• • •
I WAS drawn into Schuster’s orbit because of my background in history and my English upbringing. Henry had made my services available to Max without telling me; no doubt he thought it might do him some good with Schuster, and it could certainly do my career at S&S no harm. The opportunity arose from the fact that Justin D. Kaplan, who had worked closely with Schuster for many years on some of Schuster’s more difficult books, was planning to leave. The reasons for Kaplan’s departure were many. On one level, there was a certain rivalry between Bob Gottlieb and Kaplan, and it was apparent enough that Bob was going to be a force at S&S for the foreseeable future. Their dislike for each other was mild but visceral, a blend of envy and the slight contempt of a well-dressed, urbane Harvard man for a scruffy bohemian nonconformist with a dislike for stuffy academics—oil and water, in brief.
On another level, Kaplan—who was married to Anne Bernays, and thus son-in-law to the fabulously wealthy public-relations genius Edward Bernays, himself the son-in-law of Freud—was tired of being a junior editor, apparently doomed forever to worrying about Will Durant, Nikos Kazantzakis, Bernard Berenson, Bertrand Russell, and the rest of Schuster’s worthies. Kaplan was anxious to carve out a bit of fame for himself as a writer (which he shortly did, with a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Mark Twain).
Schuster was a snob of a gentle, old-fashioned kind. He liked the people who worked closely with him to be “connected” to somebody—Kaplan had been Eddie Bernays’s son-in-law; I was Sir Alexander Korda’s nephew. He also, not unnaturally, liked people who were interested in the kind of books that he liked: history, philosophy, new editions of the classics. Whenever Max Schuster was interviewed, he said that his favorite way of spending an evening was to sit at home reading Spinoza, though since he also said that the only form of exercise he took was to go to the office every day and exercise his options, it was hard to know whether he was serious. I had not read history at Magdalen, but I had attended lectures by Alan Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A. J. P. Taylor and was a protégé of Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, official biographer of King George VI, and had mentioned this in my job application. Schuster had apparently read it closely, even if nobody else had bothered, and what he saw there he had liked.
Kaplan’s impending departure eventually moved me toward the enviable position of being more or less independent of any real authority. I worked for Henry, to be sure, but since I was also going to be working for Max, I could pretty much set my own priorities. A man with two bosses effectively has none. In addition, I was to take over Kaplan’s role as “secretary of the editorial board.” The editorial board of S&S met on Thursday mornings in Max’s office and at that time consisted of Max, Henry, and Peter Schwed. On very rare occasions, one of the other editors might be called in to describe a book he or she wanted to buy, but Schuster’s shyness and his determination to have eye contact with as few people as possible meant that most editorial business was based on written reports and memos. It was a source of some bitterness in the company that the editors, however successful they might be, were excluded from the weekly meeting, but Schuster clung to the tradition stubbornly.
It was my job to attend the meeting and take the minutes, but there was no vow of silence involved. Schuster, I at once discovered, was as likely to ask me for my opinion as anyone else’s. Since the minutes of these meetings were central to his claim that he was truly running the business, the person who took the notes and drafted the minutes played an important role, from his point of view (though not from anybody else’s).
MY FIRST serious meeting with Max (he put us almost immediately on a first-name basis) had been interesting but unsettling. Henry and I sat facing his desk, as his right hand tapped out a speedy rhythm with the business end of a ballpoint pen. On close inspection, Max’s toilette left something to be desired: There were bristly patches on his neck and cheeks that he had missed while shaving, small tufts of Kleenex clung to a couple of places where he had cut himself with his razor, he had neglected to put stays in the collar of his shirt, and several of his buttons were unbuttoned. He looked ever so slightly unkempt, despite the expensive, tailored, three-piece blue suit and the Sulka shirt and tie. One of his eyes strayed toward the side—he was a bit walleyed, as if searching, like a flounder, for danger on the periphery of his sight. His whole demeanor, for a man sitting in his own office in a company he half-owned, was remarkably nervous and edgy. In fact, I toyed with the notion that it was I who was making him nervous, but that didn’t seem to be the case. His desk was littered—quite literally—with clippings, memos, notes, three-by-five index cards in various colors, bulging files full of Thermofaxes (those pale pink, curly, shiny precursors to xerography) and smudged carbon copies, all of them marked with his energetic, restless pencil.
