Herb paused for breath, while my heart sank. I wasn’t fussy when it came to a job, but I didn’t like the sound of starting off my career in book publishing at dawn in a delivery truck. It wasn’t, as Herb seemed to feel was the case, that I thought this kind of thing was beneath me—I just didn’t believe then, and don’t now, that you can learn much about a business by carrying cartons.
If it depended solely on him, Herb went on, that’s what I’d be doing, and who knew? It might even make a man of me. But he had two problems, when it came to me: One was that he just didn’t have any jobs available at Pocket Books; the other was that he had sort of promised Morris Helprin that he would take good care of me, and he felt that Morris would be happier if I started out at a somewhat classier level. As it happened, there was a job available upstairs—he rolled his eyes heavenward—at Simon and Schuster, which was owned partly by Leon Shimkin, so the two companies had a relationship of sorts. Henry W. Simon (as I was beginning to discover, almost everybody of any importance in book publishing used a middle initial), the editor in chief, one of cofounder Richard L. Simon’s brothers, was looking for an assistant even as we spoke.
Henry Simon, Herb went on, with a certain invisible sneer in his voice, was a former Columbia University professor, a Shakespearean scholar of some note, and a classical musician. I would probably feel more at ease upstairs with him than downstairs in the rough-and-tumble world of Pocket Books, though he hoped that when I’d found my feet I might realize where the action really was and transfer my allegiance to the mass-market business. In the meantime, I should go upstairs and see Henry, who was expecting me.
I thanked him, but he cut me off abruptly.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said, examining the manicurist’s work carefully. “If it doesn’t work out with Henry, you come on back down here, and I’ll find something for you, even if it’s in the warehouse, you have my word on it.”
The barber removed the towel, and Herb got out of his barber’s chair and moved back to his desk. I had imagined he would tower over me, but to my surprise he wasn’t any taller than me—he was broad in the beam, all right, but short, built rather like a Dutch barge.
“Tell Henry from me he’s wrong about Harold Robbins,” he said, and dismissed me.
HERB ALEXANDER’S secretary led me to a stairway that took us up to the Simon and Schuster offices on the floor above. The stairway had been opened only recently, she told me. It had been bricked up for some years, on the orders of Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, but Mr. Shimkin had recently had it opened again, so people could go back and forth between the two floors more easily. It took very little imagination on my part to guess what the relationship was between the owners of Simon and Schuster if they had been struggling for years over whether their employees could get from Pocket Books to Simon and Schuster and vice versa by the stairs.
Indeed, my guide looked nervous on the floor above her own, as if we had ventured into Indian territory, and seemed relieved when she handed me over to Henry Simon’s secretary, who showed me right in. Seated behind a pale wood desk in a large corner office, Henry Simon was an impressive figure. It was easy enough to guess that he had once been a very handsome man indeed, almost theatrically so in fact, but age and what I imagined was ill health had given him a ghostly look. His pallor was alarming, and his long, thin hands—the hands of a musician, with narrow Giacometti-like fingers—trembled noticeably. I guessed him to be in his sixties (he was, in fact, then in his late fifties, but the young are never good at guessing older people’s ages). His hair was silver, there were dark circles under his eyes, and his face was hollow-cheeked and deeply lined, as if all the cares of the world were on his shoulders. When he rose, I could see that he was tall, six foot or more, but painfully thin and slightly stooped. He came around from behind his desk and shook my hand, a quick, dry, whispery handshake, unlike Herb Alexander’s, which had felt like being squeezed hard by a pipe wrench. Henry slipped behind his desk like a shadow, sat down again, and lit a cigarette.
Even in those innocent days when almost everybody smoked—as I did—Henry’s consumption of tobacco was remarkable. There were two racks of pipes on his desk, all of them well used, and a huge, round ashtray the size of a pie plate that contained too many cigarette butts to count. His desktop was littered with cigarette packages, matchbooks, and tobacco ash, and his fingernails had a nicotine stain so dark that it seemed baked on. Not surprisingly, his voice, though soft and melodious, was a hoarse whisper. He spoke slowly, with the slightly prissy exactitude of the university professor he had once been, and it all seemed to me very much like an Oxford tutorial, except that neither of us was wearing a gown and he didn’t offer me sherry.
