The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  The cultural energies then infusing Manhattan, a reminder of the twenties, were too much for Blanche to take on this time around. From Robert Rauschenberg’s new abstract painting and sculpture made from street objects (the mix of high and low always to Blanche’s taste) to Miles Davis’s jazz album Kind of Blue, arguably as important as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, that same excitement about change filled the air.19 (Unlike Gershwin, however, Davis would be beaten in the head by police when he played certain Manhattan jazz clubs.) Even the silliness of the Roaring Twenties had returned: Manhattan’s new, fashionable “Happenings,” for instance, were for a time street theater, eventually staged in more conventional venues. During the “play” called The Burning Bridge, people dressed in firemen’s costumes ran around the audience, wielding cardboard axes as they screamed before diving out of fake windows.20

  * * *

  After receiving what Alfred considered a lukewarm response from Yale regarding donating the Knopf archives, he and Blanche decided to give them instead to the newly formed Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.21 Dr. Harry Huntt Ransom, the university’s chancellor, had a vision of creating “a premiere center for research and study in the humanities,” an enormously fertile collection enabled by an extraordinary endowment.22 Alfred, taking another long trip out west while Blanche went to Europe, seemed to be thinking a lot about the future. He’d been home two months when a hurricane destroyed the thirty-to-forty-foot Norway spruce he had grown from a sapling, causing him to ruminate about changing weather patterns and his own mortality. Meanwhile, Blanche remained fixated on the loss of her son and the need to win him back. Then, less than a week into 1960, the phone rang in Blanche’s office. A secretary answered on the first ring, as Blanche preferred, and then, after a long pause, turned to her boss and gently suggested she get this call. Sighing, Blanche took the phone, impatient to catch up on work postponed by the holiday break. “What is it?” she asked.

  The speaker on the other end came through with unusual clarity compared with the transatlantic phone calls with which the office often struggled. “Camus is dead,” a Frenchman with Gallimard told her bluntly. “He was in a car accident in Le Grand Fossard in Villeblevin [a small town sixty-five miles from Paris] on his way back from his winter vacation in Burgundy.” The Gallimards—Michel, his wife, and their eighteen-year-old daughter—had arrived in the country on January 2, in time for lunch and an overnight with Camus and his family. The writer planned to return to Paris by train the next day, and had even bought his tickets. But Michel persuaded Camus to return with the Gallimards in their car.

  Reluctantly, the writer saw Francine and the kids off at the station. He didn’t like fast cars, and he liked even less how fast Michel drove them, but he must have assumed that since Gallimard’s wife and child were with them, the publisher would drive more carefully. He couldn’t have known about the repair shop records urging Gallimard to replace his worn tires, with the publisher promising to do so when he got home. According to a detailed account written by the journalist Stephen Bayley, the journey toward Sens on January 4 continued with a drizzle that coated the straight roads, quiet and lined with beautiful, but intimidating, old forests. Janine, Michel’s wife, later said that before the accident she could recall no explosion or screech, but that Michel Gallimard might have exclaimed “Merde!” After a violent wobble, the car left the road. The next thing she remembered was sitting in the mud and shouting for the dog, which was never seen again.23

  As Bayley recounts, Gallimard’s Facel Vega hit one tree with great force and then another, “wrapping itself horribly, around the latter. Newspaper photographs showed that the out-of-control car had ripped-up the damp tarmac road surface for about one hundred and fifty feet … the debris scattered over a five hundred foot radius … The only witness … had a little earlier been passed by the distinctive car … traveling at about 150km/h, evidently—despite the Nobel Laureate’s preferences—in a hurry.”

  Michel’s wife and daughter were unhurt, but Camus was thrown from the car and died instantly of a broken neck. It took the pompiers two hours to free Michel’s body from the wreckage. Initially conscious enough to ask, “Was I driving?” Gallimard died of a brain hemorrhage five days later. In Camus’s bag was the unused train ticket he had intended for his trip home to Paris with Francine.

