The Man in the White Linen Suit

by David Handler

  Dedication

  For Gretchen Salisbury Weir, and all the amazing

  Fire Island sunsets we shared a million or two years ago

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise

  Also by David Handler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  I was standing in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel looking around for my agent, Alberta Pryce, popularly known as the Silver Fox, and Sylvia James, popularly known as the single most reviled woman in all of publishing. We were supposed to be meeting there for a drink at five-thirty. You’ve heard of the Algonquin. It’s famous for being the onetime home of the Round Table, where such razor-tongued wits as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott jousted and traded barbs for the sheer vicious delight of it. But that was back in the 1920s. It was 1993 now. No one makes a witty remark unless they’re getting paid to, preferably on their own nationally syndicated TV talk show. And nine times out of ten, they’re not even witty.

  These days, the Algonquin was hardly a hipster’s paradise. It was sedate, bordering on musty, and you’d seldom find anyone under the age of forty there. But the lobby remained popular with the publishing crowd. As I stood there looking around, I spotted Gloria Steinem, looking tanned and fabulous in a white sleeveless dress—and to hell with the Labor Day Fashion Police—catching up with Clay Felker, the very first editor who was willing to give her meaty writing assignments way back in the early sixties when he was features editor at Esquire. After he started New York magazine in 1968, he gave her a home there.

  I found the Silver Fox and Sylvia seated at a table over by the wall underneath a framed Thurber cartoon. Alberta was smoking a Newport and drinking straight bourbon. Sylvia was drinking what appeared to be a Shirley Temple. It definitely had a maraschino cherry in it. As Lulu and I made our way over to them, the Fox spotted me and rang the bell on their table. Gaylord scurried over at once to take my order. A Macallan for me and a small plate of pickled herring for Lulu, who has very strange eating habits for a basset hound—and the breath to prove it.

  It was the first Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, which marked the official kickoff of the fall literary and theatrical season despite the fact that the calendar said summer wouldn’t end for two more weeks. In fact, it had been 92 degrees that day in Central Park and at least 100 degrees in my crummy, sweltering fifth-floor walk-up on West 93rd Street, where I’d spent the day in my boxer shorts pounding away on my solid steel 1958 Olympia portable while the Ramones blasted from the stereo as a box fan blew hot, humid air across me and Lulu panted glumly at my feet. Right now I was dressed in the featherweight glen plaid worsted suit from Strickland & Sons, a lavender shirt, royal blue bow tie and spectator balmorals.

  I’d been spared the worst of the summer heat by accepting my celebrated ex-wife Merilee Nash’s generous invitation to live in the guest cottage on her eighteen-acre farm in Lyme, Connecticut, where I’d devoted body, mind and soul to working on my long-awaited second novel, The Sweet Season of Madness, an ode to the gritty, grimy crime- and punk-rock-infested New York of the seventies, when I’d arrived there to seek fame and fortune. My New York. It was the first good thing I’d written in the ten long years since I’d published my spectacularly successful first novel, Our Family Enterprise, lost my voice, lost Merilee and then proceeded to crash and burn. I could not have been more excited. I’d shown the first three chapters to Alberta, who’d told me she found them “thrilling.”

  Once Labor Day weekend arrived, I decided it was time to return to the city. Merilee had remained on the farm to putter in her garden and sort through several film offers, not to mention her feelings toward me. The summer had brought the two of us closer than we’d been in many, many years. Years that I’d spent scratching out a living ghosting celebrity memoirs. I’m not terrible at it. Have three No. 1 bestsellers to my non-credit. But, trust me, it’s a humbling step down for a writer who The New York Times Sunday Book Review once proclaimed as “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s.”

  I’d been taken aback when Alberta phoned me that morning to say that Sylvia James, editor in chief of Guilford House, was desperate to meet with me.

  “Why on earth would I want to meet with Sylvia James?”

  “Trust me, dear boy. It will be worth your while.”

