The whole scene at Coppola’s was wonderful. His father and mother were there arguing, with Mama telling Papa, “You were a goddamn Fascist with Mussolini,” and him insisting, “No, I wasn’t!”
Coppola wrote me in the April of 1973:
Thanks for the copy of Graffiti, and also the Grove Press catalogue. I looked through it, and though it may sound crazy, I’d like to buy the entire library. I mean the books of course, and not the film prints. If it’s possible, please bill me … and [send] the books to me at my home.
He had come unannounced to see me at Grove with his producer, Fred Roos, with a big manuscript by his brother August, whom he severely criticized to me. I had never heard of August but I talked to Coppola for hours about this goddamned manuscript. Francis wasn’t nice to August and August wasn’t nice to Francis, but there it is, he’s got to take care of him and God, and could we possibly publish this manuscript. August was a professor at some college in California and he had built a museum inside another museum called a “feelatorium” or something. You went inside, I am only guessing now, and felt textures.
I read August’s novel, The Intimacy. It was very strange, about a man who wants to experiment with his sensory feelings, so he blindfolds himself. And while blindfolded he meets a girl, but of course he cannot see her, he won’t take off the blindfold. They live in a rooming house in San Francisco, but not together. The girl gets in big trouble and he saves her. We worked on the manuscript for months and published it in 1978. It was never good but it got a hell of a lot better. Francis never gave us any money for it or anything like that. I sort of liked it too … ultimately.
I eventually met August. He was very good-looking. In the novel he talks about his ugly brother who is a film director. It didn’t hit me at first but he was putting down Francis. In addition, August had a school for young women in Francis’s house. The women seemed strong and attractive, French or English, not American. Some sort of teaching was going on. Alain Robbe-Grillet even taught there. He fit in perfectly. He was a caricature of an evil person. Fascinating evil.
Then Coppola made an offer for Grove, the company itself. I said yes and our deal seemed arranged. People told me I was crazy to move to San Francisco. Meantime, Francis was buying up storefronts for more space. Fred Roos had earlier taken my son Peter and me to this big studio in Los Angeles that Coppola was going to buy, a place where Jeanette MacDonald and other stars had made movies long ago. He was doing fine until Apocalypse Now. I accompanied him to the premier in New York, and had a date to see him the next morning at the Sherry-Netherland. The problem was, his opening was a disaster.
When we went over to see him at the hotel, all these producers and hangers-on said to me, “What are you here for? He’s not going to give you any money.” I said I would leave and actually turned to go, very angry, when out comes Francis in pajamas and robe.
He sat down and said, “You know, I’m broke, Barney. Everything I have is gone.”
As far as I knew, it was true that Apocalypse Now had cost him dearly. He said he was sorry and that was the end of it. We parted on good terms, and it took years before Coppola pulled out of his financial hole. I stayed in mine.
I continued to make frequent trips to Europe. I never failed to meet with Beckett in Paris and naturally saw Joan Mitchell at her place at Vétheuil. When her mother died in 1967 she came into a trust fund from her grandfather, with which she bought the beautiful stone house. About thirty miles north of Paris, it sat on a rise, with two acres of land. With a studio at the back, the house overlooked the Seine and a lush swathe of cultivated fields, rows of poplars, and the village’s Gothic church. Monet had painted there, the gardener’s cottage was once his home, and he is buried in the cemetery. The linden tree that was in the courtyard entrance, the river, the flowers, and the trees would become part of her art, just as they had for Monet.
Joan had always wanted to have a place in the country. Her arrondissement in Paris had grown increasingly dangerous as the Algerian hostilities spilled over into France. Her situation in the US had also been depressing. After the promise of the early 1960s, the assassinations, race riots, and Vietnam War made the States no longer an option, even for someone who had never been politically active. Her father had died in 1963, her mother in 1967. Frank O’Hara, who had championed Abstract Expressionism and whose friendship and correspondence were irreplaceable for Joan, died in 1966 after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island. She went through serious depressions, and her stormy relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle did not help.
