It seemed possible now that Sánchez and González might be able to locate part of the diary, and they were determined to go to La Paz to hunt for it, but now a new danger arose. A radical priest the two writers brought to meet Liss had somehow learned of his meeting with the general and accused him of being with the CIA. Nothing Liss said could sway the good father, and the deal was on the verge of foundering. But this priest had been in New York and had heard of Grove. “I told him all about the offices of Grove Press,” Liss wrote in his report, “and pretty soon with my knowledge of Grove I think he became somewhat convinced that I was not a CIA agent, but a representative of Grove Press.”
While Liss was on this adventure, I told him, obliquely, to expect a visit. He thought I meant that his wife was coming and I couldn’t make it clear that I was using the name of his wife as a blind. So he was thoroughly surprised when he received a call from me a few days later.
Using the alias Roger Tansey, I had traveled to La Paz, Bolivia with Fred Jordan because it had become very difficult to communicate with Joe while he was there, and I had started to feel deeply concerned about him. We met Sánchez and González and made a deal for their book, which became The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia. And, in addition to the six pages of the diary Liss had acquired from them and already had in hand, he was able to buy for us some eleven photos of Che. We decided to let Sánchez secure the other diary pages, which we learned had been scattered among several Bolivian generals, and send them to us.
The final hazard was getting the photos and diary pages out of the country. This turned out to be easy. As Liss explained, “Fred Jordan put them in his pocket, simple as that.”
We were never able to acquire the entire Che Guevara diary, but we did publish the pages we obtained in Evergreen, No. 57 (August 1968), along with an illustrated feature we prepared, “Who’s Who in Che’s Diary.”
On July 26, 1968, while the issue with the diary excerpts was hitting the newsstands, Cuban exiles bombed Grove’s offices on University Place with a grenade launcher. According to a man who lived next door, a group of men in a pickup truck drove past the building and shot a grenade right through the large front window on the second floor. Pow!—better than the Bay of Pigs! It was done at a late hour, fortunately. No one was inside and nobody got hurt. I heard about the bombing shortly after it happened, 3:41 a.m., when I received a phone call from Grove’s wonderful office manager, Laura Martin, who was the first Grove person on the scene. She discovered a knife tear in a poster made from our Evergreen Review, No. 51 cover of February 1968, the marvelous, iconic portrait of Che Guevara done by Paul Davis—it had been stabbed. That was interesting. The police were the only people in the building when Laura arrived.
The neighbor who saw the bombing told me the police hadn’t taken much time to look for evidence at the scene. He also said that he had recently had a lot of trouble with his telephone; the sound was just awful. He asked an engineer friend to check it, and the friend figured out that someone had accidentally tapped into his line, which was affecting the sound level of the phone. He also said he could hear every phone call I made on my private office line, the real object of the tap.
Around that time a number of other places in New York were bombed, including an attempt at the apartment of the Cuban delegate to the UN, but they got somebody else’s apartment by accident. The Canadian consulate and Japan Airlines were also bombed—groups the anti-Castro Cuban groups imagined were their enemies.
Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, who was working as an editor at Grove at the time, described the aftermath of the bombing in the fall 1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction: “They wrecked one office completely, blew out the windows overlooking University Place, and made a general mess. Grove got enormous publicity out of it, ‘publisher of porno-left-wing-radical-oddball-unreadable-avant-garde books bombed!’ … Looking back on this incident, it doesn’t seem that we were much affected. I mean, we came in to work, looked at the damage, chatted with the cops, and went to work.”95
In Evergreen, No. 60 (November 1968) we featured “The Story of Tania: Che’s Woman in Bolivia,” again by González and Sánchez. This time they wrote about Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, who later took the name Tania—the woman who guided Roth, Debray, and the other journalist away from Che’s camp. She was born in Buenos Aires in 1937 to German parents who had fled to Argentina to escape the Nazis. After the war her parents traveled back to Germany, where Tamara, as she was then called, attended university and became involved in the Socialist party. But she felt a bond with the region where she had been born. In 1960 she met Che, who was traveling with a Cuban trade delegation in East Germany. She went to Cuba the following year, changed her name, and became involved in educational and women’s causes. Later she traveled with Che throughout Latin America.
Tania was killed by Bolivian soldiers on August 31, 1967, while crossing the Río Grande with eight other members of her group. The only woman who fought alongside Che in Bolivia, Tania became a feminist and revolutionary hero—Patricia Hearst even took the name Tania when she joined the Symbionese Liberation Army after being kidnapped by them in 1974.
16
Attack from Within, Attack from Without
On April 13, 1970, the Grove offices at 214 Mercer Street were taken over by a group of eight feminists in protest of what they claimed were dismissals of Grove employees friendly to the formation of a union. Among them was Grove employee Robin Morgan. Quite famous for her feminist activism, Morgan had worked as an editor for us for about two years. During that time there were rumblings about union organizing.
Fred Jordan, Cy Rembar, and I were on a visit to Denmark to screen some films when our offices were occupied. Unaware of what was happening, I called the office and reached my assistant and asked, “Everything going okay?”
