Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  The last signing of all was at WH Smith, in the Brent Cross shopping centre. There was a short gap in the schedule and Ali suddenly asked if our office was near and whether I thought people would like it if he came by so he could thank them for all the work they’d put in. ‘Thrilled’ would have been more accurate, as the owner of the general store below our office was, too, when Ali ambled in to buy something to drink. After that we still had a little time, and Ali suggested we called in at our house, which he had heard was on the way. Now it was the turn of our neighbours to stare in wonder. Ali, immediately at home, drank some tea and fell asleep on the sofa in our living room. When he stood up, our house suddenly seemed very small.

  The tour was over, but two years later we did it again, on a slightly reduced scale, when we published Howard Bingham’s photographic book, Muhammad Ali: A Thirty-Year Journey. Howard had been with Ali through all his dramas and adventures and had recorded them with great style. He was Ali’s loyal friend and Ali wanted to repay him by supporting his book. There was a play about the boxer opening in London at the Mermaid Theatre for which he was coming over, so we tied everything in with that and the cost to us was relatively modest. On that occasion we went to Oxford again, but this time in real style. I’d planned to drive everyone there as usual, but at the last minute a fabulous-looking limo appeared outside the hotel where Ali was staying, the driver offering to take us to Oxford for a nominal sum to cover the petrol: it seemed the experience of driving Ali was recompense enough. So there I was, back in dreamland again, with Ali, Howard Bingham and two of their companions stretched out in the back of the car with me in the middle – four large, powerful black men who suddenly turned on me laughingly and said, ‘We’ve got you, whitey!’ as they sang Whitney Houston songs at the top of their high voices, Ali smiling that big grin of his, with no fists flying this time, and no Bibles.

  We were all to meet up again in unusual circumstances, and not in England, but that is for another chapter. Meanwhile, as a tailpiece and as a tribute to Muhammad Ali’s fine spirit, let me recount a story told to me in New York by the TV boxing commentator Reg Gutteridge. Reg had been rushed into hospital for a major operation, and Ali, arriving in London, had noticed that he wasn’t among the circle of friends who normally greeted him. ‘Where’s Reg?’ he asked, and when told he was in hospital Ali immediately took off in a taxi to see him. ‘There I was,’ Reg told me, ‘just coming round from the anaesthetic, and I open my eyes and see the big man sitting on the end of my bed. I really did think I’d gone to heaven!’

  And that, apart from his boxing prowess, is why Muhammad Ali really was the greatest.

  22

  FRANKFURT CALLS

  I never really graduated from the noisy, grotty hotels near the Frankfurt Bahnhof, their rooms awash with the flickering, migraine-inducing lights from the neighbouring strip joints. For some reason, even when others were footing the bill, it went against the grain to shell out the exorbitant sums demanded by the better hotels: even the cheaper ones were costly enough. One, where I stayed a couple of years ago, was by far the worst, its tiny doorway squashed between the entrance of two sleazy nightclubs. Embarrassingly, it was in the so-called lobby of that hotel that I’d arranged to meet the American agent Scott Mendel, with whom I was having dinner. It was the night before the fair and I’d only just checked in so it was too late to change the venue. As it was, within seconds of stepping out of the hotel doorway we both had heavily lipsticked young ladies on our arms, and it took us the whole length of the street to shake them off. We cooled down in the Gaylord Indian restaurant opposite the station.

  Frankfurt could bring winners and losers, and I certainly made my share of mistakes (though not of the kind the above might have led to). I do, however, vividly recall walking back to my hotel one night and spotting a certain well-respected British publisher slinking out of Dr Müller’s Sex Shop – and reading a few days later that he’d suffered a fatal heart attack on the train back to England. A heavy price to pay for what I imagine was just a peep! On a lighter level, and while still on that theme, shortly after I got back from one of my first Frankfurts, when we were all still rather on top of each other in a small office, there was a call from my irrepressible friend Jeffrey Pike, who announced deadpan to the young girl who answered the phone, ‘This is the sex shop at Frankfurt Airport. Please tell Mr Robson his goods have arrived’ – a message she took seriously and conveyed to me loudly across the room, to everyone’s amusement.

