After I had vigorously rung the old-fashioned bell, Ariel Durant appeared from out of the dense shrubbery that covered the flagstone pathway and shuffled out to open the gate for me. Her home attire was even more eccentric and bulky than what she had worn in New York. She greeted me in a hoarse, gravelly voice and warned me that I was about to see something to which few people had ever been granted entry—she squeezed my arm sharply—Will’s workplace, the place where he had researched and written his books. Max and Ray Schuster had never been here—a lot they cared for the Durants’ labors; all that mattered for them was money, money, money. But I, Ariel confided, seemed to her—though she was prepared to be disappointed—to have a finer sensibility and a real love of history, despite my having been brought up in wasteful affluence and having chosen an odious profession that was based on exploiting honest, decent, hardworking writers and scholars and stealing bread out of the mouth of genius.
But the house into which she ushered me was not exactly the West Coast equivalent of a Left Bank garret. It would, in fact, have been luxurious, had the Durants cared to give it some thought and attention, and must have been built by or for a star. The library had big French windows overlooking the garden and the empty pool. The overgrown trees around the house made it dark and cool, but it was the books that gave it a certain dusty, mildewed air, rather like that of Miss Havisham’s dining room in Great Expectations. I felt a little like Pip, when he returned from London dressed as a gentleman, except that there was no Estella in sight, worse luck.
The Durants’ working arrangements, unlike those of Irving Wallace, seemed jury-rigged and primitive. Will worked in an old wooden armchair covered in ratty-looking rugs, writing in longhand on a pad placed on his knees, with lots of spring clips to hold cards bearing his handwritten notes, lit by a shaded lamp like that of an accountant. His pages were laboriously typed up by Ethel, the Durants’ daughter. All around him were books, piled to the ceiling, covering the floor, even stacked in the fireplace. Ariel worked beside him, on a smaller chair, handing him the quotations and historical references he required.
Affable as ever, he rose and shook my hand. His movement scattered dozens of file cards and slips of paper. Ariel got him seated again, covered his shoulders with a blanket, and put all the cards and slips in order again. He did not thank her. He did not even seem to notice her presence, in fact, his mind, no doubt, fixed on the firm, upward march of progress.
Ariel dragged me out into the garden, clutching my arm. “You see what he’s like!” she hissed.
I nodded sympathetically, though it seemed to me that Will was much the same as ever, caught up in his work to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
“He’s getting worse and worse,” Ariel said. “He pretends to be working just so as not to have to talk to me.”
I murmured calming phrases. If Will had in fact developed a way of shutting himself off from Ariel’s ceaseless rancor and complaining, I thought, he was a lucky man, and a smart one, too. I recognized the symptoms easily enough. My father had always been stone-deaf to the voices of his wives, though in fact his hearing was acute when there was something he wanted to listen to. He could hear a whisper from across a soundstage if it concerned his work, particularly if it was in Hungarian.
“Perhaps Will should have a hearing aid?” I suggested, though hearing aids, I knew, were no cure for that kind of deafness.
“He won’t have one,” Ariel said lugubriously, in her strange, guttural baritone.
That seemed to me proof of real common sense on Will’s part. Ariel’s grip was rendering my arm numb, but I could think of no polite way to escape from it. “I have to do everything,” Ariel went on. “Whole passages of the book are my work, you know.”
This was news to me. That Ariel busied herself with footnotes and hunting for the exact quotation or fact that Will needed I knew well, if only because Ariel never failed to mention the fact in her letters, which usually ended with the handwritten warning, “Don’t mention any of this to Will!” (Will’s letters often ended with a quick note from Ariel at the bottom, reading, “Pay no attention to what Will has written above.”) But it had never occurred to me, nor to Max Schuster, that Ariel might be doing any of the actual writing.
“I do my share of the work,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s wrong that I don’t get any credit?”
I had no opinion one way or the other, but I knew that publishers had an almost superstitious dread of changing a winning formula. After nearly thirty years of publishing Will Durant’s books, I doubted that Max would be overjoyed at the idea of adding Ariel’s name. It seemed impolitic to suggest this to Ariel, who was still clinging to me fiercely. Indeed, I had the impression that unless I agreed, she might never let go, so I nodded encouragingly until she released her grip.
