Another Life

by Michael Korda

  * Years later, on our first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair, before Snyder had graduated to chauffeur-driven limousines, I remember our renting a car at Frankfurt airport and driving in circles through the pouring rain and early morning rush-hour traffic of a strange city. Snyder read the map in a state of growing dismay as I got into the wrong lane or missed a crucial exit. We could actually see our hotel as we sped past it in the wrong direction again and again, apparently unable to approach it. “You are never going to do the fucking driving again,” he growled in a deep voice, and I never did.

  CHAPTER 14

  Having fun has always been an integral part of the book-publishing business—indeed, one of its main attractions. Bennett Cerf, whose enjoyment of life was so well known that it actually became one of Random House’s main assets, boasted frequently about how much fun he was having. This caused a good deal of puzzlement and anxiety among Wall Street types, since most of them took a more conventional, Puritan view of business; they assumed that anybody who claimed to be having fun during office hours wasn’t working hard enough. Even in such relatively unconventional businesses as television and the movie industry, few people would admit to having fun. On the contrary, people such as Jim Aubrey, who ran the CBS television network, worked hard to be seen as deadly serious, and so did his competitors and the men who ran the major movie studios. Aubrey was, in fact, known as “the Smiling Cobra,” not because he had a sense of humor but because his thin, narrow-lipped smile always portended the dismissal of some major executive who had failed to please him. Motion-picture executives strove to present more serious appearances than bankers. It is hard to imagine any one of them being carried out of his office in his own chair, a broad grin on his face, as Cerf did the day Random House moved to its new building, or telling an audience of Wall Street analysts that publishing was the most fun you could have with your clothes on.

  There was something about many of the new, predominantly Jewish book publishers that made them want to combine business and pleasure and enabled them for the most part to eat their cake and have it too. Dick Simon and Max Schuster, too, had always stressed the importance of having fun—and for the most part, they did have fun, each in his own way, as did the Knopfs, with rather more dignity. Alfred Knopf, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, took the portraits of many of Knopf’s authors for the jackets of their books.

  Although Dick Snyder came out of the Doubleday farm team—nobody at Doubleday had any fun except Nelson Doubleday, who had too much—and the circle around Leon Shimkin (who was no fun at all), he instinctively understood the relationship between personal pleasure and publishing that made it a different business from most. In no other area of the media is it possible to take a flier on something you like with as small a risk. Movies cost millions to make, television pilots are not only expensive but seldom lead anywhere, the content of most magazines is predetermined by editorial policy, but the investment in any one book, provided it’s not by a big, best-selling author, can be measured in thousands—very often the low thousands at that. Moreover, every once in a while one of these long shots pays off. Successful self-help books, for example, are very often self-published (and self-promoted) until they reach the mainstream.

  People who work in publishing houses, and by no means only editors, are always throwing off ideas, some of which get turned into books. One S&S employee’s dance lessons led him to suggest Arthur Murray’s book on how to dance that became a staple best-seller, year after year, just as Shimkin’s knowledge of bookkeeping led him to the discovery of J. K. Lasser, whom he persuaded to write an annual income-tax guide that has been a best-seller for many decades. Cerf turned a taste for corny jokes into a succession of hugely successful joke books (some of them published by S&S), while Alfred Knopf’s passion for good wine and food led him to the creation of countless books on the subjects and Dick Simon’s fondness for cards led him to publish book after book on card games, including Charles Goren’s best-selling bridge guides. The line between self-indulgence and commerce is nowhere thinner than in publishing. Fun made money.

  • • •

  IN THE meantime, book publishers were missing the biggest change in American culture since the twenties. The age of rock and roll had begun, and the big party of the sixties was under way, with London as its swinging capital. Nobody, not even Bob Gottlieb, whose antennae for trendiness were reputed to be tuned so finely, seemed to notice what was going on across the Atlantic, nor, increasingly, even under our windows on Fifth Avenue. Teen culture was about to take over the world, while book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic continued to worry about “high culture” and to publish books aimed at the parents and grandparents of the people who were making news and having fun.

