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In those exciting early days, we advanced in many directions, and we were glad to acquire a series of thrillers featuring Jacob Asch, Private Investigator, an out-of-work crime reporter. Witty, bitter, with his ideals battered but still just about intact, Ash moved in the bizarre underworld of southern California, and the books had received high praise from both the LA Times (‘they won’t be bettered’) and the New York Times. Very different were the crime novels we took on by W. J. Weatherby, well known in England for his Guardian features. Superb though all these books were, they were rather overshadowed on our list by Jack Lynn’s The Turncoat, an explosive novel of worldwide intrigue, corruption in high places and political assassination that had its roots in actual events and came to us in a large, unpublished manuscript. It was riveting. We made copies and passed them around the office. Everyone agreed, we had to buy it, but the asking price was high – seemingly too high for us. One possible solution (and a good way of testing the commercial waters) was to try to pre-sell it to an American publisher, and this we managed to do – to Ross Claiborne at Dell, who paid a six-figure sum for it. We went on to publish several more books by Lynn, including The Professor, a Mafia thriller that was optioned several times by various movie companies but was never made into a film, such being the fickle ways of Hollywood. Those books did reasonably well for us, but not as well as I suspect they should have done, and from then on we were cautious as far as fiction was concerned, realising that it needed a special kind of publishing skill and sales force to make it really work.
Gardening was another area into which we plunged our early exploratory fork, commissioning a series of books from Daphne Ledward, then a regular on the BBC’s popular Gardeners’ Question Time (no half-measures at that early stage), and also taking on her offbeat Idiot Gardener’s Handbook, which became a perennial seller.
Humour, music, fiction, biography, literature, gardening – but so far no cookery, and it was to remain that way, with one notable exception – Evelyn Rose’s Complete International Jewish Cookbook. At that time the doyenne of Jewish cuisine and the Jewish Chronicle’s popular columnist, Evelyn had been working on the book for some years, and it was due to be published by Vallentine, Mitchell. But something had gone wrong, and I was contacted by the JC’s editor, William Frankel, who asked whether we would take it over, promising his backing. We were happy to do so, and if the Jewish people really are the People of the Book, this was the book, for it sold out instantly, going from edition to edition – some sixteen in all – encouraging the supremely professional Evelyn to write more books for us. However, shortly after we’d published, there was an uncomfortable moment when the phone rang late one Friday afternoon. On the line was a woman, clearly at her wits’ end, saying she had people to dinner and the soufflé she’d been preparing from the recipe in Evelyn’s book just wouldn’t rise. We phoned Evelyn to confer, and on checking she discovered that the eggs had somehow been left out of that recipe! She phoned the distraught lady herself to apologise. The soufflé eventually rose!
Evelyn Rose, the doyenne of Jewish cookery writers, whose books were in most Jewish households.
While we were inserting erratum slips into the few remaining copies of the first printing of Evelyn’s book, we were beginning, through Alan Coren, to be drawn closer to Punch magazine. Soon, a number of Punch-related titles came our way, and we became, in effect, the magazine’s unofficial book publisher, with such compilations as Punch on the Theatre (edited by Sheridan Morley), Punch on Scotland (Miles Kington), Punch Down Under (Barry Humphries), Punch at the Cinema (Dilys Powell), The Punch Book of Cartoons etc. Libby Purves, too, was an early ‘catch’, with a book called Britain at Play, which drew on a column Alan had commissioned. Some of the Punch books were paperbacks, others large-format books, amply illustrated and ideal for Christmas, and once again, thanks to our Hungarian printers, we were able to produce them at a reasonable price. From time to time I was invited to the weekly Punch lunches in their Tudor Street offices, joining the magazine’s writers, cartoonists and various guests at its famous long table engraved with the signatures of some of the royal and famous invitees who’d attended over the years. At the head sat the editor, William Davis, presiding over some thirty uninhibited guests talking non-stop – until the moment when he banged the table with his gavel, demanded silence and threw out a topic for general discussion, calling on people in turn. I’d shrink into myself, praying his eyes wouldn’t turn on me, and mercifully he always seemed to pass me by. When Alan became editor, the intellectual and competitive level rose as he led the conversation, and I would enjoy the cut and thrust. I felt safer with Alan in command – he knew me too well to put me on the spot.