  However, once you get away from the Moselstrasse there is a more seemly side to Frankfurt, and in the early days when we stayed right through to the bitter end (the fair has always stretched on far too long), I’d take time off and stroll down to the river, on one occasion exploring with Carole the city’s splendid art gallery. I’ve also spent several memorable evenings at the Frankfurt Opera. Generally, I’d try to avoid being alone at night in Frankfurt, there being too many ghosts around, so it was always good to link up with American colleagues like Hillel Black or Herman Graf (who sounds like, and is every bit as entertaining as, Jackie Mason). One indelible evening, however, I found myself wandering alone past a large church and, peering in, saw a woman kneeling in deep prayer. I could sense her tears and realised that grief has no nationality. What her loss was, if loss it was, I could only imagine, but her obvious distress affected me, and I could easily have slipped in beside her and recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

  As I recounted earlier, when I first went to Frankfurt, I was uneasy at setting foot in Germany, and that uneasiness remained. Visiting the fair again just a couple of years ago, I wrote a poem called ‘Vigil’, which ends:

  And yet, and yet…

  It’s over seventy years since

  that war began, but if

  I, a Jew, scion

  of that haunted race,

  forget, who will remember,

  and if none remembers, the

  dead are truly dead.

  I don’t accuse,

  am on my guard,

  that’s all.

  The poem, set on Frankfurt’s large railway station, expresses my ambivalent feelings and has been read at various Holocaust events. These days, it must be said, when the fair is on, Frankfurt couldn’t be more international and as one mixes with all the American and foreign publishers it could almost be any city. Even the strip clubs don’t seem to blaze and twinkle as brightly as they did when first I went there, but then again, perhaps I don’t twinkle quite so brightly either, these many years on.

  One year, quite early in the days of Robson Books, the dates for Frankfurt clashed with Yom Kippur, a fast day and the most sacred in the Jewish calendar, which even non-observant Jews tend to observe. It was not the day for a Jewish publisher to be offering his wares behind a stand in Frankfurt, and the fact that it was Germany added an extra dimension. Despite the apologies of the organisers, there were many protests, and some publishers decided to boycott the fair that year. However, many did not, and a special service was arranged for the day in question (the US publishers even flying in a rabbi to officiate). I hesitated, but finally decided to attend, a decision I regretted. On the eve of Yom Kippur, I went to the specially arranged Kol Nidre service, and on the day itself to a service at a large Frankfurt synagogue. I should have rejoiced at the fact that there were now synagogues in the city, but for some reason I can’t quite grasp I felt uneasy from the moment I went in. Perhaps it was the lack of decorum (non-stop chatter and children racing, uncontrolled, everywhere); perhaps it was because the essential dimension of spirituality seemed to me to be missing. Shameful that I, hardly an observant Jew, should have felt this way when some of those talking, talking were perhaps survivors or the family of survivors. I left after an hour or so, and as night fell and the festival concluded, I joined a table of publishers for a special meal to end the fast – among them Peter Mayer, Erwin Glikes, Roger Straus (of Farrar Straus & Giroux) and Beverly Gordey from Doubleday (my old Chagall colleague). />
  Yom Kippur has a haunting presence and, after the dinner, as I walked those Frankfurt streets in the dark, I found myself thinking of a great-uncle of mine with whom I’d become friendly, my paternal grandmother’s younger brother, Dr Kurt Selmar Rosenberg. Born in Heilsberg in 1886, my uncle Selmar was a physicist and a man of wide cultural interests – an intellectual of the old school. He’d fought for his native Germany in World War I, being awarded the Iron Cross first class, and later, in the pre-war Hitler years, was active in the underground, which led to his arrest in 1938 and internment in the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was perhaps too interested in history and fired by politics for his own good. A year later, by then in poor health, he’d somehow managed to escape, travelling through Holland to England. In Paris after the war, descending the Eiffel Tower in a lift, he’d found himself face to face with the brutal commandant of the camp he’d been in. Too startled to confront him, he followed the man into the crowd until he disappeared. My uncle was old and frail then, and couldn’t have done otherwise, yet it haunted him, and as he recounted the story to me in his excitable way, he found it difficult to explain how he felt. He didn’t need to.