  I was very slightly ahead of the game because I genuinely liked the music, which was anything but fashionable to admit in publishing circles in the early 1960s, where most people were busy circling the wagons to defend “traditional” culture (of which the book was thought to be a bulwark) against the onslaught of sex, drugs, and rock and roll led by crazed and presumably illiterate teenagers. The notion that they not only might be literate but might even buy books if we took the trouble to publish any that interested them had not yet occurred to anybody.

  The thought that the new youth culture was going to change most of our lives in all sorts of unforeseen ways had not yet penetrated either. We were still living the great middle-class dream, unaware that the ground was already shifting beneath us.

  OF COURSE, the future did not seem clear at that time, not to me nor to Dick. It never does. One thing, however, was clear enough to me: So long as major agents weren’t sending me books, I was going to find it hard to build up a personal list of authors important enough to make the company take me seriously—more seriously than as a hardworking book doctor and jack-of-all-trades. This clearly wasn’t going to happen by combing the fringes of the listings for agents in Literary Market Place or cultivating the Jacques Chambruns of the world.

  The major agents (nearly all men) in those days were hard to reach and notoriously capricious. But a few women, themselves the survivors of countless battles on the publishing front of the war of the sexes, were more tolerant of newcomers, more adventurous, and themselves contemptuous of the older male agents. Some of them had come out of the tough world of major movie-studio story departments, such as Phyllis Jackson and Helen Strauss. Both of them were—no other phrase will do—“tough broads,” more than capable of holding their own with the movie moguls who had once been their bosses, let alone with easy prey like book editors and male literary agents. Jackson, in fact, when she had been a movie company “scout” in New York, had been the first person to bring Gone with the Wind to David Selznick’s attention—it was still in manuscript—and urge him to buy it. She brought to the book business some of the flair, toughness, and drama of the movie business.

  Phyllis was passionately loyal to her authors in a way that would have seemed excessive and in poor taste to men such as Paul Reynolds and Harold Matson—she took everything personally and looked, above all, for the kind of real enthusiasm and personal devotion in an editor that she felt herself. Her favorite editor, not surprisingly, was Bob Gottlieb, but perhaps because of my movie background she occasionally sent me a manuscript, and gradually we became pals. Through her—and because Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People was being made into a play—I met Kay Brown, the famous theatrical agent, and through her Robert Lantz, who specialized in the theater and the movies but sometimes handled books and who had known my uncles and my father in Berlin before the Nazis.

  There were plenty of younger agents to get to know too, among them Candida Donadio, whose authors included most of what was then the Jewish nouvelle vague: Joseph Heller, Wallace Markfield, and Bruce Jay Friedman, a close friend of Bob’s. There was also Lynn Nesbit, somewhat easier to approach, then working for the urbane and dapper Sterling Lord. Nesbit combined not only brains and beauty but also taste and energy and
was already building a list of remarkable writers. She lived in a garden duplex downtown, and the party she gave there for her friend and English counterpart Deborah Rogers was the first publishing party I had ever been to that wasn’t dull and stiff (except for those in which one waited breathlessly for Ray Schuster to say something awful). In fact, Lynn gave me hope—she was elegant, witty, and to all appearances self-assured—that publishing didn’t have to be a dowdy business. When I finally worked up the nerve to take her to lunch at the Italian Pavilion, then the mecca of the younger publishing set (the meccas of the older publishing set were “21” and the Café Louis XIV), she was absolutely certain that I was going to publish a lot of her authors and become her client myself.

  “What makes you think I want to write books?” I asked.

  “I can tell,” she said, with characteristic impatience. “The sooner you start, the better.”