If Herb Alexander had considered me to be rather too much of a hothouse flower for the world of mass-market paperback publishing, Henry’s suspicion, perhaps because Alexander had sent me to him, appeared to be that I was an ignorant yahoo from the movie business, unsuitable for the refined world of hardcover publishing. My family’s fame—then very much greater than it is now—had seemed to Alexander something I would have to overcome but not otherwise of any concern. At worst, he had feared it would prevent me from being “one of the guys” and make me a poor bet for servicing the racks. Henry Simon, to my consternation, was deeply suspicious of it. Why wasn’t I working in the movie business? he wanted to know. How could he be sure I wouldn’t rush off to Hollywood at any moment, if he hired me?
It would have been helpful if I had understood then that Henry’s whole adult life had been a tug-of-war between his own inclinations as a teacher, writer, and musician and his older brother Richard’s determination to find a place for him at Simon and Schuster. The phrase love-hate relationship might have been coined for Henry’s feelings about his glamorous, dashing, wealthy, brilliantly talented brother, whose unerring instinct for commercial books and riverboat gambler’s skills Henry lacked totally. Henry had been pulled out of a respected academic career by his brother and given a job at Simon and Schuster where he would always be in his shadow. Not unnaturally, he saw in me somebody who had similar problems, and it made him nervous.
We chatted briefly, and with a certain embarrassment (in those innocent days, I didn’t know how hard this kind of job interview is from the other side of the desk), about my studies at Oxford, my languages (Henry was fluent in German but knew no French), my aspirations. Henry was, in fact, the first person I had met so far in book publishing who could actually be described as cultured and well-read in the European sense, who had read the same books I had, could talk about them like an Oxford don, and seemed to feel they mattered. I felt at home. He had traveled widely in England with his first wife, Margaret Halsey, and knew Oxford well.
Henry had edited the complete works of Shakespeare for the Pocket Books edition that Herb Alexander was so proud of and had published an edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. That his was not a donnish job, however, was made clear by how his telephone rang constantly. From time to time, his secretary, Nancy, appeared to say that the call was from an important agent or author. Henry grimaced, lit a fresh cigarette, and, cradling the receiver between his shoulder and his ear, leaned back in his leather desk chair, placed his feet on the desk, closed his eyes, and engaged in what appeared to be difficult discussions, each of which seemed to depress him deeply. Once we were interrupted when a stranger, his face puffy and contorted with rage, strode briskly into the room, flung a piece of artwork down on Henry’s desktop, shouted, “You tell your goddamn author he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about!” then turned on his heel and stalked out. Henry winced. His gray face looked suddenly weary, and he shook his head. “That was our art director,” he explained. He held up a sketch for a book jacket. It showed a man in what looked like a Roman helmet, set against a scene of mild Attic debauchery. The title was Dara, the Cypriot, by Louis Paul.
“What do you think?” Henry asked. “It’s a historical novel set in ancient Greece and Crete.”
“The helmet is all wrong.”
He sighed and put it back on his desk. “That’s what the author said.” He lit a fresh cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I think you and I would get along,” he said, breathing out two plumes of smoke. “On the other hand, you’ve had no experience at editing.”
“I’m a quick learner.”
“I don’t have time to teach you, frankly. And I’m even not sure that it’s a skill that can be taught. It really requires Fingerspitzengefühl—a certain instinct which you’ve either got or you don’t.… Would you mind very much if I gave you a manuscript to read, as a kind of test?”
I said it was fine with me. Henry got up and walked over to his couch, which was awash with manuscripts, boxes, and bulky, rubber-banded, tattered, and dog-eared piles of paper. It struck me that if this was his backlog, Henry Simon really needed an assistant. He rooted around in the pile, letting loose a cloud of dust, and chose one manuscript, seemingly at random. “I won’t tell you whether we’re publishing this or not,” he said. “Just read it, see what you think, and write me a report, all right? Take your time.”