  * * *

  The bar of the luxurious Frankfurter Hof hotel was, and to some extent still is, the after-dinner place to go and be seen, but at one time there was also a lavish party given by the German publisher Bertelsmann, who owned Leisure Circle, a long-defunct British book club to whom we sold titles. And while we never actually received an invitation to this wonderland event, we would join the long queue at the door and when people we knew from the book club saw us, they would nod us in past the security guards. That was as much a badge of honour as downing the overpriced drinks at the Frankfurter Hof bar, which could be a lively place. On one occasion, an American publishing couple I was with provided a violent cabaret when the bruiser of a husband thought someone had jostled his pretty, petite wife and he rounded on the man, throwing a glass of brandy in his eyes and smashing the glass on his forehead. That stopped the chatter for a moment or two, while the husband was bundled out and the pieces of glass (and the blood) were cleared up, before normal, expensive service was resumed.

  A couple of years ago, I was invited by an American publisher to join him and a group of friends for dinner at an old restaurant by the river. We waited some time for the husband of one of the party to join us. Eventually, he turned up with cuts on his forehead and his eyes blackened with bruises, explaining to his wife in a slurred voice that after a few (!) drinks in the Frankfurter Hof bar he’d stumbled down the hotel steps, hitting his head as he fell. I imagine it was an everyday event for the hotel’s poker-faced doormen (perhaps also for the man’s poker-faced wife).

  Many Frankfurt stories are apocryphal, but an amusing one related by Patrick Kidd in the Times diary after last year’s fair rings all too true. An American publisher had been drinking heavily in the Frankfurter Hof bar and eventually decided it was time for bed. Staggering down the steps, he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to his hotel – the Frankfurter Hof. ‘You’re already there,’ the surprised driver told him. ‘Thank you,’ mumbled the publisher. ‘Next time don’t drive so fast.’

  Ironically, it was at Frankfurt, in 1975, that I was made to remove a book from our stand because it displayed a swastika on the cover. It wasn’t a book on Nazi Germany, but a humorous book by Alan Coren, who always liked to have arresting titles and jackets for his books. When we were discussing the cover for this one he’d come up with a typically off-the-wall idea: ‘Books on cats, golf and the Third Reich always sell, so let’s call it Golfing for Cats and slap a swastika in the middle.’ It didn’t exactly spark an international incident, but we got some press coverage and Alan took mischievous pleasure in having created a stir.

  Although, as at any book fair, we were there to buy and sell book rights, and that was important, the people we met over the years were a vital part of the mix – intelligent, cultured publishers with whom lasting friendships were often struck, leading to further meetings and dealings in London, New York, Paris or wherever. Many have now vanished from the scene, and Frankfurt is the poorer for their absence, as the rather anonymous conglomerates spread and dominate. I think of George Braziller, whose literary list I always admired and with whom I’d wander out of the halls to share a sandwich at lunchtime; Larry Ashmead, the courteous éminence grise at Harper & Row, who always welcomed me to his empire, and whose end-of-year ‘funnies’ I would look forward to – a compendium of odd and amusing gaffes and stories from the publishing year; William (Bill) Targ, the editorial head of Putnam’s, who invited me to join him for lunch at his regular table at the Algonquin when I first went to New York. As I now watch the books of the poet/singer Patti Smith climbing the bestseller lists, I remember that it was over that lunch that Bill offered me a volume by the young Patti, of whom I’d scarcely heard at the time, immediately withdrawing his offer when he saw me hesitate. I’d had my chance! Another American publisher who received me warmly in those early days was Sally Richardson’s late husband, Sandy, the big white chief at Doubleday. Tall, elegant and handsome, Sandy Richardson seemed to have all the time in the world for the fledgling publisher I then was, just as Sally has always had when I’ve ventured into the St Martin’s Press offices. Erwin Glikes, the erudite publisher of the Free Press, invited me to lunch in the Macmillan private dining room – a privilege – and it was through him that I met the then CEO of Macmillan, Jeremiah Kaplan, who came to our stand at Frankfurt having heard we had a photographic book entitled Leningrad’s Ballet. But he was disappointed, thumbing through the arty pages and demanding, ‘Where are the stars? I see no fucking stars.’ Not a man to mince his words. And finally, it was through our dear friend Tom McCormack, about whom I wrote earlier, that I was always invited to breakfast at the Ritz by those other two fine St Martin’s stalwarts, Tom Dunne and Charlie Spicer. Tom Dunne has bought quite a few of our titles for his own prestigious imprint over the years, and we have generally lunched together at Frankfurt, too – importantly, we share a passion for the ice creams always on sale near the fair entrance. Colourful times, colourful people, and real publishers all.

