Another Life

by Michael Korda

  IT WAS not to be expected, in the normal order of things, that two men as different as Bob Gottlieb and Dick Snyder would get along well under one roof, but in fact they developed a certain distant, wary respect for each other. Dick had a clear-cut picture of the future—he would run S&S and Bob would be one of his major assets—but it almost goes without saying that Bob did not share this vision. In Bob’s view of the future, he would be running S&S, leaving the things that didn’t interest him to Schulte, Snyder, or both. He recognized Snyder’s extraordinary combination of energy and sheer competence—these were traits he shared himself—but he thought of him mostly as “Leon’s man,” somebody to be kept at arm’s length from the faithful friends and the decisions that mattered about books. In later years, when Dick had become something of a publishing god in his own right (an angry one, many people said), he would affect a kind of gruff comradeship with Bob, as if they had been close at S&S, and Bob, with a certain noblesse oblige, allowed him to do so without, however, joining in. Dick, revealingly, always referred to Gottlieb as “Bobby” and was the only person to do so. A Snyder-Gottlieb alliance would have been a formidable combination of publishing talents, and Dick knew it, but there was never a prayer of it happening. For all his dedication to his “loved ones,” Bob was an autocrat at heart, albeit one with a genuinely sincere belief that he was a benevolent autocrat; it was not in his nature to share power with anyone. Bob had no difficulty in recognizing a wolf when he saw one, and much as he admired Dick’s sharp intelligence he was not about to put himself in the service of another person’s ambition. Nor was he eager to see Schwed, a relatively benign figure, replaced as publisher by somebody with real teeth and his own agenda, as was clearly Dick’s ambition.

  All of this, of course, was passing beneath the surface, largely because Bob was the kind of person who could never have admitted, even to himself, that he was capable of playing office politics. It was impossible to imagine that Bob would ever leave or that anything would ever change, but, in fact, we were on the brink of changes so big and dramatic in our small world that they were literally unthinkable.

  CHAPTER 17

  In the meantime, my own life was about to change. I was about to become, of all things, a writer, just as Sidney Kingsley had predicted. I got there by a curious twist of fate.

  Years before, when I was still living in London, I became friends with Milton H. Greene, the glamorous photographer of high-fashion and show-business celebrities who had himself leaped into international celebrity of the most sensational kind when he made a deal with Marilyn Monroe to become her business partner and her producer.

  Milton was a small, darkly handsome man, with an open, boyish smile of considerable charm that contrasted oddly with his brooding eyes. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time, his celebrated partnership with Marilyn was at once the zenith of his career and the beginning of his downfall. It resulted in one of Marilyn’s worst pictures—The Prince and the Showgirl—and one of her best, Bus Stop, but in the end Milton was no more capable of controlling Marilyn (or saving her from herself) than Twentieth Century–Fox had been.

  It was typical of Milton’s charm that he had seduced Marilyn Monroe in one instant, right on her own doorstep. He had been sent out by Look magazine to photograph her, and when she opened her door and saw Milton, he looked so young that she said, “Why, you’re just a boy!” Milton looked her up and down slowly and carefully, taking in all of that lush figure, and said, in his quiet, gentle voice, “And you’re just a girl.”

  Milton not only charmed her, he somehow managed to soothe her—no easy task, given her high level of anxiety, her pill taking, and her mind-numbing hysteria. He persuaded her that he could help her break away from the tyranny of the studio—with which she had had a love-hate relationship since she was in her teens—choose her own roles, make her own movies, and become a serious actress in New York. The ink was not even dry on the contracts that linked them before Milton realized that he had bitten off more than he could chew, but by that time it was too late.

  In these unhappy circumstances, Milton spent a good deal of time sitting in the small mews house he had rented just off Grosvenor Square during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, around the corner from the elegant apartment building where my Aunt Alexa was living. Milton and Alexa met and became friendly, and since I was often at Alexa’s, it was inevitable that I met him.

  Against all the odds, Milton and I became friends, despite the difference in age. Milton, it transpired, loved to play chess, and since this was one of my skills—my father had taught me to play on a tiny, folding, pocket-size board during a train trip across the United States when I was eleven—I took to coming over at odd hours, in case Milton was free. Mostly, he was. Neither Laurence Olivier, who was costarring and directing, nor Marilyn wanted him on the set, and as producer there was not much for him to do but sit at home while other people spent his money. Occasionally, Marilyn wandered through the house, dazed and distracted, with a shopping list of complaints for Milton.

  Soon after I had become a more or less permanent guest at Milton’s house, his wife, Amy, arrived from their home in Connecticut. Amy Greene was a diminutive, exquisite woman, something like a high-fashion model in miniature, whose energy surrounded her like a bright aura. Unlike Milton, who could sit for hours without saying a word, perfectly content, Amy was as bright and restless and chatty as a parrot, forever in motion and determined never to be bored—the complete opposite, in some ways, of her husband. The last thing Amy wanted to see was Milton and me sitting around the house playing chess, but she wasted no time in finding out everything there was to know about me, and we soon became close friends.

  Eventually, The Prince and the Showgirl was completed, for better or for worse, and the Greenes sailed for home. I lost sight of them until I myself went back to America, at which point I became a regular visitor to Milton’s penthouse studio on Lexington Avenue and to their house in Wilton, Connecticut, on weekends.