  The Silver Fox, who was called that because of her helmet of silver hair and because she was the savviest, toughest literary agent in New York, had no seasonal wardrobe issues. She was dressed in a standard-issue Harmon Wright Agency black Armani suit and white silk blouse. The oversize pair of round glasses that she wore made her look like a devious owl. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, who had just turned seventy-three. Had run her own boutique agency for years. Represented such giants as Cheever and Styron. But she’d surrendered to the changing times a few years ago and sold out to Harmon Wright, the former Heshie Roth of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, whose behemoth multimedia agency had offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tokyo.

  The dreaded Sylvia wore a plain white cotton blouse that was beginning to fray at the collar and a shapeless gray jacket and skirt that did nothing to help her lumpy figure. Her jacket had a number of greasy food stains on it, and she kept shifting around in her chair and tugging at her skirt. Her stockings had runs in them and her low heels were scuffed. Sylvia James was famous for being the messiest editorial executive in town. And it wasn’t just her clothing. Her mouse-colored hair, which she seemed to comb in three different directions, flew this way and that—and wasn’t helped in the least by her nervous habit of picking at her scalp with her fingernails. She always seemed to have pencil smudges on her hands and face, too. Sylvia was in her midforties. Had good cheekbones and a nicely sculpted nose. But her brown eyes were remote and cold and she had a nasty jagged inch-long scar just underneath her left one. She also had the unfortunate habit of curling her lip as if she’d just stepped in a puddle of fresh vomit.

  Not once had I ever seen her smile.

  The three of us murmured politely to one another as I sat. Lulu circled around three times under the table before she curled up at my feet to wait for her herring.

  I did mention that Sylvia was the single most reviled woman in all of publishing, didn’t I? Chiefly, this was due to the pride that she took in her viciousness. I can still remember the rejection letter she sent Alberta for my first novel: I loathe this manuscript. Its author does not possess one original thought. Perhaps he should consider a different career. House painting might suit him. If you’ve ever wondered whether authors remember rejection letters word for word twelve years later, the answer is hell yeah. But Sylvia wasn’t merely vicious. She was also dishonest, unscrupulous and appallingly unprofessional. Didn’t return her authors’ phone calls. Failed to show up for lunch dates with them. Made them wait an hour or more outside of her office before she’d usher them in to eviscerate their works in progress. The woman was so devoid of common courtesy that during the course of her twenty-year publishing career she’d driven away four future Pulitzer Prize winners, two National Book Award winners, and a dozen other writers who’d gone on to become No. 1 bestselling authors for oth
er publishing houses.

  Any other editor in chief possessing Sylvia’s spectacularly awful personality, track record and personal hygiene would have been fired long ago. Not Sylvia, who was the chosen editor of Addison James, the seventy-eight-year-old literary giant who’d been the single most successful author of mainstream American fiction for the past forty years. And who also happened to be her father. Addison James had been reliably cranking out spicy, well-researched No. 1 bestselling historical sagas for so long that the movie and TV miniseries adaptations of his 800-page epics spanned the generations from Clark Gable to Rock Hudson to Tom Selleck. He was acknowledged to be the wealthiest author in America, owner of a fifteen-room penthouse on Riverside Drive, a shorefront summer mansion on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton and an array of sprawling vacation retreats in Aspen, Jackson Hole, Montecito, Maui, Provence, Tuscany and somewhere in Switzerland. He also had a thirty-two-year-old blond trophy wife, Yvette, a would-be actress who’d been making ends meet by typing Addison’s manuscripts for him until she managed to wriggle her way into the septuagenarian widower’s bed a few years back.

  You may pause here to shudder if you wish to. I just did.

  As for Sylvia, she would remain editor in chief for as long as her father’s bestsellers paid the salaries of everyone who worked at Guilford House—no matter how detested she was.