  “The crash was world news. André Malraux, the French cultural minister, sent his chief adjoint de cabinet to represent the Republique at the crash scene. He was told to respect Camus’s world view and not allow any inappropriate religious interference or associations in the proceedings,” Bayley continues. “Camus’s corpse was at rest in the local town hall, where an Algerian journalist who paid homage at Villeblevin said that ‘under the light of a naked bulb, he had the expression of a very tired sleeper.’” The Gallimard heir became a detested figure, with people blaming him for Camus’s death.

  Stunned by the news, Blanche said nothing, then suddenly let out a scream that pierced the entire hall. Rushing to her office, Knopf employees found her distraught and incoherent, trembling. Alfred actually put his arms around her as she “burst into tears, the first time anyone had ever seen him touch her,” said Pete Lemay.24

  * * *

  Though the sixty-eight-year-old Alfred had wanted to retire for years—even discussing over lighthearted lunches with Bennett Cerf possible future mergers, Blanche, only two years younger, had resisted. Her talks with Elizabeth Bowen had left the writer sure that her publisher had no intention of cutting back on her work, though she was currently “so slight she could almost blow through a keyhole” while somehow emanating the “aura” of an aristocrat. Had she been an idle, aimless soul, Bowen wrote, Blanche “could have been a destructive woman.”25 Surely Blanche realized the impossible was becoming real, though not in time to benefit her. As the editor and publisher Al Silverman has written about women in publishing, heads of firms had always assumed women weren’t up to playing their game hard enough to win. In the sixties, Blanche would see her efforts rewarded as barriers yielded to at least fourteen highly successful women, including Nan Talese and Judith Jones, who around 1960 took over Langston Hughes from Blanche.

  Just a few weeks after Camus died, Alfred’s business lunches with Bennett Cerf turned serious. Cerf offered the full $3 million asking price to Knopf, and Alfred and Blanche decided to accept and become part of the Random House board. Though Phyllis Cerf opposed the merger, her husband longed to share the Knopfs’ reputation for literary distinction.26 Publishers Weekly would detail “the Knopf success,” achieved without the help of huge bestsellers. After all, Knopf had published only twelve books that sold more than a hundred thousand copies, among them The Prophet, Death Comes for the Archbishop, A Bell for Adano, The Snow Goose, Berlin Diary, Life with Father, The Wall, and Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld’s spiritual journey. But the company had published many books that sold more than fifty thousand copies—and what Random House was after, “the Knopf backlist,” currently accounted for 57 percent of the company’s total sales.27

  It was a good time for Blanche and Alfred to sell Knopf. Similar to when they founded the company in 1915, now, as they wound down, publishing was changing. The age of the gentleman publisher was essentially over—except to ensure a strong balance sheet. Alfred rewarded himself by buying a Rolls-Royce, which he picked up in England that fall after the merger was completed.

  In 1960, Knopf, along with Vintage, eventually merged with Random House. The acquisition story would be told differently over the years, but the ease with which everything was decided, a benefit of doing business with lifelong friends, was undisputed. Alfred would recall that “one day” in 1959, “at lunch, in the Cub Room of the Stork Club [at its original site, East Fifty-Third Street,] I finally said to Bennett: ‘Why don’t you make a proposal?’” Bennett asked to look over Knopf’s books and a few weeks later met in Alfred’s office with Blanche and Cerf’s partner, Donald Klopfer, and they reached an agreeme
nt. In the merger, Knopf preserved everything from its editorial sovereignty to its advertising, a kind of perfect union, Alfred would always maintain. The poet Witter Bynner, to whom Alfred had once confided that he himself was “constitutionally unable to appreciate good poetry,” and who believed himself the “longest-lived” of Knopf’s writers, would publish his last book with Knopf on January 1, before the merger.28

  However well the merger worked for everyone business-wise, it took some getting used to on the part of Random House personnel. Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf were appalled at how the Knopfs behaved at the first joint board meeting, when Blanche clearly meant to control the conversation and Alfred to frustrate her. The Knopf staff was accustomed to the partners’ vicious back and forth and their harsh public criticism of each other, with editors expected to take sides (Alfred’s), but at Random House, jaws dropped: Cerf and Klopfer were used to chairing board meetings with “laughter, [where] nobody shouted,” where there was no collateral damage. Klopfer would remember years later how taken aback he was, “Jesus, the way he talked to her.” The Random House publisher thought Alfred callous, “the most selfish man in the world.”29 As for Blanche, he was horrified that she didn’t stand up to him.