Joan was not isolated at Vétheuil. Friends visited, and Riopelle’s studio, where he kept his large collection of cars, was not far away. But he usually kept his distance, rarely spent the night, and seemed to show up mainly to pick a fight. Their relationship of twenty-four years would end in 1980, leaving her unhappy but freer than she had been.
During the 1980s I saw Joan declining in health, depressed by the death of her sister in 1982 and two good friends from AIDS. Two years later Joan was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. In 1985 she underwent hip surgery, painting the “Between” pictures between her hospital stays. Her painting was a record of her joys, her depressions, her sickness, her loves. It was astonishing to see them in person, their size and complexity. In spite of her illness and loneliness, during the last years of her life she worked with astonishing vigor and originality.
Joan’s rugged, athletic, impish beauty never left her. She was surrounded by a lovely landscape, by animals, flowers, and beauty of all kinds. The house at Véutheil was usually in disorder, as if she had just moved in, but it was pleasant and, given her character, it was logical disorder. Our marriage had been difficult but separation had allowed a deep friendship to blossom. Joan was always family, wonderful with my children, and warmly accepting of my wives Loly, Cristina, Lisa, and Astrid when we visited.
After the debacle at Grove in 1971 we powered on, in the dark so to speak. I worked out of my Houston Street digs in the early 1980s. It was a comfortable arrangement and, given the fortress-like building, a hell of a lot safer. We went on publishing, but the situation was becoming untenable. We did enjoy some financially significant achievements during the decade. Most importantly, our republication of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
This was a stunning publishing coup, since the book eventually won the Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller. The novel might have never been published if Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola University in 1976, had not given in to a persistent caller and agreed to read a messy typescript by an unknown author who had died in 1969. Percy convinced Louisiana State University Press to publish the book in 1980, upon which it immediately attained cult status. We acquired the rights soon after and brought it out as a Grove title. Marvelous, hilarious, and weird, we loved the book yet were astonished that it took off.
We published another comic masterpiece in 1984, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Fred Jordan was always Acker’s champion. But the book that really caused a sensation that year was CIA: The Freedom Fighters’ Manual. Discovered in Nicaragua, it detailed the strategies put into place by the CIA to subvert foreign governments that were not in league with the US. The book did nothing to endear Grove Press—and Barney Rosset—to the intelligence services.
When Coppola’s offer evaporated in 1979 my back was against the wall, and by 1985 Grove was faced with a desperate need to raise new money. There were monthly meetings just to decide how we could meet the payroll. Numerous offers had been made to buy the company. None of them seemed good, for one reason or another. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had approached me, but I turned them down because I wanted to maintain editorial independence. So when the British publisher Lord George Weidenfeld came along telling me, in essence, “I’ve got this woman who has all the money in the world, and she’s going to give me all I want, and I want you. You can do whatever you want, I’ll give you money to run the company,” I was sucked in.
The woman was Ann
Getty, the wife of Gordon, an heir to the Getty oil fortune. I had known Weidenfeld for thirty years. “Known him,” as I told Small Press in a 1986 interview,98 not as a friend but an acquaintance. We were amicable. He came to New York in September 1984 and told me he was involved with this wonderful person, Ann Getty, who had limitless funds and wanted to be involved in American publishing. I don’t know if acquiring Grove was his idea or hers, but I would guess it was his and that she approved. I imagine that her main goal was to assume a certain kind of prestige, and that becoming the publisher of Beckett and Stoppard and Pinter and Ionesco and Mamet and so on appealed to her. I in no way think that Grove Press was their only objective. But there was a promise of enormous amounts of money to do good things.
The first time I met Ann Getty I brought her a book from a Latin America series, edited by my wife at the time, Lisa Krug, called The Other Side of Paradise, which dealt with the domination of American conglomerates in Bermuda, Haiti, and the whole Caribbean. I said to Ann, “Do you know what you’re getting into?”
She replied, “Oh yes, it doesn’t bother me. We’ve sold all our oil to Texaco.”