  Gaylord arrived with my drink and Lulu’s herring. I sipped my Macallan and waited Sylvia out. Somehow I felt certain that this so-called desperate meeting had something to do with her father. It was Life magazine that had famously dubbed Addison James “The Man in the White Linen Suit” way back in 1953. His first two novels, Moscow and Berlin, which drew on his experiences as a member of the OSS during World War II, had received critical praise but failed to find many readers. When his decidedly sexier third novel, New Orleans, went straight to the top of the bestseller list, Life decided to feature him in a cover story standing on Bourbon Street looking like a rakish adventurer in the white linen suit he was sporting along with his black eye patch and Malacca walking stick. He’d lost his left eye during the war when he was working with the French Resistance. Nearly lost his left leg as well. Was shipped home and ended up marrying the U.S. Army nurse who’d helped him through his lengthy rehab at a Veterans Administration hospital in North Carolina. They’d had one child together, Sylvia. After Sylvia graduated from Bryn Mawr, Addison persuaded his publisher, Guilford House, to take her on as an editor. His editor. She rose rapidly through the ranks to become editor in chief despite antagonizing nearly everyone with whom she came in contact. She’d never married. In fact, no one in the publishing world could recall her ever having had an intimate companion, male or female. She was friendly with no one. Attended no book launch parties. Avoided the literary scene entirely. Avoided the city as well. Lived alone in a mansion in Willoughby, which was out past Scarsdale on Metro-North’s commuter rail line.

  Sylvia continued to shift around uncomfortably in her chair, tugging at her bra strap, sipping nervously at her Shirley Temple or whatever the hell it was. “Before we go any further, Stewart,” she said finally, her eyes fastening on my bow tie. An inability to make eye contact was another of her non-virtues. “I have done business with Alberta for years and have come to know her as someone whom I can trust completely. But you I have never done business with. Therefore I must have your word that what is said at this table will never, ever be repeated to anyone. And if I find out you’ve gone back on your word, I’ll break you.”

  “Too late, I’m already broken. I did that all by myself. Sylvia, I wouldn’t be the top ghost in New York if I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut. But if you lack confidence in me, then feel free to confide in someone else. It makes no difference to me. I’m strictly here as a personal favor to Alberta. I’d rather be home working on my novel.”

  Sylvia made eye contact with me just long enough to glare at me disapprovingly before her eyes returned to my bow tie. “Fair enough.” She lowered her voice discreetly. “I am about to tell you something that absolutely no one else in publishing knows. Addison’s longtime research assistant, Tommy O’Brien, who I understand is a friend of yours, was the real author of Addison’s last two bestsellers, San Francisco and Havana, not Addison.”

  I sat there thinking how odd it was that she referred to her father by his name, as if they weren’t related. “And . . . ?”

  She cleared her throat, choosing her next words carefully. “The unfortunate truth is that Addison isn’t up to the job anymore. He’s a senile old man. Forgetful, cranky, quite crude. He also doesn’t see very well anymore out of his only eye. He needs a magnifying glass in order to read. I’ve managed to shield his deteriorating condition from the public. He no longer appears on Good Morning America or any other shows to promote his newest title. He no longer gives print interviews or does bookstore signings. And no one at Guilford House is aware that Tommy has taken over the writing of his novels. Tommy knows his style so well that the handoff has been virtually undetectable. He’s just completed the manuscript for Addison’s latest, Tulsa.”

  “Just to be clear, my dear,” Alberta interjected. “Are you absolutely sure no one knows that Tommy has been writing Addison’s books?”

  “No one,” Sylvia replied with total certainty.

  Which prompted Alberta to ring Gaylord for another bourbon for herself, a Macallan for me and a plate of pickled herring for Lulu. Sylvia was still nursing her Shirley Temple, or whatever the hell it was.

