Another Life

by Michael Korda

  If the “new,” mostly Jewish, publishing houses shared anything in common with their WASP predecessors and rivals it was the genial assumption that people who worked in the book business did it—or ought to do it—for the love of books. Since few white-collar workers in the book industry are unionized, there was no particular pressure on publishers to raise salaries or increase benefits. Furthermore, so long as most of the big firms were privately owned, nobody knew exactly what anybody else was making, let alone what the owners were taking home in profits.

  The Random House decision to go public inadvertently put an end to this cozy tradition of silence. A company that is traded publicly has to list what it pays its directors and senior corporate officers, as well as its principal stockholders. The owners of the major publishing houses had always lived well, though usually with a certain discretion, since none of them was anxious to stimulate greed and envy among their employees and authors. Most publishers carefully avoided such obvious displays of wealth as chauffeured limousines and private dining rooms. Indeed, the only person who ever parked a Rolls-Royce in the courtyard of the Random House mansion at Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street was the author John O’Hara, on his annual visit to his publisher.

  Now, with publishers getting rich overnight by selling their companies or going public with them, the sense of embarrassment about money that people in publishing circles had always affected vanished just as quickly. Contrary to what had always been believed, it appeared there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and everybody wanted a share of it.

  MY OWN regular salary review was invariably an occasion very similar to that of asking a headmaster a question about sex, and it produced a similar combination of embarrassment and evasion, along with a long and self-pitying account of how disappointing the results of the previous year had been and the sad state of the book business in general. I was lucky, Henry Simon (or later, Peter Schwed) would tell me sorrowfully, to be getting a raise at all, and small as it might seem to me in financial terms, it represented a real vote of confidence in my future at S&S. Max Schuster, it goes without saying, was protected from having to talk about money at all, and Leon Shimkin, to whom this distasteful task was usually delegated, had been known to cry real tears when describing the firm’s financial affairs and the state of the industry to those who came to him seeking a raise.

  At about the same time as the Random House/Knopf merger made the headlines, however, Paul Gitlin made his appearance at S&S and changed the hitherto even course of my life.

  Previously, literary agents had played a fairly small role in the publishing business, as they were resented deeply by the older generation of publishers. Even the more powerful agents, such as Harold Matson or Paul Reynolds, were reasonable enough when it came time to negotiate a contract for one of their authors and more likely to counsel their clients toward patience and compromise than greed and threats. Far from attacking the publishing establishment, they felt themselves to be part of it and behaved with a certain self-conscious dignity, as if to make it clear that literary agenting was a respectable profession, like being a lawyer or a clergyman. Theirs, too, was a WASP profession, apart from a few newcomers such as Scott Meredith, and they looked down with undisguised contempt on the kind of vulgar “10 percenters” who proliferated in Hollywood. Even so, there remained among publishers of a certain age a certain suspicion of agents, however Ivy League their origins, rather resembling that which has surrounded snakes ever since Eve’s unfortunate slip in the Garden of Eden. Besides, a good many authors, Hemingway and the Durants among them, managed to do without one.

  Into this cozy world swept Gitlin, a partner in a firm of literary-minded lawyers, Ernst, Cane, and Gitlin. Short, rotund, stocky, Gitlin tended to lean forward on the balls of his feet, like a man walking into a powerful wind, and somehow gave the impression that he was on a collision course with you, and possibly the rest of the world as well. His voice was an aggressive growl, usually sharpened with impatience and, when opposed, a large measure of rasping, scalding contempt. Gitlin was tough and smart and made no effort to hide it, nor was he a man to mince words or take fools lightly.