Alan and I and our families became close, and he and I would often walk together on a Sunday over nearby Hampstead Heath, the endlessly inventive Alan regaling me with the highly original plot for a novel he had in mind. A week later he’d have forgotten what it was and come up with an even more original storyline. Having the ideas seemed to be what excited him. He wanted to write a novel but never did (other than a teenage novel he regretted once showing me), telling me whenever I pursued him that he was a sprinter, not a longdistance runner. Given the brilliance of his short pieces and his many books for us, all wonderfully titled, I could hardly complain. Nor did he ever write the autobiography we’d contracted – his idea was to write it in different decades through the various cars he and his parents had owned over the years (‘Auto-Biography’, he wanted to call it). What a shame. But, as I mentioned earlier, he did write a series of highly successful children’s stories, the Arthur Books – Buffalo Arthur, The Lone Arthur, Arthur the Kid and so on. Set in the American Wild West, they featured a mysterious young boy called Arthur who would appear from nowhere, help clueless adults get out of the stupid messes they’d found themselves in, then disappear into the sunset. After six Westerns, Alan brought Arthur to England to help Sherlock Holmes (Arthur and the Great Detective, Arthur and the Bellybutton Diamond etc.). Arthur was roughly the age of Alan’s son Giles – no coincidence. The stories were funny, with authentic backgrounds, and more sophisticated than I think Alan realised, and we sold editions all over the world thanks to the help and connections of Felix Gluck, who was still running his company from our office and knew everyone in the world of children’s publishing. Felix also introduced us to John Astrop, who illustrated the books with great style.
A Bookseller advert for Alan Coren’s ‘Arthur’ books, which we sold in many languages.
There were two memorable ‘Arthur’ launches – one at the Martini Terrace in Haymarket where Robert Morley made an impromptu speech, saying wittily that he was looking forward to Le Morte d’Arthur, and one in France where Gallimard published the books and Alan had everyone in stitches by delivering a speech in his usual dazzling way – but in French (he’d checked several expressions with Carole on the way there). In America, where Little, Brown published the books, ABC Television made an hour’s film of one of them, and they were read on the BBC TV children’s programme Jackanory.
For Alan, everything was possible and everything permitted, as he told me when we shared a family villa in Portugal one summer. He also told me I’d have made a good tennis coach, which I was never sure was meant as a compliment! It was on that holiday that, as Carole and I drove Giles and our daughters to the sea (Alan and Anne preferred the villa’s pool), Giles, who was then around eight, begged us to get his father to give up smoking: both his parents were militant smokers. Not a chance. Nobody could get Alan to do anything he didn’t want to do, but he was very proud of his children, with good reason.
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A number of Punch’s high-profile authors approached us as a result of our involvement with the magazine. George Melly was one. I was rather in awe of George, perhaps because I’d been a fan of his since my teenage days, perhaps because I was conscious of his erudition and colourful past, or maybe it was because his eyes seemed to mock you as he talked
– what was he thinking, one wondered? But in truth he was generosity itself, inviting me several times for lunch at the fish restaurant Sheekey, where he was entitled to bring a guest once a month at their expense in return for having advised on and helped procure the paintings that adorned the restaurant’s walls. It was there, appropriately, over a long boozy lunch, that he came up with the idea of writing on one of his passions – fishing – and the result was an engaging book called Hooked!, which he laced with a goodly number of personal stories and ribald confessions.
Frank Keating, The Guardian’s popular sports writer and a regular contributor to Punch magazine. Frank had his own special touch, which endeared him to readers and players alike.