  By now, the Knopfs had been married forty-four years. In public, especially in their offices and at parties attended mostly by Knopf staff, the two still snarled at and tangled with each other as if in a boxing ring, with Alfred almost always the victor. But as the British journalist and publisher Sir Robert Lusty wrote in his memoir, Bound to Be Read, “they battled with a verbal intensity which misled some. There existed between them a most touching devotion.”30 Those who saw them up close maintained that Alfred actually adored Blanche—an observation Mildred Knopf had first made soon after she married Edwin. No one ever seemed to suggest that the adoration was mutual. Blanche’s erratic eruptions of hope that the two could be proper marital spouses again either never went beyond Alfred’s mail—the two seemed unable to talk—or were too ephemeral to count. Alfred kept her occasional entreaties in his archives, their presence perhaps reminding him of the possibilities.

  * * *

  At the end of March, Alfred told Blanche she “looked like hell,” and in fact she was not feeling well. Physicians found a bowel obstruction, caused by adhesions from the hysterectomy she’d had more than thirty years before. She underwent emergency surgery, even though her doctor, according to Alfred, thought her a poor risk. She pulled through the operation, and Alfred eventually went all the way home to Purchase, but the surgeon called at 4:00 a.m. “She was sinking—no blood pressure and kidneys not functioning. I’d better come up and see her,” Alfred wrote in his journal.

  Well, by the time I got there she was almost chipper, though they’d been working all night with her—plasma, glucose & something intravenous to help blood pressure. At 8 a.m. she phoned me … Went up to see her at 11 am. She looks much better and was very aware of everything. Talked about London and Paris and some dates she has here. I went back at 4. She’s wearing down as the day advances and they work over her almost all the time and blood pressure every 30 minutes—but her condition miraculous, considering. I drove home: am absolutely pooped. That hour between 4 and 5 this morning was something.31

  Eventually Alfred realized how much Blanche’s lack of appetite, by now part of her reputation, was caused by her inability to eat much at one time without feeling pain from her abdominal condition.

  She was soon to be made an officier of the Légion d’Honneur, the honor above chevalier. On April 13, looking as magnificent as her emaciated form would allow and barely able to stand, she received the award, which was pinned to her chest like the earlier one. As usual, Blanche charmed everyone at the ceremony—whose focus she managed to turn around to honoring the guests.32

  Against doctors’ advice, she spent much of the fall in England and Europe, where at the Paris Ritz she slipped on the bathroom floor, knocking herself out. A long visit with Elizabeth Bowen soothed both women. By early 1961, however, colleagues and friends at home had to wonder if Blanche was becoming suicidal. Though crossing Madison Avenue was dangerous before, she now began wearing a white ermine coat that the staff thought sure to get her killed, especially in the snow, which she walked through almost daily “when she went to lunch at a French restaurant in the Lombardy hotel.” Her longtime friend Carol Brandt often arrived at her office just in time to accompany her, Blanche offering her hand as if to help Carol.33

  Soon Blanche fell yet again, this time in the elevator. “She was very brave … [on the floor of] the elevator, obviously in agony. It was taking her a long time to get up, and she said to a Knopf clerk whom Bill Koshland later quoted: ‘Don’t look … and don’t help me.’”34 At Lenox Hill Hospital she was told that her hip was broken, but the orthopedist had her out of bed the day after the operation, getting around with a walker, and at the end of the week sent her home with a three-pronged rubber-tipped cane. Back in the office, she pampered Monsieur, letting the dog run—or limp—free. Her maid had accidentally crippled Monsieur by falling on him during a blackout, and he had remained in a coma for three weeks. Now at least she and he could share their recoveries.