  He had approached the world of book publishing indirectly. The founder of his law firm, the late, great Morris Ernst, had been a formidable advocate of free speech, and his partner, Melville Cane, a man of great learning and refined literary taste. Gitlin’s personality was more that of a street fighter than a civil libertarian or an aesthete—though he concealed a certain intuitive good taste—but he enjoyed the company of writers and had a profound respect for the written word, to whatever purposes his clients were to put it. Having taken over the job of looking after the Thomas Wolfe estate, as well as that of counsel to the Matson Agency, Gitlin soon found that there were no great mysteries to agenting. Indeed, he developed a certain contempt for agents who negotiated without a lawyer’s eye and who had to rely on him to point out unacceptable or contradictory language. Most of them, he felt, were timid souls, unwilling to bluff or threaten publishers and unable to see the big picture.

  It was then still usual to sell hardcover rights to one book at a time and to let the publisher handle the mass-market paperback rights for half (or in the case of a major best-selling writer, slightly less than half) of the proceeds. Gitlin was the first to see that if you sold a publisher three or four books by a major author and made it pay for the mass-market rights and the foreign rights at the same time, you would come up with a very substantial amount of money. With the right kind of legal and tax structure, a really successful writer might become seriously rich, instead of having to live from book to book, anxiously waiting for the next royalty check.

  A glance at the correspondence between Hemingway and Perkins is enough to demonstrate that Gitlin was onto something. Hemingway never took advances against his novels and was forever pleading with Perkins or Charlie Scribner to transfer relatively small amounts of money to his bank account. The notion that a writer should have to beg for money—his money—from his publisher, as if he were a child trying to wheedle an advance against his allowance out of a reluctant and all-powerful parent, was deeply repugnant to Gitlin. He was determined to put an end to that sort of paternalism.

  GITLIN ENTERED my life as the agent for Cornelius Ryan, a successful war correspondent and writer for Reader’s Digest who had just been finishing his classic account of D-Day, The Longest Day, when I arrived at S&S. Since I happened to be a fanatic student of military history, I was eventually drafted by Peter Schwed, Ryan’s editor, into the small group of people who struggled to keep pace with Ryan’s remarkable capacity for infinite military detail. Ryan’s previous career as a writer of books had been modest—he had written, among other things, a ghosted autobiography of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer, called I Aimed for the Stars, which Ryan, who had a wicked Irish wit, joked ought to have been called I Aimed for the Stars—But Sometimes I Hit London.

  Unlike some people at S&S, who found him overbearing, I liked Ryan, who under a veneer of charm and a remarkably thin skin was in fact an acute historian and a man of very considerable courage. We were to grow much closer over the years—particularly since my father was the art director and one of the animating spirits of the all-star movie of The Longest Day that helped make Ryan an international celebrity and, by the standards of magazine journalism, a rich man. My main task, however, with Ryan grew to be that of a kind of British aide-de-camp, advising him on the many illogical and eccentric points of British military rank and organization (I was perhaps the only person in American publishing who knew that in the Household Cavalry, sergeants, for reasons lost in the mists of time, are called “Corporals of Horse,” or that the rank of Field-Marshal is never written without the hyphen or with two l’s), helping out Frank Metz, our art director, with the transformation of his military maps into four-color endpapers, and fact-checking German military nomenclature. Schwed remained his editor.

  Since Ryan saw no reason why Gitlin cou
ld not do for him and military history what he had done for Harold Robbins and popular fiction, Gitlin’s attention was inevitably drawn toward me. I picked up the telephone one day to hear a rasping, low-pitched voice, full of menace, say, “Listen, kid, Connie says you’re being helpful to him—I just want you to make goddamn sure that he’s your first fucking priority, whatever anybody else tells you.” Gitlin always referred to his writers as “clients,” perhaps to emphasize his status as a lawyer instead of a mere agent and that his bark was, at least in my case, considerably worse than his bite.

  In any case, he invited me out to lunch (ordered me, actually) and I found myself sitting next to him a couple of days later at the Café Louis XIV in Rockefeller Center, then his favorite hangout, being helped to a slice of Gitlin’s wisdom of life as he knocked back a scotch on the rocks. “How much are they paying you?” he asked. When I told him, he snorted, eyes squinting like a bull’s about to charge a tourist at Pamplona. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Leon, put him straight.”