“Well,” she replied, “there is something special going on today. I’m on the fifth floor.” Our office was on the sixth floor.
I asked, “Why?” and she said, “Well, some other people are in your office,” and went on to explain that my office had been occupied by a women’s liberation group.
All my personal correspondence and business records were stored in my office, where these women were barricaded. I said, “Get ’em out!”
She said, “No, they won’t come out,” so I said, “Go in and throw them out,” and she replied, “No, nobody wants to do that.”
I realized she was right.
Meantime, I was going crazy. What are they doing while they’re in there?
I said, “Well, if none of you have enough guts to get them out, call the police.” So they did. But the women requested that female cops arrest them. After an unsuccessful attempt was made to find policewomen, male cops finally went in and carried them out. They were arrested and booked.
As far as I know, the women didn’t steal any documents from my office, but they certainly smashed up the place and draped flags out the window as if they’d taken over Grove Press. And there I was sitting in Denmark.
In her book Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, Robin Morgan described how she gained access to the building at 8:00 that Monday morning. She told the security guard that she and her many friends were there to clean out her office because she had been fired the previous Friday. Morgan wrote in her book, “Once upstairs, I sever some of the elevator cables, strew Vaseline-coated thumbtacks on the stairs, lock the doors, and pour glue in the locks. Then I hang our Women’s Liberation banner out the window of the executive office.”96
They had also made a flyer with their demands which included something to the effect, “No more mansions on Long Island for boss-man Rosset and his executive yes-men flunkies, segregated mansions built with extortionist profits from selling The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a best-seller—and not one black welfare mother a penny better off after millions of copies made Rosset rich!”
When I came back from Denmark I found everything in chaos and the plan to unionize Grove Press in full f
orce. As I explained in an interview published by Smoke Signals years later, people were marching around the building screaming, “You make all your money on obscenity; give all this money to black women of America and to Betty Shabazz.”97 Malcolm X’s widow, Shabazz was a friend and seemed happy with what we were doing for her.
They also demanded a twenty-four-hour-a-day childcare center. I said, “Okay, there’s an empty lot across the street owned by NYU with a fence around it. I will lead you there. And we will put up a tent.” Nobody would follow me. We exchanged hostile words all day in front of the building.
Emily Goodman, a woman I had hired to be staff counsel of Grove Press because I wanted to be in the forefront of using women legal professionals, instead became the lawyer for the women who occupied the office. As someone who viewed himself as a champion of women’s liberation, I was utterly taken aback. I found myself assailed as one of Grove’s “wealthy capitalist dirty old straight white men” involved in the “scapegoating of women.”
I was present in early May at the court hearing for the women who were arrested. They wanted to go to jail, and were bound and determined to do so. We went before the judge, and Emily Goodman demanded that the court return the women’s fingerprints. She told the judge, “You’ve illegally taken our fingerprints, and we demand them back! And we want a twenty-four-hour childcare center in the courtroom right now.” They had a couple of babies with them. Robin Morgan’s baby was yelling and crying.
While all this was going on, I cornered the young arresting officer in an outer corridor and asked him whether it would influence him in making future arrests if we dropped the charges. He said it would not, though the DA insisted it would be a terrible tragedy if we did. Our lawyer, Cy Rembar, following up on this, asked the same policeman on the stand whether it would have any effect on him performing similar duties in the future if the charges were dropped. Again he said no. Goodman was screaming at the judge and Morgan’s baby was screaming, so the judge looked around the crowded courtroom, said, “I agree with Mr. Rembar,” and dismissed the case.
I think something sad happened in the feminist movement when a faction became opposed to what they considered sexist and pornographic writing. There seemed to me to be a failure to understand the nature of fantasy and creativity. Politically, it got all fouled up. If you suppress erotic art, anything that might be considered too sexual, and combine that tendency with general discrimination against women in multiple ways, you find yourself well on the way to fascism. Years ago I was asked to debate Betty Friedan, a very well known women’s rights activist of her time, about pornography, or obscenity, or whatever. We got together before the meeting and as we talked to each other we realized there was no conflict between us. We were in agreement. We became friends and our debate became a discussion and an analysis of the status quo in our society.
Besides the women’s lib group, a union with a left-wing history targeted us. It all added up to an enormous outside onslaught against Grove Press. I deeply believe the FBI and CIA backed it all, and that Grove’s antiwar stance had something to do with it. But I don’t think the women were part of the conspiracy or consciously aware of being duped. Nevertheless, they played a vital role in bringing Grove down. We won the battle, if you want to call it winning, but we lost the war. They destroyed us. It is hard to explain it to people on the outside, but it really was the end of a fully functioning Grove Press. We lost key employees.
The union, which I believe was aiding and abetting the government effort to bring Grove down, was headed by Henry Foner of the Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers Joint Board, affiliated with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. It was a left-wing union that had been red-baited almost out of existence during the McCarthy era. They were attempting to unionize Grove Press when no other publishing company was unionized. (The only exception was Harper & Row, which had a “company” union that was not affiliated with any independent group.) Why did they start with us if not because they were put up to it?