On the walls hung a number of framed photographs, obviously designed to impress: Max and Ray at I Tatti with Bernard Berenson; Max and Ray in Jerusalem with David Ben-Gurion; Max and Ray with Bertrand Russell at Plas Penrhyn, his Welsh castle; Max and Ray with Sir Max Beerbohm at Rapallo; Max and Ray with Nikos Kazantzakis somewhere in the Mediterranean. In all these photographs Ray Schuster—a firm-jawed, compact, stylish, and good-looking woman of a certain age—stood close by the famous personality, sometimes even touching, smiling directly into the camera, while Max stood shiftily to one side, as if he suspected that his presence was an intrusion. In most of them the famous personality looked old and bewildered, as if uncertain about why he was being photographed with this energetic American woman. Beerbohm looked positively senile.
Max’s handshake was trembly and damp and offered rather unwillingly, not, I felt sure, from any aversion to me but rather from a desperate need to keep a desk width between himself and any stranger. As I let go of his hand, he sighed with relief and collapsed back into his chair. The leather on the right arm of the chair had been holed so that the stuffing was emerging in unsightly gray clumps.
“Welcome to the inner sanctum,” Max said. He had a resonant voice, spoiled by a tendency to stutter and by long pauses while he gathered his strength for the next consonant. “Have you read Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization?” he asked, pointing to his bookshelves, where the first six volumes of Durant’s life’s work stood together. They were massive, each one of them a veritable Missouri-class battleship of a book, formidably bulky and armed with every possible footnote, index, and bibliography.
I indicated that I had not yet had the pleasure.
“No matter,” Max said breezily. “It’s never too late to start, is it, Henry?”
Henry nodded glumly.
“Will has just sent in the latest volume,” Max went on, his face aglow with enthusiasm. “Wonderful stuff! I sat up all night reading the manuscript. It’s called The Age of Reason Begins. A work of monumental importance. I cabled Will this morning telling him how proud I was to be his publisher.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk, sending pieces of paper flying in all directions, looking for a copy of the telegram, but failed to find it. “I only wish I had the leisure to go through the manuscript in detail, but of course I don’t.” Max waved his hands at his desk and the piles of clippings that were waiting to be filed. He sighed. “History is an adventure,” Max said. “A voyage. Will Durant sails the seas of history and time like a Columbus, discovering new continents of knowledge.”
At first I thought that Max must surely be making fun of me, but since Henry wasn’t laughing—if anything, he looked gloomier than ever—I assumed that Max often spoke like this, and I was right. He could spout advertising copy like Moby-Dick surfacing for air, some of it not half bad. In his time, Max had written—or dictated—any number of groundbreaking advertisements for books. He was at his best with the breathless style of mail-order book advertising, which S&S had practically invented, and had a gut instinct for great headlines such as YOUNG FOREVER! for a book about vitamins or FAT NO MORE! for a diet book. An ad for an anthology of the wisdom of the ages began, “Last
night I walked hand-in-hand with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee.” His prose was unmistakable and over the years became the S&S house style, a heady, oracular mash of superlatives, puns, and one-liners that most people at S&S could write by the yard but that only Max actually spoke.
“Will needs to have his hand held by someone,” Max said. “Someone who cares about history.” I nodded earnestly, to show my love of history, but Max was off on a riff of his own and didn’t notice. “Ariel—Mrs. Durant—is still after me to get him the Nobel Prize,” Max said plaintively. “It’s not as if I haven’t tried, but of course she just doesn’t understand how difficult that kind of thing …” He paused and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Ariel is very much part of the picture.… Did you know that Will was trained as a priest, and when Ariel made up her mind to marry him she was so young that she actually went to the marriage bureau on her roller skates? He renamed her ‘Ariel,’ and she called him ‘Puck.’ ” Max paused for breath again, eyes goggling. “Of course, all that was a long time ago. She’s no longer young. But they remain a very devoted couple, wouldn’t you say, Henry?”
Henry shrugged. “You bet,” he said glumly.