We were standing in front of a sizable swimming pool, empty and overgrown with weeds. The Durants’ garden, a fairly narrow and pinched space between the house and the wall, had the look of a set for Rain, a tropical jungle that threatened to engulf us from every side. One thing that can be said in favor of Los Angeles is that it is usually light and sunny, but here there was a dark closeness like that which so dismayed the Roman troops in the Teuteborg Forest before they were massacred by Arminius’s Germans. I am not normally afraid of plants, but there was something aggressive and claustrophobic about the garden that made me edge my way gingerly back toward the house, careful to keep my feet on the narrow flagstone path, not that the house itself was very much more cheerful.
All the same, it was with a certain sense of relief that I regained Will’s library—partly because Ariel had gone off to get tea. There was an atmosphere that seemed in some way familiar, like that of my grandparents’ house north of London in the years after the war—a certain overheated stuffiness that I associate with age. I experienced the same depressing and slightly guilty feeling that overcame me on those Sunday afternoons in Hendon—the sense of performing a slightly tedious obligation, coupled with a desperate desire to get away. Just as they had in Hendon, the minutes seemed an hour long, and every time I looked at my watch, I thought it must have stopped. I could not help feeling, too, that my visit gave the Durants as little pleasure as it gave me. I could hear Ariel banging pots and muttering in the kitchen, presumably infuriated because I had said yes when Will asked if I would like a cup of tea—for Ariel was ahead of her time in rejecting all forms of domesticity as unnatural impositions on womankind—while Will, however serene his smile, occasionally glanced surreptitiously at his watch. No doubt I was keeping them from a brisk afternoon spent producing five or six thousand words on the ideas of Hume or Hobbes, followed by a nut burger and a glass of herb tea, then early to bed with Pascal’s Pensées.
Will and I sat companionably for a few moments. He had a tendency to go blank from time to time, perhaps as he contemplated the vast stretch of history still left to him to cover, with or without his wife’s help. In the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization he had reached the seventeenth century. True, that only left him with three centuries to go, but since he planned to devote a whole volume to the age of Louis XIV, another to Rousseau and the French and American revolutions, and a further one to Napoleon, the work before him must have weighed heavily on his shoulders. I chatted with him about the nineteenth century and suggested it might be called The Age of Victoria, but he gave me a kindly smile of reproof and shook his head. He did not think he would live to reach the nineteenth century, he said, but felt it would probably require two volumes: The first might be named after Darwin and the second after Marx or Freud. He was not an admirer of Victoria. But if he reached Napoleon, he would be content. (He did, but only just.)
He wanted to be very frank with me, he said. It was of course a pleasure to see me, but there was a purpose to my being here, a small problem that needed to be dealt with between himself and S&S, which I might be able to raise with Max on my return. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He wiped his brow with a
handkerchief and fell silent again.
Might the subject be that of joint authorship? I asked, hoping to put him out of his misery, for he was clearly having a great deal of difficulty bringing the subject up himself. A look of immense relief appeared on his face, and he glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where the kettle could be heard whistling. “Ariel talked to you then?” he asked. I wondered what he had supposed we were doing in the garden. “Do you think Max will mind?”
I suspected that Max would hate the idea, but of all people he should understand that Will wasn’t going to stand in the way of whatever Ariel wanted. After all, however scared Will might be of Ariel, it could hardly exceed Max Schuster’s fear of Ray. All the same, it didn’t seem to me that Will was all that happy about the idea himself. He had the look of a man who has given in to overwhelming pressure and was determined to put the best face on it. I guessed that in his own quiet, passive-aggressive way, Will had been resisting this change for a long time.
There might be problems, I told him. The sales department would probably raise all sorts of objections, as might the Book-of-the-Month Club. But I didn’t think the general public would be affected one way or the other. What mattered most was his own comfort and peace of mind. It might even be a good opportunity to get some publicity for the Durants, who complained constantly that Will had never been on the cover of Time or a guest on the Today show and that Max had failed to procure the Nobel Prize for his work. I said I would talk to Max as soon as I was back in New York.