As I recall, the union had in its constitution a provision that you could not be a member if you believed in violence or in overthrowing the government. I believe this clause had been forced on them by the McCarthy people; otherwise the union would have been destroyed. Well, that wasn’t our fault. But there they were attacking us. So we counterattacked. Jules Geller, who worked at Grove, was a Trotskyite from World War II. He was a brilliant guy and devastating because he knew exactly how to provoke what we considered the pro-union group. They supposedly adored Castro and Mao, so we made up statements that we would hang in the elevators, things like: “What Would Fidel Think If He Knew a Union That Cuts Up Animals Was Unionizing Grove?” We plastered slogans like that all over the place. The union supporters wore buttons that said “I Am Furious (Yellow)” so when I started wearing one, too, they took theirs off.
Do you want to be a member of a union in which you can’t be a Black Panther? We didn’t even need to say that explicitly, we just handed out the constitution to everybody who worked at Grove. There were a number of young black guys working in our book club—our manager of clerical workers had been hiring lots of young people and he made a personal thing out of hiring young radicals, many of whom were black. This was right at the moment of the Black Panther peak. The manager had treated his workers badly. They were not being paid enough, for one thing. Still, I heard one of them say, “What’re they doing to us? How can we belong to a union that doesn’t believe in revolution?”
It was a living hell. Every day the building was emptied out by bomb threats and fire alarms. And this union was thinking they were going to organize us and get some points out of it? We never knew who could vote in the union election, although we knew no one in management was allowed a vote. One time when they held a big union meeting at Grove, I went. I was allowed to speak because a democratic faction in the group called for the right of the opposition to participate. I got up and said, “I’m firing all of you whether you win or lose,” because we were running out of funds. I couldn’t find out from these employees what they wanted. Unlike the feminists, the union organizers would never clearly tell me. I never got a demand.
This went on for two or three months and they finally had the election—and they were wiped out! Almost nobody voted for them. I had been sure we would lose, and had already written my speech accepting the union: It was a good fight and we lost. Welcome. … I tore it up. But in the meantime, Grove Press was critically wounded.
We were dead broke after that. At that point, 1970, we had rebuilt a big old seven-story building on Mercer Street, at enormous expense, instead of putting our money into books. The banks had assured me that real estate was a better investment even though we had a book club that was more or less thriving, a growing film distribution business, and increasing book sales. Gilbert Sorrentino recalled this period in a letter to me dated May 9, 1998:
Reading your interview in Paris Review [No. 145, Winter 1997–98] reminded me that when we moved from University Place to Mercer Street, I had the flu and was out of the office during the move. When I got well, I returned to work on Mercer Street, and when I was shown my office—about three times the size of the old one, with a huge potted tree in the corner, armchairs, etc., etc., my first thought was “Who the hell is going to pay for this?” The handwriting seemed to be on the wall.
Finally we had to move back to Eleventh Street, and afterward we settled in my house on Houston Street. From then on Grove was a holding operation. For a number of years, we were actually making a little bit of money, but we had incurred debts we couldn’t pay on a current basis. It took twelve years to pay them off, one month at a time. We stayed alive, but the company was just subsisting.
I brought in one accounting team after another to look at the books, and they all said, “You’re broke, you’re bankrupt.” I didn’t believe it. We went on for many years in a state of quasi-bankruptcy, and it was quite an accomplishment to keep the company going. It meant ma
king deals with everybody to pay them ten cents on the dollar over a long period of years. Twelve years of creditors’ committees. Imagine how much energy that took. You don’t have much time to look for books to publish when you do that.
We entered into a distribution agreement with Random House in 1971. This enabled us to close our warehouse and make do with a much smaller staff. Random House sold the books to our accounts, shipped them, and took over the accounting functions with the stores and wholesalers. Still, we continued to shrink. In 1971 we had some thirty-five Grove employees. In 1972 there were twenty-four. By 1978, seven years after our agreement with Random House, our staff had dropped to only nine employees.
We almost had a deal with film director Francis Ford Coppola to buy Grove Press. He made an offer and I accepted it. This was just before the opening of Apocalypse Now, in August 1979. I first met Francis in San Francisco in 1973 when I went out to Berkeley to meet with people at the Pacific Film Archive, who were preparing a program to salute our film division. The guy who ran the PFA said, “I want you to meet Francis Coppola, he’s a friend of mine.” He took my wife Cristina, Cristina’s sister Luisa, and me to Coppola’s office, which was in a tower in a beautiful copper-roofed building. We went up to the office without being announced, and Coppola was there writing music for The Godfather Part II on a blackboard mounted on an easel.
At first I found him to be very cold. Someone had told me that he had been a French horn player in the San Francisco Opera company orchestra, so after a while I said, “Oh, did you know, Mr. Coppola, Cristina and Luisa’s father co-founded the San Francisco Opera?” He said, “What? Let’s go home to dinner,” and took us to his house where he cooked up some pasta.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 26