Well, I liked that remark. Texaco was not favorably spoken of in the book. At the same meeting I gave her an order form that included the erotic books in our Victorian Library.
She picked up on one title and said, “Oh my God, it says, Lashed Into Lust. I better not show this to my children—they’ll all go out and buy it.”
I thought both of her comments were genuine and friendly and that she understood two of the things that Grove had always stood for—a mixture of politics and a fight against the fear of eroticism, in fact a celebration of it, if you will.
We signed the $2 million deal at the Carlyle Hotel. On March 5, 1985, the New York Times described the details:
… Lord Weidenfeld said in a telephone interview yesterday from London that he and Mrs. Getty, who are longtime friends, would seek to expand the roster of writers at Grove and “keep the character of a very literary house.”
It would be his first American venture, he added, and Mrs. Getty’s first entrance into publishing.
Mr. Rosset … said his company had been chronically undercapitalized and that the offer from Mrs. Getty and Lord Weidenfeld allowed a new infusion of money without loss of identity for the press. Mr. Rosset, who is president and publisher of the publicly held company, said he would retain the titles under a five-year contract drawn up with the new owners.99
I wrote to Ann Getty on December 20, 1985:
It gave me such great pleasure to go to Paris to see Sam Beckett, I felt I must write to you to let you know how grateful I am for the opportunity you have provided me. Again, due to you, I was able to give to him directly almost $50,000 owed on anthology sales, performances, etc. Just being able to convey this to him made for a great trip.
I hope that sometime during my next trip to Paris I can have the opportunity to introduce you to Beckett. I think it would provide a very nice moment for us all, and it would give me great pleasure personally. Also, if you ever feel you would like to discuss this and other Grove happenings with me, I would be most happy to meet with you.
Grove’s business concerns are in good hands, as you know, but nevertheless our lifeblood has been provided by you, and I sometimes wonder if you are keeping us in mind. I stand ready at any and all times to inform you of any or all of our activities.
Everything looked promising. I thought this arrangement was going to take a lot of anxiety off my mind as to how to stay afloat financially and proceed in a fashion that would enable us to afford new projects to build upon what we already had. The Gettys would assume Grove’s debt, buy out Grove stock, and I would be left in charge.
Soon I learned this was not to be the case. I had visions of starting up Evergreen Review again, with the young John Oakes, who had recently joined the team, and Ann’s son Peter Getty, then a student at Harvard. Peter was a kind of macho kid whose aesthetic interests were in punk rock, war heroes, and assorted third-rate writers. He was also a paranoid anti-Marxist. For an heir to an immense fortune he was pretty pathetic—borrowing money for bus fare or lunch while his mother was shopping for a jet airplane.100
Weidenfeld was an astonishing, cigar-chomping hippopotamus with small feet, bulging eyes, exquisitely tailored suits, and a puzzling Austrian accent. He and Ann Getty—slim, girlish, coquettish with red fiery hair—made an odd couple. At the 1985 American Booksellers Association Convention, we organized a dazzling booth. Weidenfeld lodged himself in a perilously conventional folding chair, and held forth. Ann was busy flirting here and there, looking for famous authors. It wasn’t exactly the usual Grove event.
There were some other interesting highlights during the early days of Grove/Weidenfeld. Ann Getty threw a party at the Getty mansion, with luxurious refreshments and a speech in which she extolled both presses and looked forward to a fertile future in publishing. Everyone applauded. Under the direction of publicity manager Ira Silverberg, an old buddy of William Burroughs’, we held wild nightclub parties, supposedly to celebrate the publication of our books. The meetings with the board that was technically running the press became thornier, louder, and more unpleasant. None of the members had a feel for what Grove represented in American publishing, nor did they have the least sense of the creative. What they were looking for were safe bets, accepted standards of presentation, money-making names.
I spent a lot of time running back and forth—I lived on the bottom two floors of the townhouse where the Grove offices were located—trying to make sense of a situation that had turned nasty. Even liquor did little to soften the pain, and I saw it would be a short time till the end came, and come it did.