Frank Keating, The Guardian’s fine sports writer who called everyone ‘m’dear’, was another Punch catch and someone I became fond of. Frank’s writing had a particularly romantic hue about it – he absolutely loved, with wide-eyed boyish enthusiasm, the sporting events and great sporting figures he wrote about, whether a rugby match or a superb innings, a Botham or a Borg. Frank had a magical way of conjuring up the scene, but he was far more sophisticated than he let on and was greatly admired by the sporting legends he wrote about as well as by those he wrote for. His Punch and Spectator essays made several winning books for us – Passing Shots, Long Days, Late Nights, Gents and Players – but his original Classic Moments from a Century of Sport and his autobiography, Half-Time Whistle, were particular highlights.
I saw Frank in action once, when he came to a lunch at Wembley for the great Hungarian footballer Ferenc Puskás, whose autobiography we were launching there, courtesy of Wembley’s then chairman, Jarvis Astaire. Puskás had played the key part in destroying a rather arrogant England team 6–3 at a famous Wembley match in 1953, and then 7–1 in Budapest the following year. For the lunch we had assembled as many members of that humiliated English team as we could, including Sir Stanley Matthews. Frank sat down afterwards and, on a borrowed typewriter, wrote a perfect 1,000-word piece about the lunch for The Guardian in under half an hour, without hesitation or repetition. But he missed my own great moment when, to my amazement, I found myself walking though the Wembley tunnel onto the pitch with Puskás on one side and Matthews on the other. Not a photo, not a selfie, not even a Keating to record this unbelievable Boy’s Own, schoolboy’s dream of a moment!
Roy Hattersley was somewhat untypical of Punch authors, but he was an award-winning writer as well as being Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, and his regular ‘Press Gang’ column gave an informed insight into the workings and shenanigans of the press and made compelling reading – well worth collecting into a book. Roy had agreed to speak at a Reading literary lunch as part of the promotion for his book, and I drove him to the hotel where it was to take place. As soon as we arrived he was given an urgent message (no mobiles in those days!) saying there was going to be a vote in the House on capital punishment and he needed to be there to respond to the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan. Time was short but, not wanting to let the organisers down, Roy came up with the suggestion that he speak before lunch was served, sign books and then leave. As soon as he’d finished, away we raced, Roy listening to the Test match as I drove. Then, as we approached Westminster, he said, ‘You see that No Right Turn sign? If you were to ignore that and turn right, you’d save five vital minutes.’ Who was I not to comply with the shadow Home Secretary’s obvious wishes? It was, after all, in the national interest, and he arrived with five minutes to spare.
Roy’s partner at the time, Maggie Pearlstine, later to become his wife, had been the main buyer at Book Club Associates when we started up, taking several of our early titles, and we’d become friendly. That’s probably how we ended up having Christmas drinks with just the two of them at Roy’s Westminster flat – and when I say ‘we’ I mean Carole and me and our young daughters, Deborah and Manuela – not too young, however, to show Roy how to work all the controls on his new TV set and recorder, which he and Maggie had been struggling with. Roy and Maggie always remind us about that when we meet, as we did only recently and unexpectedly at the Oxford Literary Festival.
Simon Hoggart, The Guardian’s acerbic political sketchwriter, let little that went on in and behind the scenes in Parliament escape his irreverent ‘On the House’ columns in Punch. These formed the basis for three highly successful books, superbly illustrated by John Jensen, who in one volume depicted the ‘cast’ as Tudor conspirators. The first of Simon’s books twinned nicely with another that we published at the same time by his opposite number on The Times, the very classy Frank Johnson, and we gave a joint launch party in our office. Strangely, Frank had been to our house for dinner quite some while before he started writing for The Times, along with Nicholas Snowman and Arianna Stassinopoulos, whom Nicholas had brought. That can’t have been long after Arianna came down from Cambridge, where she was president of the Union, but long before she became involved with Bernard Levin, and even longer before she moved to America, married and became the Huffington of the Huffington Post. I remember both she and Nicholas telling me that Frank was the coming man, and indeed he was. And Carole remembers how Arianna got up at the end of the meal and began to help with the washing up. Frank’s first book was Out of Order, and his last, published posthumously with the help of his widow Virginia, was Best Seat in the House. His books started a kind of tradition for us, followed as they were by Matthew Parris’s Times sketches and those of Ann Treneman.