  Gitlin’s care for his clients was all encompassing, and later came to include me and my family. Loyalty he prized above all other virtues (actually, he had a certain contempt for the others), with the result that I was to work with Ryan (alongside Schwed) until the very end, taking the last pages of his final book away from him as he lay dying of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

  GITLIN’S PURPOSE—apart from deciding if I was friend or foe—might have been to see if I was suitable material to edit Harold Robbins at some future point. Apparently, in the elaborate organization that had been handcrafted to publish Robbins, this was the only element that had not been engraved in stone. Not, Gitlin assured me quickly, that Robbins needed a lot of editing, the man was a natural writer, whatever people said of him, but from time to time it was necessary for somebody to pass a sharpened pencil over his prose.

  Did Robbins take well to being edited? I inquired. Gitlin shot me a look of pure fury. Harold was no fucking prima donna, he told me. Besides, Robbins would do whatever Gitlin told him to do, and I should never fucking forget it. I had a dim perception even then that by merely lunching with Gitlin I was doing the equivalent of signing on for a voyage before the mast, with Gitlin as my Captain Bligh. “So long as all this doesn’t backfire on me,” I said, knowing that nothing was more likely, given the state of relations between Schuster and Shimkin. Gitlin looked at me as soulfully as he could manage. “You have my word, kid,” he said, and he would prove to be true to his word, as he always was.

  Having settled that (it would be some time before it took effect, since Robbins would be edited for several books more by Cynthia White of Pocket Books), he leaned closer to me. “I hear you’re going to be helping out Peter Schwed with Irving Wallace’s new book,” he said. It was news to me. Wallace was a former Knopf author and screenwriter who had written a book about P. T. Barnum, which I had read more or less by accident, and whom Peter Schwed was trying to bring to S&S, which would be a major coup for him.

  “What’s the book about?” I asked.

  Gitlin gave me a roguish wink. “Sex.”

  AND THUS I turned another corner. My career, which had been moving toward fairly serious nonfiction (the Durants, plus all of Max Schuster’s friends), Dariel Telfer’s novel notwithstanding, now suddenly moved toward mainstream best-selling fiction. I was also being drawn into the no-man’s-land between Schuster and Shimkin. Each of Gitlin’s deals had Pocket Books publish the mass-market edition of the book and S&S the hardcover edition, with the author getting 100 percent of both royalties, instead of splitting the paperback royalty with his publisher.

  Gitlin and I soon became close friends, though I was careful not to be sucked into his social life, which seemed to consist largely of sitting around in restaurants or hotel suites and drinking with his clients or flying to L.A. or Cannes to hold Harold Robbins’s hand while he gestated another novel.

  As for the stories about Robbins’s writing habits, I soon learned that they were, if anything, less dramatic than the reality. Robbins invariably waited until the last possible moment before beginning a novel, usually a couple of months before the finished book was supposed to be shipped. To this psychological burden, he added the fact that he always spent his income, substantial as it was, the moment it was received, without putting anything away for taxes. Thus, when he finally sat down to write, Robbins had given himself not only an impossible deadline but the added pressure of IRS liens—not to speak of the expenses of keeping houses full of servants in L.A. and Acapulco, plus the yacht, with its crew of four, in Cannes, and his wife, Grace. Once the wolf was at the door, Robbins would sit down reluctantly, often in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and start typing. Only after he had passed a certain number of manuscript pages under the door would Gitlin allow room service to send a meal in. Even then Robbins had been known to escape out a window to Palm Springs or Las Vegas unless Gitlin watched him like a jailer.

  Compared to this, Irving Wallace seemed normal, although the subject of his novel raised eyebrows at S&S, except for those of Peter Schwed, who was hugely enthusiastic. The Chapman Report was based on a sex survey very much like that of Dr. Kinsey, a subject which seemed shocking at the time.