  ACCORDING TO the hallowed tradition of book publishing, it was necessary to have lunch with all these people, and many more, as often as possible. For editors, in fact, having lunch is regarded as a positive, income-generating, aggressive act, and a certain suspicion is extended toward those few who can be found eating a sandwich at their desk more than once or twice a week. Publishers have been known to roam through the editorial department at lunchtime to catch editors who are “not doing their job” in the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich from the nearest deli. A large expense account is very often perceived as proof of ambition and hard work. Publishing might, in fact, be the only business in the world in which it is possible to be criticized for expenses that are too modest.

  There were some exceptions, of course. Bob Gottlieb later became famous for not going out to lunch. Agents who wanted to see him had to come to his office for a sandwich. Everybody else in the world of book publishing, at least at what we in the British armed forces called “the sharp end of the stick,” could be found from twelve-thirty to two-thirty at some midtown restaurant with a napkin in his or her lap.

  Nobody has ever done a poll to see whether the agents—the putative beneficiaries of this largesse—really want to be taken out to lunch every day of the workweek. It is simply one of the basic assumptions of book publishing that he or she who lunches with the most agents gets the most books. In the fifties, and even the early sixties, such lunches used to be preceded by a couple of cocktails and often dragged on well past three o’clock, leaving both parties with bad headaches and tendencies to nap during the rest of the afternoon. In those days, editors did indeed give their all for their company—cirrhosis of the liver and cardiovascular failure only too often went with the profession and were assumed to be work-related illnesses. By the mid-sixties, as younger agents who limited themselves to water or one glass of white wine came to the fore, lunches tended to become more spartan. Still, drunk or sober, the average editor faced five lunches a week for the sole purpose of trying to charm comparative strangers into sending him or her manuscripts that in all probability would turn out to be no good, thus calling for another lunch to apologize for rejecting it—for not every agent takes rejection well, particularly if that agent has spent two hours rhapsodizing over the manuscript in question during lunch, while the editor nodded away as if agreeing with every word.

  As if they didn’t have to lunch out enough as it was, editors even formed their own lunch club that met once a month, though many avoided it on the grounds that no editor had anything much to gain from having lunch with another, and anyway, it was full of fossils and has-beens. For the latter reason, I rather liked it—some of the older members were certainly curmudgeonly and fossilized, but I found it interesting to talk to people such as John Farrar (one of the founders of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) or Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday, both of whom had been editors for at least fifty years at that point. What struck me most was that while neither of them was rich—it’s always been hard to get rich as an editor—they still had a certain joie de vivre and a keen interest in what was going on. Here, at any rate, was a profession in which age, if it was not treated with respect, was at least tolerated. Besides, allowance being made for Farrar’s extreme testiness, they both still seemed to be having fun, thus proving Dick Snyder and Bennett Cerf right.

  FUN WAS about to enter my life on a grander scale than that, however, and was to remain in it for over thirty years in the person of one remarkable (and diminutive) agent.

  West Coast agents had long been an unknown quantity to most East Coast publishing people, who tended to look down on them as mere “10 percenters,” knuckle draggers of no culture and no interest in books, who made their living peddling flesh and something called “screen treatments” and who appeared in the offices of New York publishers only from time to time in sweaty pursuit of original stories that could be made into movies. There had been a very few exceptions over the years—there was Myron Selznick, David’s brother, a flesh peddler if ever there was one, but also a sophisticated and well-read man, and Leland Hayward, whose urbanity and sophistication had made him welcome on both coasts, as well as in those parts of Europe that mattered. Hayward was a man of taste and charm. Supremely elegant and something of a celebrity in his own right (he married two international social stars, Pamela Churchill and Slim Keith), Hayward was more interested in serving as the link between Broadway and Sunset Boulevard than in books, but when in New York he paid his respects to the more socially acceptable publishers, chiefly Bennett Cerf, who moved—or yearned to move—in the same social circles as Hayward, and the Knopfs, who were celebrities in their own way.