When Private Eye did us the honour of featuring us in its ‘Greatest Publishers of the World’ series, I always suspected, perhaps wrongly, that it was Simon Hoggart who wrote it – he was certainly the first to phone and tell me about it. On the other hand, now that I come to think of it, perhaps it was Alan Coren, for it contained details (one third right, two thirds wrong, in the usual Eye manner) that only an insider would have known or indeed cared about. The best thing about it was that it was long.
Then there were Miles Kington’s bestselling Franglais books. A jazz bassist and member of the popular group Instant Sunshine, Miles was literary editor of Punch at the time. Quieter than Alan Coren, who tended to overshadow everyone at Punch, Miles had his own dry, deceptive wit, and his ‘Franglais’ column in the magazine had built up a cult following. Written as short, self-contained scenes under such titles as ‘Dans le Health Food Shop’ or ‘À la barbecue’, Franglais was, as Miles put it, ‘plus facile que l’Esperanto, beaucoup plus facile que le Français, more fun que le yoga ou karate, et absolument painless’. There were five Franglais books, Miles signing off with an original tome entitled Le Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman, a highly inventive compendium in Franglais of some of the world’s most famous novels, plays and stories – from ‘le book of Genesis’ to ‘Mlle Marple’. As well as introducing a word into the English language, the books spawned a Franglais TV series – short episodes, each taking a scene from the books and featuring famous stars: the episode I saw being recorded featured Wilfrid Brambell and Ron Moody. Ron was extremely patient with the aged Brambell, who, not surprisingly, kept stumbling over his tricky Franglais lines.
After the Franglais books came another cult book, this time drawn from The Guardian, where the influential feminist writer Jill Tweedie, whom we had already published, raised eyebrows with her weekly ‘Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist’. These letters, ostensibly from Martha to her younger, more liberated sister Mary, became a runaway success for us and then a BBC TV series starring Lynn Redgrave. A classic, the book was described by one critic as ‘the only published book I know which manages to be howlingly funny about the women’s movement without a shred of spite or cruelty’.
It was at about this time that the very popular actress and impersonator Janet Brown came into our lives. Janet was charm itself. She’d been making people laugh with the accuracy and wit of her mimicry since she was a child and now she was particularly famous for her uncanny impersonation of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. So good was it that the talk show host Johnny Carson in
vited her to America to take part in an elaborate candid-camera hoax that he planned to spring on the outrageous and very funny Joan Rivers. The ‘hit’ involved inviting Rivers to a dinner in Las Vegas, putting his private jet at her disposal, and arranging for Janet, in full Thatcher rig-out, to arrive in the VIP lounge of the airport at the same time. Janet marched in smartly, surrounded by ‘security guards’, and graciously allowed Rivers to be presented to her. Initially charming, Janet abruptly changed tone and began to berate the fawning comedian for the ‘absolutely disgusting’ things she’d said about the royal family. ‘I’ve spoken to President Reagan – as you must know, we’ve been friends for years,’ she went on, improvising brilliantly, ‘I’ve been told you have great difficulty understanding English people … Can you understand what I’m saying, Miss Rivers?’ ‘Oh, perfectly, Mrs Thatcher,’ Rivers stammered, wriggling beneath the onslaught and condescending tone.
Janet took a letter from her handbag and ordered Rivers to read it out, which, putting on her glasses, she did. The note was from Johnny Carson and read, ‘Dear Joanie, this is just a joke. And we hope you take it as such. If you don’t, we don’t care a ****.’ And, after she’d got over the shock, Joan did take it as such, roaring with laughter and requesting a photo of herself with ‘Mrs Thatcher’. The film of the hoax was broadcast three times on American TV, the sporting Rivers accepting that ‘if you dish it out, you have to be prepared to take it’.
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