Tears welled up in Will’s eyes, and he grasped my hand. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Shortly afterward—I could not help suspecting that she had been listening at the door—Ariel arrived with a tray on which were three mugs of steaming herb tea and a plate of stale Fig Newtons. The tea was something special, she said—very good for the health. She and Will were great believers in it and drank several cups a day. It was without caffeine and absolutely unstimulating. The mugs were odd, heavy, gnarly things, cast by some amateur potter and glazed in a kind of jungle green. Was their daughter an amateur potter? I wondered. The taste of the tea was distinctly medicinal, with a bitter, unpleasant aftertaste. I drank mine quickly, anxious to get back out into the sunshine and tawdriness of Sunset Boulevard, as far away as possible from the Durants’ glum and Sisyphean struggle with world history. I made a mental note to myself to seek out the most trashy double feature I could find and spend the evening as unculturally as possible; unfortunately for me, Ariel’s tea had a pronounced laxative effect, and instead I spent most of the night in my hotel bathroom. I was still there the next morning, when Casey arrived from New York, and suffered off and on from severe stomach spasms all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.
Perhaps for that reason, we did not enjoy the second honeymoon that we had discussed somewhat wistfully in New York. We visited San Simeon, stopped to have a hamburger at Nepenthe in Big Sur, stayed the night in a hotel where it was possible to bathe in a warm natural spring. Despite all this, the romantic mood was lacking.
By the time we had reached San Francisco, we had decided to take what was in those days the inevitable step toward healing a marriage: to have a child.
It is hard now, almost thirty-seven years later, to remember that period before the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism when married couples who didn’t have children were looked upon with some combination of suspicion and pity and felt not to be really grown-up. Casey was ahead of the curve when it came to sex and feminism, but she too felt that a child would put everything right between us, as well as validating her adulthood in the eyes of her mother and grandmother. No doubt it would do the same to me, I thought, in the eyes of my father.
On the flight back, we discussed the future. I would cut down working every night and weekend, we would take vacations like civilized people, I would put S&S in proportion.…
It all made sense. Or would have, had I not been flying back to a series of events that was to change S&S—and ultimately the rest of the publishing industry—beyond recognition.
CHAPTER 11
“Big things from small acorns grow.” Truer words have never been written. In 1961, S&S was lurching along much as it had for several years, undisturbed except by the minor, everyday fracases and turf wars of office politics and the growing split between Leon Shimkin and Max Schuster. There is no law that says partners have to feel about each other like Damon and Pythias. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House were umbilically linked in friendship and sometimes took vacations together; Alfred and Blanche Knopf were married, if not happily then certainly successfully. No doubt it would have been nice had the two remaining owners of S&S followed that pattern, but it need not have been fatal that they did not. After all, even before Shimkin became an owner, Dick Simon and Max Schuster were beginning to drift apart. As young men they had been partners in the most exciting adventure of their lives, but whether they had ever really been friends is open to doubt.
I mention all this only to explain that S&S was by no means the simple, happy place about which old-timers were later to reminisce—no place ever is. There was a certain amount of jockeying for position among those who felt themselves qualified for higher office. Some attached themselves to Shimkin, who seemed the person most likely to end up in control of the company—nobody assumed that Max Schuster could go on running it for very long. Others merely sought a better, more secure foothold.
I was in an ambiguous position myself. On paper, I still worked for Henry; however, Bob was my friend, and I was also doing a lot of editing for Peter Schwed. Not for the first time in my career, I was obliged to steer a middle course between people whom I liked but who disliked each other. I consoled myself with the fact that I was welcome, for the moment, in every camp and that everybody—Schwed, Simon, Gottlieb, even Max—wanted me to work on their books. Perhaps because I had nothing at stake, I was the first to notice that the power structure had changed insensibly, as if an invisible hand were shaking it from below.
Which, in a way, was the truth.