  As soon as she was able, Blanche went on her spring scouting trip, but she had barely arrived in Paris when she decided to return home. The disastrous American-backed invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs began on April 17, 1961, its objective to oust the communist Fidel Castro. Blanche wasted no time contacting Allen Dulles, assuming her friend would finally give her a book, but his response disappointed her: “Dear Blanche, it is always good to hear from you and I have not forgotten—and have been deeply flattered by your suggestion about a book I might write … All this is postponed until I have a little more freedom and I have not really been giving any thought to when I might do it if the time for writing really returned. I only hope we can get together and trust you will let me know if you should be in Washington.”35 Indeed, Dulles had more urgent issues at hand: as a result of the Bay of Pigs, he would be forced out of office on November 29, a day after President Kennedy presented him with the National Security Medal at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  Blanche replied that she might see him in the summer when she was in Washington for the city’s book fair. Her prescient response to change still intact, she could sense the dramatic cultural transitions under way. In the late summer, G. & C. Merriam issued the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, which contained one hundred thousand new words and definitions not in the 1934 second edition. “A-Bomb, astronaut and beatnik to loyalty oath, sit-in and Zen” suggested more of the ways that society was evolving.36

  A conference of editors and publishers took place in June 1961 at the Statler Hilton in Washington, D.C. (A year later, the number of books published in the United States reached an all-time high, with paperbacks accounting for 31 percent of the total.)37 The occasion appeared more animated to many than the annual Frankfurt fair, and the agent Desmond Flower and his wife, Margaret, Cass Canfield, and the Knopfs gathered at the event, which, it seemed, everyone who was anyone attended. Canfield, longtime president of Harper & Brothers, was in the process of merging his firm with Row, Peterson & Company to become Harper & Row. For a short while, the literary crowd felt it was part of a brave new world.38 Blanche even briefly allowed herself to celebrate Judith Jones’s achievement: she had made Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking a reality in America. Its autumn release a broadly anticipated event in American culinary circles, the book became a national bestseller.39

  Blanche’s renewed optimism proved short-lived: in November, while getting up from the table, she broke her “good” hip and had to be hospitalized to have pins inserted, further incapacitating her. Tensions escalated between the Knopfs, because Alfred was forced to supervise editors ordinarily under Blanche’s purview in order to meet deadlines. The editorial pressure apparently provoked Alfred’s cruel remark “Do you recognize yourself now, Mrs. Knopf?�
�� when he caught his haggard wife looking in a mirror. Pete Lemay (recently made a vice president) overheard the comment and believed Blanche had too much “grace” to acknowledge it.40

  * * *

  At the end of the year, the Knopfs went to South America, where Alfred had been eager to go since Blanche’s trip in 1942. One of Blanche’s acquaintances, the translator Harriet de Onís, urged her to follow the same itinerary as Alfred because “he enjoyed himself so much more when she was with him.” Blanche responded that she would connect with her husband midway through the trip, as she was still too weak to endure his vigorous agenda.41 The couple met in Brazil, where in Recife they visited the library named in honor of Blanche before spending a week with their author Gilberto Freyre. Even in her frail condition, Blanche charmed her authors, their love of their publisher spilling over onto Alfred so that he, too, felt welcomed. When Alfred went on to Chile to explore the Andes, Blanche stayed in Buenos Aires, where she was tended by friends she’d made decades earlier.

  For the now-dreaded December holidays, without Pat or Camus or even Heifetz, Blanche flew to France to be with Jenny, both women remaining on the French Riviera late into January. There would be no eggnog party this year: illness, cigarettes, and decades of diet pills were taking their toll. By 1962, the sixty-eight-year-old Blanche’s appearance shocked visitors who hadn’t seen her recently: she looked more like a woman of eighty. Increasingly her days were spent in doctors’ offices. But though most women her age hadn’t worked outside the home at all, she refused to think about retiring—even if Alfred was eager to stop working.