  I should say a few words here about Tommy O’Brien, a proud native of Jackson Heights, Queens, who began his career as a beat reporter for the New York Daily News. Tommy’s dream in life was to follow in the footsteps of his New York tabloid idols, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, and become a star columnist and bestselling novelist who wrote gritty tales about the “real” New York of cops, firemen and cabdrivers. Tommy enrolled in a series of lectures on short-story writing that I gave at NYU way back when I was a young hotshot who’d sold a couple of my own stories to The New Yorker. We hit it off and became buddies. Drank together. Went to Knick games together. Talked writing endlessly. I thought that he had genuine promise. He just needed to find his voice. I didn’t think that he’d find it when he quit the Daily News eight years ago to become Addison James’s research assistant. But Tommy was convinced that working alongside a bestselling novelist would be a valuable learning experience. Addison also offered him twice what he was earning at the Daily News, which meant a lot to a man with a wife and two young daughters who was scraping by in a two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

  “How much more money did you offer Tommy to take over writing Addison’s books?”

  Sylvia frowned at me. “I have no idea what you mean. Tommy’s already a well-paid, salaried employee who’s simply doing what’s asked of him.”

  “Okay, allow me to rephrase that. What does he think you offered him?”

  “Ah, now I see where you’re going. Tommy does seem to be under the mistaken impression that I promised to give him coauthor credit as well as a percentage of the royalties.”

  “And however did he get that mistaken impression?”

  She curled her lip at me. “I don’t know what you mean, Stewart.”

  “It’s possible that you aren’t aware of this, but in the world of publishing what you just told me is popularly known as ‘Sylvia being Sylvia.’ You promised him coauthor credit and a percentage of the royalties, but you never intended to keep either promise. You committed nothing to paper. It was strictly a verbal commitment. And Tommy, a good guy who has no agent looking out for him, got himself royally hosed, didn’t he?”

  “I resent that,” she snapped at me.

  “Go ahead and resent it. I don’t care.”

  The Fox sipped her bourbon. I sipped my Macallan. Lulu polished off her second plate of herring and fell asleep with her head on my foot, snoring softly.

  Sylvia heaved an exasperated sigh. “As it happens, Tommy has become conv
inced that I’ve royally hosed him, as you so inelegantly put it. And has grown so increasingly bitter that the unspeakable has happened.” She fell silent, scratching at her scalp. Stayed silent for so long that I was beginning to wonder if it truly was unspeakable. Finally, in a quavering voice, she said, “Tommy has absconded with the completed first draft of Tulsa.”

  The Silver Fox leaned forward eagerly. “Absconded with it how?”

  “Last Friday, after he’d stopped by Addison’s penthouse to review the final two chapters with him, Tommy took the entire 783-page manuscript to a copier shop on Broadway to have a Xerox made for me, since there was only one copy of the first draft. Tommy’s an old-fashioned newspaperman. He works at home on a manual typewriter, not a computer. And Addison refuses to have a Xerox machine in his apartment. Don’t ask me why.”

  “No need to,” I said. “I don’t want one either. Or a fax machine. I’d rather not have a phone machine either, but you pretty much have to these days.”

  “We’re not here to talk about your peculiarities, Stewart,” she said to me in a voice that was stern enough to rouse Lulu, who let out a low growl.

  Sylvia arched an eyebrow at her. “Why is she doing that?”

  “She doesn’t like it when people are mean to me.”

  “Please continue,” the Silver Fox urged Sylvia.

  “Tommy told Addison he’d be right back with the copy of the manuscript. Except he didn’t come right back. Didn’t come back at all. Or messenger the manuscript to me. Or phone me. No one has seen him. No one has heard from him. I’ve called him dozens of times to no avail. I’ve even called the copier shop, where they know Tommy well. They confirmed that he had indeed been in there Friday evening, made a copy of a 783-page manuscript, paid them and left. Nothing unusual occurred while he was there. And yet Tommy O’Brien, and Tulsa, have disappeared.”

  “I see . . .” I said, tugging at my ear

  “Any thoughts or impressions, Stewart?” Sylvia asked.