Sincerely,
Ira C. Herbert
Convinced that Mr. Herbert, or Coca-Cola, had gone frigging mad, I took the letter in to Barney. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asked, before my belly laughter reassured him. I handed him the letter, which he read as carefully as if it contained yet another threat of lawsuit, then he too burst out laughing. “I assume you’re not going to let this pass,” he said. “I’ll show you my response,” I said.
Next morning I sat down at my trusty manual typewriter—I had not yet mastered the complex technology of the IBM Selectric—and replied thus:
Mr. Ira C. Herbert
Coca-Cola USA
P.O. Drawer 1734
Atlanta, Georgia 30301
Dear Mr. Herbert:
Thank you for your letter of March 25th, which has just reached me, doubtless because of the mail strike.
We note with sympathy your feeling that you have a proprietary interest in the phrase “It’s the real thing,” and I can fully understand that the public might be confused by our use of the expression, and mistake a book by a Harlem schoolteacher for a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Accordingly, we have instructed all our salesmen to notify bookstores that whenever a customer comes in and asks for a copy of Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher they should request the sales personnel to make sure that what the customer wants is the book, rather than a Coke. This, we think, should protect your interest and in no way harm ours.
We would certainly not want to dilute the distinctiveness of your trade slogan nor diminish its effectiveness as an advertising and merchandising tool, but it did not occur to us that since the slogan is so closely identified with your product, those who read our ad may well tend to go out and buy a Coke rather than our book. We have discussed this problem in an executive committee meeting, and by a vote of seven to six decided that, even if this were the case, we would be happy to give Coke the residual benefit of our advertising.
Problems not dissimilar to the ones you raise in your letter have occurred to us in the past. You may recall that we published Games People Play, which became one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of all time and spawned conscious imitations (Games Children Play, Games Psychiatrists Play, Games Ministers Play, etc.). I’m sure you’ll agree that this posed a far more direct and deadly threat to both the author and ourselves than our use of “It’s the real thing.” Further, Games People Play has become part of our language, and one sees it constantly in advertising, as a newspaper headline, etc. The same is true of another book we published six or seven years ago, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding.
Given our strong sentiments concerning the First Amendment, we will defend to the death your right to use “It’s the real thing” in any advertising you care to. We would hope you would do the same for us, especially when no one here in our advertising agency, I am sorry to say, realized that you owned the phrase. We were merely quoting in our ads Peter S. Prescott’s review of Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher in Look, which begins “Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher is the real thing, a short, spare, honest book which will, I suspect, be read a generation hence as a classic…”
With all best wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Richard Seaver
I fully expected a tart response from Mr. Herbert or, God forbid, an even higher Coca-Cola executive threatening me, or Grove, or both, with a million-dollar lawsuit, or even bodily harm. After all, our mere plastering of Che Guevara’s poster throughout New York, to forewarn its denizens of the impending arrival of excerpts from his diaries in the next issue of Evergreen Review, had prompted anti-Castro Cubans to lob a bomb into our premises at 64 University Place. Imagine, we thought, what an ever more powerful organization such as Coca-Cola might dream up as retaliation for our having borrowed—nay, usurped—its precious slogan. We put the staff on red alert, a move that perhaps saved the day, for if the Atlanta headquarters had planned an assault, its knowledge that we were all at our battle stations (for its spies, generally disguised as Coca-Cola truck drivers or deliverymen, were everywhere) doubtless deterred them.
In any event, at the dawn of the 1970s, we had far more serious matters to contend with.
* * *
The April 1970 issue of Evergreen Review had on its cover a fully clothed, futuristic male, looking for all the world like an astronaut–hockey player, complete with shoulder pads, a helmet, a Rangers jersey, gloves, and a hip-holster pistol. In his arms—one hockey glove grasping the midriff, the other the wrist—Mr. Freedom (for that’s who our hero was) held a scantily clad, sequin-spangled red-white-and-blue redhead, whose open mouth could just as easily be construed as a cry for help as a moan of ecstasy. Let the beholder decide.