I grasped the manuscript. Henry showed me to the door. As we shook hands he gave me a small, embarrassed smile. “It’s a shame you didn’t come to see me a day or two sooner.… There’s, ah, one little problem, I should tell you. There is another candidate, some fellow from New Jersey, to whom I more or less promised the job yesterday.”
My spirits sank. What did “more or less” mean, I asked? Henry thought about this. “I told him I wanted to sleep on it. He seemed very qualified but not at all experienced, just like you. If you don’t mind being in a two-horse race for the job, just read the book I’ve given you, bring me your report, and let me make up my mind. That’s the best I can do.”
Fair enough, I said, though in fact I was disappointed and walked home as fast as I could to read the book. Clearly, this was like an examination, and if there was one thing I was good at, it was examinations. I had always been able to cram for them successfully at the very last minute, in school, in the RAF, and at Oxford. I decided that the sooner I handed in my report, the better—speed had to count for something, even in a business as slow as book publishing—and got right down to it.
The manuscript was a study of the British press called The Sugar Pill, by T. S. Matthews. Fortunately, it was short, hardly more than an extended essay. It distinctly failed to impress me. Matthews was apparently an American journalist of some distinction and clearly an Anglophile—one of those expatriate Americans who, in the long tradition of Henry James, found it more comfortable to live in England than at home and felt himself to be plus anglais que les anglais. The trouble was, I thought, that Matthews simply didn’t understand the subtle nuances of the English class system and therefore often missed the point of the newspaper stories he was criticizing. On a more practical level, I couldn’t see who would buy the book. English readers would resent being criticized by an American, and American readers were unfamiliar with the problems of Fleet Street and surely not very interested. I read the book quickly, wrote a blistering brief urging its rejection, and went back to Rockefeller Center to leave it for Mr. Simon.
The next morning I was summoned back. Henry was waiting for me, his high, noble forehead creased in a frown, a look of deep suspicion on his face, even of distaste, as if he smelled something offensive. “Did you really read the book?” he asked accusingly. “I expected it to take you a couple of days.”
I explained that I was a natural speed reader and volunteered to take a quiz on the book’s contents, but Henry waved the offer away impatiently. “Never mind that,” he said. “You say here that the book is inaccurate and unpublishable, right?” I nodded. “Would it make any difference to your assessment of it if I told you that Tom Matthews is the former editor of Time magazine and one of my closest friends? Or if I told you that I’ve already bought the book and that I’m publishing it next spring?”
I thought about this unwelcome news quickly, wondering how I had managed to fall into Henry’s trap so easily, and decided candor was the only way out. It made no difference to my opinion at all, I said—I would stick to my guns.
Henry put my report down with a sigh. “It’s funny,” he said. “The other fellow, the one from New Jersey, feels the same way about the book that you do. He didn’t phrase it quite as elegantly as you do, not having been educated in England, but his advice was to turn it down, too. It just shows that you’ve both got a lot to learn about publishing. Well, I suppose you’ll learn …”
“Does that mean I’ve got the job?” I asked incredulously.
He nodded glumly. “The other young man accepted an offer from Doubleday first thing this morning.” Henry stood up, and we shook hands across his desk. “I’ll have Nancy get you a shopping bag and you can take some of those manuscripts over there on the sofa home to read, since you’re such a fast reader.”
Henry paused and handed me the jacket sketch we had looked at yesterday. His expression showed a certain cunning, as if he had found a way out of an unpleasant task. “While she’s doing that and filling out the forms for hiring you, you might take this down to the art department. Ask for the art director. A fellow called Frank Metz. Somebody will show you the way. Tell him you’re working for me—and that he’s wrong about the goddamn helmet.”
As I left his office, he called out, “If he throws something at you, duck!” and laughed.
CHAPTER 4
The first thing I found on my desk when I came to work officially on August 11, 1958, was a cast bronze plaque bearing the words: “Give the reader a break.”