  Hayward seemed at home almost everywhere except Los Angeles, although he lived there for years. He went out of his way to build a New England–style house in Beverly Hills, complete with clapboards, shutters, and a shingled roof—even a barn that would not have looked out of place in rural Connecticut or Vermont, except that it contained, among other luxuries, a completely equipped, lilliputian soda fountain for his children, the countertop low enough that they could serve themselves and their friends.

  There was yet another West Coast agent, one who had modeled himself to some degree in Leland Hayward’s image (except for the soda fountain), and that was Irving Paul Lazar. Lazar had been around, it sometimes seemed, since year one, a more or less permanent fixture in international society, the movie business, and, since the 1950s, the book business. He handled a good many writers who were all major celebrities. As a rule, he dealt only with heads of houses, mere editors being beneath him.

  I had never met Lazar, but I had been hearing his name since 1950, when I first saw him, at Eden Roc on the Cap d’Antibes. Lazar was then in his forties, I suppose, and already something of a legend. My Aunt Alexa and I had been swimming and had been joined by Uncle Alex for lunch. Looking across the pool, Alex shaded his eyes with his copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and waved. “It’s Irving Lazar,” he said to Alexa. “We must ask him to dinner. By the way, nobody who matters calls him ‘Swifty.’ Bogart gave him the name after Lazar made three deals for him in the same day, on a bet,” Alex explained.

  The person in question was standing on the other side of the pool, an incongruous, diminutive figure among all the half-naked, oiled, and bronzed bodies. He was totally bald, and his face—what could be seen of it below huge, glittering, gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—was tanned, like his pate, to the color of a well-cared-for crocodile handbag. He was wearing tiny white shoes, a blue blazer with gold buttons, and white trousers pressed so perfectly, despite the heat, that he looked like a shiny, expensive beach toy that has just been unpacked by some lucky child. He was shouting into a telephone.

  He was shouting into a telephone some thirteen years later when he called me, out of the blue, at S&S. “Lazar here,” he said, as if there were none other. The voice was unknown to me and difficult at first to decipher. He seemed to be affecting a rich, even plummy, upper-class English accent, of the Lord Haw-Haw type, with every syllable accentuated, and for a moment I
thought he was making fun of me. “Have lunch with me, dear boy,” he went on grandly. “I want to pick your brain.”

  In what area, I asked suspiciously. “I’m not doing any business with your shop,” Lazar said, still apparently aping a toff’s accent for my benefit. “I do a lot of business with Bennett Cerf at Random House. I do a lot of business with Tom Guinzburg at Viking.” He paused, perhaps for breath. “I don’t know why I’m not doing any fucking business with Simon and Schuster,” he snapped suddenly, as sharply as the crack of a whip, his voice changing to what I presumed was his natural accent, a grainy, impatient Brooklyn Jewish growl.

  “Yes, all right, where?” I asked.

  “ ‘21,’ for chrissakes, where do you think?” Lazar said. “One o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  At “21,” where I arrived a good ten minutes early, I had only to mention Lazar’s name to be treated like royalty. I was swept to a red-checked table downstairs, opposite the bar, and given a bowl of celery and olives on ice and a basket of rolls. From time to time, as I ate the rolls, a captain arrived bearing bulletins of Lazar’s progress. Mr. Lazar called to say that he would be on his way shortly. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called to say that Mr. Lazar was just leaving his apartment. Mr. Lazar’s secretary called again to say that Mr. Lazar was actually out the door. Mr. Lazar’s California office called to ask Mr. Lazar to phone as soon as he arrived. Three quarters of an hour later—by which time I had emptied the basket of rolls—there was a bustle at the entrance of the bar, and Lazar appeared, dressed faultlessly, as ever, in a checked suit of the kind worn in England for attending the more fashionable race meetings. I waved to him, but he was busy scanning the room like a theater manager counting the house before raising the curtain. He plunged off to shake hands with everybody he knew, moving around the room in a slow, counterclockwise semicircle.