  Whereas most agents make a point of spreading their major authors over a number of different publishing houses, Gitlin made a deliberate decision to put Ryan, Robbins, and Wallace in the same place and even, in time, in the hands of the same editor. He calculated that having three best-selling authors at one place would give him more leverage—it might even, in the long run, make the house dependent on him, so that he could pretty much get whatever he asked for. But no large publishing house can ever really become dependent on one or two authors, however many copies their books sell, and very few authors go on writing best-seller after best-seller forever. Anyway, if you publish two or three hundred books a year, other best-sellers are almost certainly going to come along sooner or later. Successful as, say, James Michener and John O’Hara were, Random House would have survived the loss of either or both of them, just as S&S and Pocket Books would have survived the loss of Robbins, Wallace, and Ryan. Publishers are, on the whole, more likely to tie themselves up in knots over the writers they don’t have but want than over those they already have, particularly when it’s a question of multibook deals spread over several years.

  * It is a measure of things to come in the publishing industry that Atheneum was later acquired by Macmillan, after the latter firm was taken over by that leviathan of corporate crookery Robert Maxwell, and vanished altogether as an imprint after S&S acquired Macmillan in the wake of Maxwell’s mysterious death.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Television is the best thing that’s happened to kids since the invention of mother’s milk,” Bennett Cerf, ever the optimist, announced ebulliently to an audience of librarians in the summer of 1960. The librarians had been indulging in that pastime common to all those involved in books since the invention of movable type: the prediction that culture is about to go belly-up once and for all and that the next generation will be, or already is, functionally illiterate.

  Considering that Cerf would shortly sell Random House to RCA, which owned a TV network, his enthusiasm for television might not have been entirely objective. He himself was not always immune to the pessimism of those who make their living from books. A few years before, struck by the fact that booksellers were always predicting that the bookshop would one day go the way of the village blacksmith, Cerf had commissioned some research into the subject that produced the alarming information that not only did blacksmiths greatly outnumber bookstores in America but the per capita purchase of books by Americans was less than that of Thailand.

  By 1961, however, the age-old pessimism of book publishing had been erased by a sudden burst of confidence, prompting Life magazine to devote a long, yea-saying piece headlined, NO MORE A HEADACHE, BOOK BUSINESS BOOMS! According to Life, publishing stocks were soaring, the prolifera
tion of mergers was a sign of the industry’s growth, and the founding of new publishing firms such as Atheneum and Bernard Geis Associates pointed to a rosy future. (Hardly any of the new firms founded in that era survived.)

  Book publishing, “the business that capitalism forgot” in Life’s words, was suddenly glamorous, along with such businesses as “electronics [and] vending machines” and was being revolutionized by the use of some “mechanical brain” that could predict or create best-sellers. Indeed, Doubleday, Life reported, was already experimenting with an ambitious new sales program that would take the guesswork out of the book business. Doubleday salesmen were to be “armed with portable dictating machines” and sent out to take continuous inventory of the Doubleday titles at bookstores across the nation. These reports would be airmailed back to New York, where Doubleday’s executives would be able to plot how many copies of each title had sold and how many were still on booksellers’ shelves. “With uncanny accuracy,” Life marveled, Doubleday statisticians would then be able to predict the sales of a book and identify a best-seller, “just as an election night statistician can predict the outcome of an election from the early results of a few scattered precincts.”

  Since Doubleday’s ratio of best-sellers to failures was about the same as anyone else’s throughout the sixties, it can be presumed that this futuristic scheme failed to pay off. It was, however, typical of the sudden optimism that overcame publishers and investors at the time. Wacky ideas proliferated as share prices rose: instead of editors choosing which books to publish by reading them, “sales experts” would determine the right “product mix” for each list; “books would be sold through the mail to people who read magazines” (as if the book club had not already been invented); and publishers would strive for market share, since “the only way to get more books read is to put more on the shelves,” in the words of Doubleday’s then-chairman Douglas Black, who had apparently not been told that they were returnable.