.
From this one can deduce certain things, the first being that it’s probably not a good idea for a husband and a wife to work together in the same place, particularly if they have high-profile jobs. (Ironically, Joni and I had collaborated to edit Mary Cunningham’s book about herself and Bill Agee, the CEO of Bendix who had first mentored her, then had an affair with her, then married her, following which they both had to leave.) The second lesson is that almost no relationship can survive the kind of media scrutiny that was being given to book publishing. Perhaps most important of all, the old idea that job security was one of the benefits of publishing was, at last, definitely dead and buried.
THE ARGUMENT for working in book publishing had always been that while the pay was low and the perks consisted of nothing more than free lunches and all the books you could read, in most places you had to work hard at it to get fired. By the 1980s, that was no longer true. At the higher levels of book publishing, the pay was actually pretty good, and in those houses that were owned by big corporations or media conglomerates or movie studios, the perks began to include (at any rate for a lucky few) stock options, bonus plans, special retirement funds, a leased car, free parking, discounts on anything the parent company manufactured—all the bells and whistles, in short, of corporate America. At the very highest level, the cornucopia was tilted even more steeply and disgorged such goodies as private dining rooms, the use of corporate jets, and company-paid apartments.
While these benefits were limited to a very small number of people at the largest houses, the consequences went all the way down through organizations. When companies were merged and acquired, people got fired—indeed, that was one of the major reasons for merging and acquiring in the first place—and the need to make each year better than the one before in order to satisfy the corporate parent meant that more and more people got hired and fired as quick fixes. You didn’t find your editors in-house anymore, nor your executives. You hired a headhunter to raid other houses for editors, tried them out, and if they didn’t measure up quickly, you fired them and started all over again. Since, increasingly, the editors didn’t expect to be at a house for very long, they left the moment they had a better offer elsewhere. Star editors were wooed and fought over by major houses, though all too often they turned out to be past their peaks when they moved or to have grandiose illusions about becoming publishers.
Job security had always had two faces—on one side, the loyalty of the company toward the employee and the promise that he or she would be kept there for the long haul, and on the other side, the employee’s loyalty toward the company and his or her willingness to be patient and trust that long service would bring its own rewards. With companies being merged, bought, and sold, however, that kind of patience and trust was increasingly meaningless—the people who owned you had probably never heard of you, had no idea what you did, and couldn’t have cared less anyway. This was all the more difficult in the case of editors because it is hard to measure what they do in any simple way: The next book of the author whose novel has just failed may be a huge bestseller; an editor switching jobs might inherit a list and thereby get credit for a surprise best-seller he or she had nothing to do with. In any event, the gestation of books (and of editors, for that matter) is a long one, requiring considerable patience and optimism, and the process of editing is not one that lends itself to dramatic color photographs in the parent company’s annual report. The story goes that when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper and Row (which he was later to merge not very successfully with Collins, his U.K. book publishing acquisition), he walked down “editors’ row” and, seeing a lot of people bent over the desks reading, asked what the hell they thought they were doing and when they were going to get to work. (The story is told about several people, but it fits Murdoch better than most.) All of this meant that while the salaries were climbing a little, job security plummeted.
So did prestige. Even as late as the 1970s, a publishing house was basically an organization built around its editors, and the connection between ownership and the editors was strong, personal, and direct. The rest of the company consisted of service departments that were in most ways subordinated to the needs of the editors. To the extent that there was any glamour to publishing, it was provided by the editors.
With the appearance of big, merged publishing houses, the picture changed. The glamour, such as it was, was at the top, where houses were bought, sold, and merged, new imprints created, and multimillion-dollar deals
made. Slowly but surely, the editors were relegated to the status of pieceworkers. If they provided a steady flow of profitable books, they were rewarded—very often with bonuses instead of salary increases, since a bonus can be withheld the next year whereas a salary increase is forever—if they did not, they were fired, and new ones brought in. Both the power and the prestige of their position were stripped from them, as the decisions they once made unilaterally were assigned to others, and as layers of management were created to supervise and quantify the editors’ work. The editors were no longer at the center of the company in a large publishing house, but on the periphery, at once part of a large and growing bureaucracy and the focus of its attention.
From the point of view of management, the editors are just about the hardest part of the publishing process to deal with, except of course for the authors themselves. It is hardly surprising that most publishing houses are now run by people who would just as soon climb Everest without oxygen as edit a book (or, in some cases, read one). If you want to know what’s happening in the other departments of a company, you can get numbers, printouts, bar graphs, charts, the kind of thing that appeals to business-minded persons and is thought to make sense, but the editors deal not in numbers, which hardly ever prove anything when it comes to books, but in ideas, hunches, style, most treacherous of all, words.
Most of the really big mistakes in book publishing come from ignoring the importance of words in favor of numbers or personalities. Of course, it’s easier to buy books by numbers, which explains why so many bad books by novelists at the tail ends of their careers still get bought for millions of dollars. It’s a lot easier (and quicker) to make decisions by digging up the previous sales figures, calculating the royalty earnings, adding on foreign sales, and so on than to actually read the book. Most of the big writers who regularly grace the best-seller list are bought and sold without anybody going to the trouble of reading the manuscript—indeed, such deals are usually made without a manuscript, purely on track record and numbers. A lot of publishers are far more comfortable dealing with a P&L than a manuscript anyway—the numbers can be crunched, studied, fine-tuned, but they’re real, as opposed to the author’s words, which, even if available, merely produce more words, in the form of subjective reports from the editors.
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