These, it appeared, had been designed by Dick Simon and had been placed on every editor’s and assistant’s desk. It was, in his view, our job to make things as easy and clear for the reader as possible. Left unsaid was how to perform this miracle. It was Henry Simon’s method, I quickly observed, to painstakingly correct his authors’ punctuation, grammar, and spelling with a precisely sharpened pencil and to write queries in a minuscule hand in the margins. Perhaps the first, and most important, difficulty of our relationship was Henry’s discoveries, on day one, that I punctuated by feel and instinct rather than by rule, had a shaky command of grammar, and couldn’t spell worth a damn. (On the other hand, I turned out to be a natural at the kind of picky, know-it-all comment in the margin that drives authors crazy, such as “Surely the Treaty of Utrecht was earlier than this?” or “Are you certain Wellington was a Field-Marshal at this point of his life?”)
Right from the beginning, I felt that Henry was interested in only the kind of small details that somebody else could have fixed (though not me), while I was more concerned with the big picture—that is, whether the book worked or whether it needed massive cutting, could use a better title, or contained characters whose motives and actions made no sense. In short, it was as if our roles were reversed, perhaps not the best way to start out as an assistant.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings. I spelled and punctuated badly in three languages, and it had never made any difference to me or anybody else. At Oxford, the dons cared more about the originality of the student’s ideas and his grasp of the fundamentals of a subject than about spelling—indeed, in England, a certain aristocratic contempt for the rules of grammar and an idiosyncratic approach to spelling (the more daring, the better) were marks of culture.
Perhaps sensing right from the beginning that I was more eager to find out everything I could about Simon and Schuster than to spend the day penciling in commas or changing semicolons to colons, Henry had found for me a small, windowless cubicle with a desk that faced a blank wall, so that my back was turned to the hallway. Here I sat reading through the endless piles of manuscripts that had been submitted to him and occasionally editing the manuscripts of those of his authors whom he did not feel obliged to edit himself. It was not so very different from my work at CBS, except that I was no longer a freelancer. Modest my job might be, but I was
an employee at last! It did not escape my attention, however, that Henry was anxious to keep me separated from the other members of the editorial department, or that his relationship with them was touchy and marked by mutual suspicion.
AS IT happened, I had stumbled into my job at a particularly interesting time for S&S and for the book-publishing industry. S&S was a hotbed of thwarted ambitions and intrigue, much of it swirling around Henry Simon. To me, it appeared that Henry was a powerful executive, with his corner office and his list of important authors, but the truth was that he was surrounded by enemies and hanging on by his fingernails. S&S had gone through several years of upheavals, all of which could be traced back to Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster’s decision to sell their company to Marshall Field III in 1944. After Field’s untimely death, they managed to persuade his widow to sell it back to them. She agreed, on the condition that they admit Leon Shimkin as a full partner.
This was the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent. Shimkin had been close to Field and also owned Pocket Books, which gave him a certain leverage. Without Shimkin’s support, his connection to the Fields, and his access to capital, Simon and Schuster would have been unable to buy back their company; with it, they were beholden to a man who had little in common with the scholarly Schuster or the ebullient, risk-loving Simon.
It was not a partnership made in heaven. While Max Schuster retreated to his office to plan further volumes of philosophy and of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, Dick Simon chafed at having to deal with the cautious and often nay-saying Shimkin. Simon was a handsome, chain-smoking, hard-drinking man with an eye for a pretty woman and a sense of fun and wit that made him a vast number of friends, most of them brilliantly talented. He played tennis with a terrifying will to win, turned his interest in photography into a multimillion-dollar business, had a passion for music that made him such friends as George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and helped establish one of his daughters as an opera singer and another as a pop superstar. His energy level was such that even after he had been diagnosed with heart disease and ordered to slow down by his doctor, a friend saw him running back to his house as fast as he could after a brisk tennis game. “What’s your hurry, Dick?” he asked. Panting heavily, Dick shouted an explanation over his shoulder. “My doctor told me to take an afternoon nap,” he gasped, “and I’m late for it.”
Another Life Page 5