The two men sat for a few moments, apparently contemplating the state of marriage in a spirit of mutual gloom. Max, it was said, lived in fear of Ray Schuster’s piercing voice, while Henry’s bride was allegedly disliked by everyone at S&S, as well as by the rest of the widespread Simon family. She was reputed to make small dolls of those whom she disliked and stick pins in them.
“Ariel sits by Will’s side and turns the pages as he reads,” Max said. He did not say it with envy. His own ambition, it was said, was to lock himself in the library with his favorite books where Mrs. Schuster couldn’t get at him. “Well, you get the idea. You have to include her, listen to her ideas, treat her as if she were Will’s partner. Walk on eggshells, yes?”
I got the idea.
“It’s a great opportunity for a young man like yourself,” Max went on, more upbeat. “This is a monumental project, you know. Each volume is a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and a guaranteed best-seller. Why, Harry Scherman often calls the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘the house that Will Durant built.’ … This is commerce, you see, as well as culture. You’ll be working with one of the great thinkers of our time.… I envy you. Of course, you’ll have to be careful not to take too much time away from the work you’re doing for Henry,” Max added hastily. “We have a contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I promised Will and Ariel we’d have the book out in September, so you’ll have your work cut out for you. Come to me with any problem. My door will always be open to you.” He paused. “Within reason.”
Max’s buzzer was keening noisily before we were out the door. On his assistant’s desk was a huge stack of manuscript, neatly tied with string. It showed no sign of having been opened by Max. I looked at it with a certain degree of awe mixed with apprehension. It was almost unimaginable that any living human being could have written this number of pages without going blind. “If Durant is such a prize, why is he getting a junior editor?” I asked Henry.
Henry lit a cigarette and coughed. “The Durants are a little … ah … difficult,” he said cautiously.
“How difficult?”
“On a scale of one to ten, ten. They won’t work with me because they hate academics. They feel that everybody in the academic world looks down on Will as a popularizer. Which, of course, he is. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it gives them a monumental inferiority complex, as well as a chip on the shoulder.… It’s not that Will’s books need a lot of editing, by the way—it’s just that he and Ariel are very fussy about details. My advice is to keep them away from Max as much as you can.”
“I thought he liked them.”
Henry grimaced. “Oh, Max likes them all right,” he said. “He just doesn’t want to see them.”
FULL AS S&S was of odd people, Max Schuster was far and away the oddest. Office legend had it that because of Max’s shyness when faced with a member of the opposite sex, he had married the wrong woman. Max had been a bachelor until well into his middle age, living a fairly hermitlike existence except when he was obliged to entertain authors or agents and apparently content with his lot. At some point in the thirties, he had apparently rented a house for the summer in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island—Gatsby territory. His next-door neighbor turned out to be a well-preserved recent widow named Ray Levinson, who had three daughters. The late Mr. Levinson had been a local landscape and nursery czar, and his widow was wealthy, but with social ambitions that went beyond gardens and pools. At some point during that summer, Max fell in love with one of the daughters. Max’s courtship was pursued so timidly that the young woman might not even have been aware of the feelings of her ungainly suitor, but at some point he finally got the nerve up to talk to her mother and seek her permission to propose to her daughter.
Max visited the widow Levinson and haltingly managed to approach the reason for his visit. He was, he told her, in love, and felt he had to unburden himself of his feelings. Ray put her fingers to his lips and in a sharp, piercing voice, strongly marked by a Russian-Jewish accent, cried out: “Shush! Not another word!” Alarmed, Max fell silent. “I know just what you are going to say, Max,” Ray went on. “I accept.”
Whether from sheer timidity or the undeniable fact that Ray Levinson’s willpower and determination were positively Nietzschean, Max stayed silent and soon afterward married her, no doubt going to the altar in something of the sprit of a condemned man mounting the steps to the gallows.
An emotional predicament more calculated to drive Max to his beloved files can hardly be imagined—all the more so since Ray was a ruthless domestic tyrant, of whom poor Max lived in fear, desperate to please her but apparently unable to. She was a pint-size, Eastern European Jewish version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, and her occasional visits to the office threw not only Max but everyone else into a state of panic, since she was quite likely to insist on having him fire any attractive young woman who happened to cross her path. Ray was apparently under the illusion that Max’s appearance made him a magnetic attraction for women, or, even more improbably, that Max himself might lust after them.