  Probably our biggest early Frankfurt buy was Uri Geller’s autobiography, from Arnold Dolin at Praeger. Uri was then at the height of his spoon-bending fame, and if we had paid half the price it would have been fine, but that’s the way things go in publishing. Sell 10,000 copies of a hardback and all’s well – but not if you printed 20,000! Shortly after the fair, Carole and I were in New York and the publishers took us for a celebration lunch (no wonder!). Uri was living in New York at the time, and we met up with him to discuss launching the book in London. As always, he was full of enthusiasm and charm, and drove us back to our hotel in his larger-than-life car. Whether or not his psychic powers are just highly skilful deception, I never fathomed. I watched him closely over a dramatic week in England and never saw any signs of trickery, though he was a superb showman. Our own Geller show started at the Martini Terrace in the Haymarket, where somehow Uri identified the famous TV astronomer Patrick Moore, who discovered that all the keys in his pocket had bent, which caused a sensation. The press, of course, loved it, as Uri well knew they would. (Less sensationally, an aunt of mine was unable to drive home when she found her car keys bent.) Uri always knew who to pick on, how to get the maximum attention. At Alan Coren’s suggestion, I took him to a Punch lunch. Sceptics have claimed that Uri’s brother-in-law Shipi always goes ahead to venues to ‘fix’ things, but Shipi wasn’t there on that occasion, and in any case couldn’t have known the layout of the Punch offices. There were the usual people at the lunch – the Punch staff writers and regular contributors, cartoonists and several guests – about thirty in all, with the then editor William Davis at the head of the table.

  Uri began in his usual dramatic fashion: to everyone’s delight, the editor’s spoon not only bent but seemed to turn to rubber as he drank his soup. Then Uri asked one of th
e cartoonists to go to the end of the table and draw, while he sat at the other end and also drew. When they had both finished and revealed their separate drawings, Uri’s matched the cartoonist’s almost exactly. After that, he had those brilliant, sophisticated, cynical writers and artists in the palm of his hand.

  Then he received an approach from the Marquess of Bath, challenging him to bend the large, solid silver centrepiece on display in the dining room at Longleat. Uri readily accepted, and we all went down the afternoon before the event, spending the night there as guests of the Marquess – or ‘Henry’, as Uri immediately called him – and joining him for an informal supper at which Uri did his impressive spoon-bending. If the Marquess was impressed, so was his librarian when he discovered that several old books that hadn’t been moved for years had ‘jumped’ off the shelves in the night and were lying on the floor, along with a framed oil painting. Someone claimed to have heard the noise. The only person who wasn’t surprised was Uri. Keen to publicise the visit (which suited us nicely), ‘Henry’ had invited the Queen’s jewellers to witness the event, together with special guests and the national press and TV. Before that, however, his son, Viscount Weymouth, took us on a tour of his quarters, the walls of which were decorated with his erotic paintings – the Kama Sutra suite, I believe he called it. Back in the sober of light of day, everyone assembled around the large table as Uri moved in on the centrepiece, rubbing its solid silver arms gently, until they flopped. This was done not only under the close scrutiny of those present, but of the BBC’s cameras too, so millions of viewers saw everything in close-up on the main evening news.