The magazine cover, intriguing in itself to most, was also a prime example of Grove’s new internal synergy (a word we actually used in our discussions of Grove’s future, God help us all!). Not only did it supply grist for the Evergreen Review mill, it also served as the poster for the U.S. release of the Grove film, Mr. Freedom, a not-too-subtle satire on America as it moved out of the turbulent 1960s. A scathing attack on American foreign policy, especially its “vulgar and grotesque” involvement in Vietnam and the Strangelove notion that democracy had to be brought to the rest of the world, even at the cost of destroying it, the French-made film was written and directed by the ex-patriot (sic) William Klein. It starred John Abbey as Mr. Freedom; Delphine Seyrig (who had been propelled to cinematic stardom as the Garboesque lead in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad) as Marie-Madeleine, organizer of the Whores-for-Freedom network; Donald Pleasence (whose voice and accent bore an uncanny resemblance to Lyndon Johnson’s) as Dr. Freedom, the mad mastermind behind the movement to save the world from anti-freedom infiltration; and Philippe Noiret as Moujik Man, Russia’s answer to Mr. Freedom.
On the surface it was a perfect vehicle for the Grove Movie Machine: irreverent, sexy, outrageous, politically pointed, a no-holds-barred attack on the establishment. Unfortunately, its script, dialogue, and direction, alas, were sufficiently amateurish to give film critics a golden opportunity to lambaste it.
The rest of issue number 77 was vintage Grove. In addition to a cover tie-in interview with William Klein about the making and meaning of Mr. Freedom, there was a storyboard sequence using stills from the movie. The lead article was by the black writer and activist Julius Lester, whose Look Out, Whitey! we had reprinted. Entitled “The Black Writer and the New Censorship,” it attacked the white-dominated book-publishing industry for its sorry record of not publishing black writers and, even more egregious, its seeming refusal to hire black editors. Although Grove had published a number of black writers—Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, a.k.a. Amiri Baraka, Julius Lester himself—as a percentage of our lists, blacks were underrepresented, so in effect Julius’s piece was as much an attack on Grove as it was on the industry as a whole. I thought the piece important and right-on, but as Julius’s editor I felt I should discuss it with Barney. He read it with an increasingly black (no pun) scowl on his face, then said: “Do you really think we should publish this?” “Absolutely,” I said. He nodded. “Okay. Let’s make it the lead article.” That’s what endeared Grove to me, I reminded myself. What other house would have opened its editorial pages to a voice whose slings and arrows were aimed directly at its heart? The issue also contained Tom Hayden’s “Repression and Rebellion,” his response to being convicted in February by a Chicago jury “of having crossed state lines to incite rioting” during the 1968 Democratic National Convention; Nat Hentoff’s “Keeping Ecology Alive,” a call to arms to save the planet long before that cause became fashionable; and, most important, the aforementioned chapter from Justice Douglas’s then-forthcoming book, Points of Rebellion, entitled “Redress and Revolution,” which echoed the antiestablishment themes of Hayden and Hentoff, likening the political climate of Washington at the turn of the decade to that of King George of England at the time of the American Revolution. Attacking the Pentagon, the h
ighway lobby, and the CIA, Justice Douglas stopped just short of calling for a new American Revolution. Pretty heady stuff, we thought, coming from a member of the Supreme Court, though clearly his views did not constitute a majority opinion.
As we entered the 1970s, we were still offering up the same combination of provocation, social consciousness, and (tasteful?) sex that had served us so well during the previous decade. Thumbing your nose at the establishment (Klein) as you taunt the censors (Freed) and proselytize (Douglas, Hentoff) was no simple task. But somehow Grove and Evergreen had mastered it, and the combination was still working on all cylinders.
Or was it?
54
Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers, Arise
ONE DAY in early April 1970, about the time Mr. Freedom was hitting the stores and stands, Barney and I arrived back at Grove after lunch to see two scruffy young men, barely out of their teens to judge by their zit-scarred faces, entering the building. They were clothed, if that is the proper term, in jeans and jackets so tattered your eyes automatically shifted downward in search of the mendicant’s paper cup. But if they were juvenile bums, why did they disappear through the magic G into the building?