MAX’S FORGETFULNESS was well noted by his colleagues and spawned many stories, some of them true—indeed, it was one of the bonds he shared with Dick Simon, who lost manuscripts, contracts, letters, and his personal possessions so frequently that everyone who worked for him knew the phone numbers of the major lost-and-found offices in New York City and the surrounding counties. Max usually managed to hang on to his coat, hat, and briefcase, but he was unreliable when it came to names and faces.
At one point before the war, S&S became the publisher of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mystery novel, The G-String Murders. Gypsy had always fancied herself to be an intellectual (hence the song in Pal Joey in which one of the supporting players does a Gypsy Rose Lee imitation and sings, as she strips, “Zip!—I’m an intellectual”) and writing a book had long been her dream. Her long-term lover Billy Rose took on the task of getting the book published, and when S&S bought the rights it was major news. Gypsy was by then well past her stripping days but was still a formidable woman, tall, voluptuous, and somewhat overpowering. Billy was tiny (he came up to about her waist), so they made an odd couple.
Rose got his start as a boy by taking shorthand from the famous financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, made his fortune in show business, and inspired a good many other short, dark, energetic, and ambitious Jewish boys to follow in his footsteps, including Mike Todd. He was enormously wealthy by the time Gypsy plunged into authorhood—he was perhaps the only man in New York to have a malachite urinal in his downstairs guest bathroom (and a malachite sink to match it, too)—and made it clear that he expected Gypsy to get first-class treatment, which Max and Dick agreed happily to give her, given Gypsy’s celebrity status.
Alas, like most publishers, th
ey were more interested in Gypsy before they bought her book than they were afterward. In publishing as in love, the really heady period is during the courtship, when the author is still being wooed. Once the deal is consummated, the love affair ends, a certain indifference sets in, and the marriage begins. Since neither Dick nor Max were greatly interested in murder mysteries, Gypsy was handed over to S&S’s mystery editor and promptly forgotten by the two owners.
As the publication date approached, Gypsy became more and more anxious about the big party that she assumed would be given to launch her book and increasingly upset to hear nothing about it from her publishers. When it became evident that no party was planned, she was distraught, but Billy Rose cheered her up. Fuck ’em, he told her, if the lousy cheapskates weren’t going to give her a party, he would take her out to dinner to celebrate instead. So Rose booked a table upstairs at “21” and took Gypsy there for dinner. About halfway through the meal, Gypsy looked up and realized that Max Schuster was sitting a few tables away with his wife Ray and another couple. Should she get up and say something to him? she asked Rose. Rose was against it, but finally he could see that nothing was going to hold Gypsy back.
Embarrassed and a little nervous, she walked over to Max’s table and interrupted the conversation to say hello and ask Max how her book was doing. Max beamed up at Gypsy, and before she could say a word, stammered out to her: “Gypsy, how nice to see you! You know, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.” He paused. “One of these days, you ought to write a book.”*
IN MY own small way, I soon had direct contact with the manic-compulsive side of Max’s personality. The notes I took once a week at the editorial-board meeting had to be typed as a draft on dark yellow paper, triple-spaced, so that Max could rewrite and expand upon them, often until they bore no relationship at all to what had actually been said or decided. This was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener, first to the fact that Max was living at least part of the time in a dream world, and second, that what passed for facts at S&S were often not facts at all. I knew what had been said and by whom, I had even written it down pretty much verbatim, so it was odd to see how it changed under Max’s relentless blue marks as he expanded his comments, downplayed Schwed’s, and often eliminated Henry’s altogether. Anybody reading the minutes would have supposed that Max talked nonstop throughout the meetings, whereas, in fact, he was usually silent, lips pursed as if blowing bubbles, while Schwed and Henry argued things out between themselves. Max’s revisions gave him a certain statesmanlike air, though for a long time I had some difficulty in deciding why he cared enough to go to this trouble. Most people who got the editorial-board minutes merely looked to see which books we had bought and how much we had paid for them; it was a practical tool, not intended to leave S&S. When I mentioned this to Henry he sighed deeply, his face looking paler and more world-weary than ever. “The only copies Max cares about,” he said, “are the ones that go to Leon Shimkin and to Ray Schuster.”
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