I was politely removed from my duties as editor-in-chef in April of 1986. The five-year period was cut short, violating the agreements in the contract of sale, and I was thrown out. I should not have been surprised. Weidenfeld was a master mesmerizer. He had a great talent for taking you in and making you feel immune. He told me exactly what he was going to do to everyone and then he did it to me. That in a nutshell was that. But it took only a year for the corporate marriage to hit the skids, as reported in the New York Times on April 10, 1986:
AN OUSTER AT GROVE PRESS RAISES WRITERS’ IRE Barney Rosset has been removed as president and chief executive officer of Grove Press, the avant-garde book publishing company he founded in Greenwich Village in 1951, and news of his ouster immediately sparked complaints from authors and literary agents.
“We are making the change because we are now merging the service departments of our publishing companies,” said Lord Weidenfeld, the British publisher who with Ann Getty, his American partner, bought Grove Press last year. The two also started Weidenfeld & Nicolson, named after Lord Weidenfeld’s British house, which will publish its first list this September.
Lord Weidenfeld said that Mr. Rosset has been offered the position of senior editor, so that he can concentrate on acquiring new books. However, Mr. Rosset said yesterday that he was “too stunned and traumatized” to know whether he would accept.
As word of Mr. Rosset’s ouster spread yesterday, a number of writers and literary agents signed a letter of protest decrying “the impersonal corporate hand” that led to the move. It also called for Mr. Rosset’s reinstatement or, barring that, asked Grove’s new owners “to allow the company to be bought by more interested owners.”
… Lord Weidenfeld also described as “absolutely ridiculous” suggestions that he was bringing corporate power to bear on Grove or was contemplating altering its unique character.
“It has nothing to do with corporate power,” he said. “We want to make the two companies more efficient by merging the sales force and distribution, and we want to give Barney a chance to acquire new authors and do what he has always done best.”
Mr. Rosset, 63, learned that he was being replaced last Thursday afternoon at a board of directors meeting attended by Lord Weidenfeld and Mrs. Getty. He said that h
e immediately offered to repurchase Grove for $4.5 million, but was told that the company was not for sale.101
When I was informed I was being thrown out, I turned to the man sitting next to me at the meeting, Marc Leland, who worked for the Gettys, and said, “I don’t get it. Am I hearing straight? I’m no longer running Grove Press?”
As I remember it, he basically said, “Oh, you knew that. You knew the day you signed that contract we were going to throw you out as soon as we could.” I never received an explanation, but I know I was judged too iconoclastic to remain at the helm of the company. A clause in my contract had stipulated they could replace me as president and demote me to senior editor, a position that could carry a great deal of power. But they hadn’t given me those powers. The first thing that happened after I was thrown out as president was that I was told I could not go to editorial meetings, could no longer acquire books, I could not sign checks, and, later, could not even attend the American Booksellers’ convention for Grove.
Fred Jordan had the job of telling the staff, in a meeting in his office, that I had been relieved of my duties and that he was now in charge. He had met with the board and they had appointed him chief officer of Grove. It was impossible for me to contain myself, but rage as I did, nothing came of it.
Weidenfeld brought in Dan Green, who had worked with Simon & Schuster, to take over the hands-on operation. When Green learned that I had a complete library of Grove Press books in my home in the Hamptons, he dispatched a truck and workers to pack up my private library. An arrogant—and illegal—move. There was obviously going to be a fight.
Some of the staff met with me at dinner and decided to come up with a petition signed by editors in the industry and the Grove authors—among them Samuel Beckett, William, S. Burroughs, Robert Coover, John Rechy, and Hubert Selby, Jr.—claiming that without me Grove Press would die. The petition was organized by my wife Lisa and the enthusiastic John Oakes, who made dozens of calls soliciting signatures. It was released to the New York Times, which published an article on the situation. But it soon became evident that when you are up against Big Money you are doomed.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 27