“Who are those two guys?” Barney growled.
“They work here,” I said, vaguely remembering them.
“Who for?” he rightly wanted to know.
“For Myron. In the book club.”
“Do you know their names?” Barney insisted. I was afraid he would ask that. “As the number-two person in this company, shouldn’t you know the names of all the people who work here?” Before I could answer, he added: “The fact is, I don’t know the names of half the goddamn people here anymore.”
“Me neither,” I confessed.
“Well, that’s not a good situation,” Barney muttered.
Fortunately for our mood, the ever-cheerful Frieda, perched atop her swiveling stool behind the giant new switchboard, looking more and more like a Kewpie-doll space cadet in Star Trek, greeted us with a warm “Hi, Barney. Hi, Dick. I have a stack of messages for both of you.” But as we entered the executive elevator, both of us felt an uncomfortable twinge at the memory of the two bedraggled persons who had preceded us through the big G. Grove was changing—had changed over the past three or four years; that was undeniable. Had we grown too fast? And was this building, fruit of our one conservative decision to channel our windfall I Am Curious millions not into speculative new book titles but into real estate (“you can never lose putting your money in real estate,” an adviser had assured us), had this become a dangerously divisive element? Though he was silent, I suspected the same questions were going through Barney’s mind, too.
* * *
On Wednesday, April 8, 1970, a young woman who worked in fulfillment for the book club ran into Martin Quayle, the Grove comptroller, in the downstairs hallway.
“Oh, Marty,” she gushed, “we’ve just had the greatest organizing meeting!”
Not quite sure he had heard correctly, Quayle, feigning pleasure at the news, probed a bit. “Oh, yes, where was that?”
“At union headquarters on Twenty-sixth Street, of course. Where do you think?”
Union headquarters, it turned out, was that of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America—at first glance, or even second, a totally unlikely bedfellow for an avant-garde publisher, or any publisher for that matter. Grove’s warehouse had already been organized two or three years before with no opposition and no subsequent problems. But the notion of unionizing book publishers’ editorial, or even sales and marketing, arms had always struck industry executives as nonsensical. Absolute freedom editorially—to pick and publish the books you want—was the sine qua non of the business. How would a unionized editorial staff handle a manuscript attacking the labor movement? Or a book supporting a political candidate anathema to the AFL-CIO, of which the Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers—the union that had taken over Grove—were part? Or, God forbid, a vegetarian cookbook?
If Quayle’s information proved correct, that Grove was threatened with an attempt to be unionized, why in the hell the Fur and Leather boys? Had they run out of butcher shops, hog butchers for the world, sheep, and beef? Whatever the reasons for their expansionist ambitions, further probing revealed that they had formed within their union a Publishing Employees Organizing Committee. One small leap across a meadow of sheep or cows and, voilà, you land squarely in Bookland. It made all sorts of sense, if you didn’t think about it.
But why us? Because we were known to be liberal, therefore pro-union, therefore unlikely to resist their efforts? Because we had grown so fast that the union knew we had scads of new, low-paid employees, always a fertile ground? Because, the more paranoid among us deduced, the government, weary of our parries and thrusts through the years, had co-opted the union into making its frontal attack, all expenses paid by some shadow organization in Washington? That was Barney’s firm belief: for years he had been convinced that there was a mole among us, reporting to the FBI or CIA or whatever antisubversive agency to which he (she?) reported. If most of us old-timers tended to chalk Barney’s conviction up to paranoia, we also had to remember that we were the only American publisher in history to have been bombed. What’s more, the same anti-Castro people who had tossed a fragmentation grenade into our second-story window two years before, destroying the production department, had that same night bombed half a dozen other sites in the city, yet when arrested and brought to trial, they were let go, a bizarre carriage of non-justice sufficient to make the healthiest mind paranoid.