• • •
IN THE meantime, however, everybody’s attention at S&S was diverted by an ice swan.
The ice swan is a relic of a past age of opulent display, when the great international hotels of the world had five-star restaurants, and the summit of luxury was still the transatlantic liner. In those days, any self-respecting hotel kitchen or ocean-liner galley had a sous-chef whose task it was to carve sculptures out of huge blocks of ice, often gleaming fantasies of vaguely nationalistic appeal. These sculptures, by definition ephemeral, usually four to five feet high, were carved in bulk and stored in the freezer, to be brought out to form the centerpiece in the first-class dining saloon at dinnertime. Caviar was usually presented in a life-size ice swan, its back hollowed out to hold about a kilo. On the big Cunard liners, smaller ice swans were also used for caviar at cocktail parties, either the purser’s, to which all the more important and distinguished first-class passengers were invited on the first night at sea, or at ones given by the more social passengers in their own staterooms during the voyage. On my mother’s side of the family, I actually had a distant relative who was chief purser of the Queen Mary, and I remember him taking me down to see a big, brightly lit freezer compartment stacked with ice sculptures, like an Aladdin’s cave of frozen treasures, in the center of which a heavily dressed and gloved member of the kitchen staff, his breath condensing in clouds of vapor as he chipped away with a mallet and chisel, was carving a swan out of a block of ice about five feet long and four feet across, to add to a whole row of swans, lined up neatly like a ballet chorus, on the floor.
It was therefore with some surprise that I found an ice swan in the shower stall of the men’s toilet at Simon and Schuster late one morning, its elegant, curved beak coldly mimicking that slightly supercilious smile that swans have as it dripped on the floor. The hole in its back was empty, so I surmised that the can of caviar it contained must have been r
emoved before it was parked here to drip to death. It was a spectacle that produced a certain melancholy—so much effort, melting away so fast and unseen—as well as inevitable curiosity.
It soon transpired that I was, unfortunately, neither the first nor the only person to have seen the swan. It had been delivered on a trolley by two men earlier in the morning, and, as fate would have it, they had brought it up to the twenty-eighth floor in a passenger elevator with, of all people, Ray Schuster. At that time, the caviar was still in place, as was a card suspended from its beak.
There could have been no greater sign of the kind of hanky-panky that Ray most feared was taking place behind her back, so, to the great indignation of the two deliverymen, she ripped the envelope off the bird’s beak and, bursting into Max’s office, slapped it down on his desk. “Explain this!” she cried.
Poor Max bumbled and mumbled, his confusion no doubt passing for guilt in Ray’s eyes, but when he at last had worked out the whole story, he discovered that the swan was destined for Phyllis S. Levy, Bob Gottlieb’s assistant. Tall, thin, svelte, with the high-cheekboned, long-necked beauty of a model, Phyllis was the antithesis of the grubbiness that usually defines book publishing. Perfectly dressed and coiffed in the style that Jackie Kennedy was already making famous, Phyllis maintained a small cubicle that was as elegant and carefully tended as she was. Bob had more or less inherited Phyllis when Jack Goodman, then the publisher and the heir apparent of S&S, died unexpectedly. Both of them had worked for Goodman, whom they had worshiped, Bob as an editorial assistant and Phyllis as a secretary.
The best friend and college roommate of Rona Jaffe and instrumental in bringing The Best of Everything to S&S, Phyllis had a shrewd eye for popular fiction, great charm, a wicked sense of humor, a sharp intelligence, and a small but steady flame of ambition. The swan had, in fact, been sent to Phyllis by Aubrey Goodman, a first-time author whose hand she had been holding on behalf of Bob. Goodman’s book, The Golden Youth of Lee Prince, was a flagrantly autobiographical novel about the New York jeunesse dorée that Phyllis had brought to Bob’s attention. At Phyllis’s urging, the book had been given a dust jacket made of metallic gold foil, an innovation that failed in the stores, since all the jackets wrinkled and tore in shipment. Nevertheless, Goodman wanted to express his gratitude, and since an ice swan was mentioned in the book, he sent one to Phyllis.
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