In any event, the rumor of the union meeting was soon confirmed: not only had the Fur and Leather boys formed a publishing committee, but several disgruntled Grove employees had already rushed to embrace it. Barney was livid. “We haven’t got enough problems around here without this!” he growled. He had a point. After three or four years of one victory after another, some Pyrrhic, some real, both in the courts and in the marketplace, there were increasing signs of strain within the company. The seemingly endless flood of moneys from I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue) was finally slowing to a trickle. The cost overruns on the new Mercer Street building had been staggering. The book business in general was stagnating. Our three mass-market lines—Black Cat, Zebra, and Venus—were not selling through as well as we had planned, and the returns were fast eating up the receivables. More, the so-called synergy between the book club and the publishing arm was increasingly tenuous.
But without doubt our greatest sin had been expanding too fast. Still tiny by corporate America’s standards, we had nonetheless more than quadrupled sales over the past three or four years. Spurred by the fact we were a public company, traded on the NASDAQ exchange, we felt for the first time the need to grow, if only to keep up with our image as “a smart little company that could do no wrong,” as one misguided broker had dubbed us, either because he really believed it or, more likely, because he was touting us to his clients as the newest way to get rich overnight. In any event, in this cruel month of April 1970, our new thirty-two-thousand-square-foot building housed only half the total staff. The editorial department, for years two and a half strong, now counted a dozen more-or-less full-time employees.1
Throughout most of its existence, Grove had knowingly and willfully chosen to ignore organization charts detailing lines of authority. Since for years many of us had worn several hats, often as many as six or seven, it was hopeless to try to draw up such charts, much less implement them. When an urgent need appeared, anyone qualified, even peripherally, stepped in to plug the gap. Though hired as managing editor, a job in most publishing houses meant to keep the flow of manuscripts on track, I soon became co-editor with Barney of Evergreen Review; editor in chief of the book division; production director for several months after Richard Brodney departed; sales rep for part of the northeastern territory when our commission rep for that territory suddenly resigned; head of inventory control, making certain our growing backlist was never out o
f stock; and design consultant with Barney for our covers and jackets, liaising for years with Roy Kuhlman. That for starters.
Strategic plans and five-year forecasts, which I heard some of my uptown colleagues rhapsodizing about, seemed to us useless, if not risible. How could we, or anyone, in good faith make such futuristic predictions for 1972 or 1973, much less 1975, when we hadn’t the foggiest notion what we would be publishing in those years? We recognized that book publishing is by its very nature a seat-of-the-pants business, where instinct and intuition must reign. Unlike the larger houses, several of which were owned by corporate masters, we had no imposed mandate to grow by 5 or 10 or 15 percent per annum. If we survived and paid our bills, and hopefully did right by our Faithful Old Authors and introduced to the world new voices, that was enough. That philosophy had served us well in the past and would, we firmly believed, in the new decade as well.
But the hard fact was, Grove had changed. When we were small and squeaking by, it was all for one and one for all. No one was making much money, so who was there to envy? We were all making a decent wage, but the whole point of being at Grove was that it was exciting. And freewheeling. Bombs away and a laugh a day … Throughout the 1960s, we had the feeling we were shaking up the gray-flannel establishment and striking a chord among members of the younger generation, many of whom, judging by their letters, were telling us we had changed their lives.
The world too had changed, more than we realized. Our battles against censorship, our espousal of writers the establishment had hitherto disdained, had opened the doors, if not the minds, of other publishers, far more ready now to take on authors and subjects that had previously been taboo. Our piddling advances to authors only too happy to be published at all in the 1960s now began to look like what they were—piddling—with larger houses ready to offer several times what we could or would muster. Too, women’s liberation was forging to the forefront of people’s consciousness, and we who thought of ourselves as liberators were now being viewed—by a minority, perhaps, but a very vocal one—as repressive. Or worse: exploiters of women. But as the news that day of the unionization attempt reached us, we were only vaguely aware of these sea changes, if at all.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 50