  By then, Milton’s attempt to transform himself into a movie producer had failed. He had to go back to taking photographs because his experience at producing movies with Marilyn had plunged him into debt, but his heart was never in it. He was always looking for a way back into movie production or to Broadway. “I’m putting something together,” he murmured mysteriously if asked what he was doing.

  In the meantime, he did magazine work, while Amy, much to Milton’s surprise, took a job as an assistant to the beauty editor of Glamour magazine. There, she quickly proved to be surprisingly ambitious and successful and soon became something of a gadfly at the magazine.

  A great many unsuspected talents had worked at Glamour at one time or another, including Andy Warhol, who drew shoes and handbags for the magazine before his artistic career took off; Cybill Shepherd, who got her start as a cover girl; and Gloria Steinem. Glamour’s offices were full of people whose aspirations went beyond evaluating lipstick colors, so I should not have been surprised when Amy asked me to write a piece for the magazine. In 1962, Glamour was going through one of those crises typical of fashion magazines, in which the management begins to question the content of the magazine and wants it made more “relevant” to its readers. While Glamour’s readers wanted to know how to dress well and look pretty and were quite happy with the magazine as it was, the editors were forced to start looking for writers who could make contemporary trends and issues “relevant.” Thus it was that Amy asked me if I could write a piece on rock and roll.

  I said that I thought I could. Pop music was hovering out there, hard to avoid, but without yet having much impact on traditional culture. People who read books or edited magazines were aware of music that was then usually lumped together as rock and roll but regarded it as a noisy teenage fad, connected inextricably with mobs of screaming girls, greasy ducktail haircuts, and a generally surly and rebellious adolescent attitude. Everybody had heard of Elvis, of course, but he was usually dismissed as another of those we
ird Southern phenomena, like “snake-chunking,” gospel revivals, and speaking in tongues. Bob Gottlieb, with his instinct for popular culture, was the only person I knew who actually listened to rock and roll, and he even owned some of Elvis’s albums. From him, I had developed an interest in pop music myself, though I made no claim to be an expert—still, I enjoyed the music (had, in fact, ever since being introduced to Eartha Kitt and Bill Haley and the Comets while I was at Oxford) and at least knew more about it than Glamour’s editors, who thought it was trashy and preferred Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. I agreed to write the piece—five thousand words—and sat down at my portable Hermes typewriter (a purchase made in the days when I still saw my future as that of a foreign correspondent in a trench coat, writing my dispatches at a café table) to do it.

  Very shortly, I was writing pieces for Glamour at a fast clip, one after the other. From time to time, I asked myself if the writing might eventually interfere with being an editor, but there seemed no good reason why it should—other men had hobbies like golf or stamp collecting. But the truth was that having two simultaneous careers did have a downside. Like a lot of other men, I was working at the expense of my domestic life. One could argue that working hard and making more money was good for everyone, but I knew better. I would probably have spent hours every evening editing manuscripts even if I had been obliged to pay S&S for the privilege and continued to bang away at my portable typewriter on the weekends. Workaholism, like alcoholism, has its own logic and invariably justifies itself. Anybody who can crank out a readable piece about almost anything is always in demand, and pretty soon I was writing for all sorts of magazines. It was not the kind of work that was likely to make me rich, but it was writing, and the sight of my byline meant more to me, for the moment, than the size of the check. I took pleasure in seeing my words in print to the extent that I even agreed to write the copy on the labels of Sherry-Lehmann’s house brands of liquor.

  The great thing about magazine writing is that you start ahead of the game, with somebody else’s idea. Magazine editors, unlike book editors, mostly know what they want and have a fairly clear idea of who their average reader is. As a freelance writer, I never truly became a member of the Glamour family, but I gradually began to develop a feel for what might interest the Glamour reader, though without the cast-iron certainty that the editors had about the tastes and limits of their subscribers. Shortly after my debut, Glamour’s editor in chief, Mrs. Kathleen Aston Casey (it was then almost mandatory for the editors of women’s magazines to have three names), expressed an interest in the fact that more and more women were engaging in dangerous sports. Like most topics seized on by magazine editors, this nugget of information reached her from a fellow guest at a dinner party—in the world of women’s magazines at the time this constituted serious research. Mrs. Casey conceived an issue dedicated to the clothing necessary for the pursuit of these dangerous sports, whatever they might be—her fellow guest had not been clear on their exact nature—to be introduced with a feature article by me.

  I took on the assignment happily enough, fairly confident that I would find women doing all sorts of unlikely sports. This indeed proved to be the case. Over a period of a few weeks I talked to women rugby players, a woman jockey, women scuba divers, women rock climbers, women hockey players, and even an embattled, if privileged, team of women polo players. The women’s movement as such had not yet even begun—Gloria Steinem had yet to go underground as a Playboy “bunny,” Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer had not yet written their books—but already it was apparent that women were eager to “push the envelope,” as test pilots say, and confident that anything men could do they could do as well or better. I even met the first woman telephone lineperson, who had attracted national attention when she was photographed climbing a telephone pole in her overalls, work boots, and hard hat, but of course repairing telephone lines was not exactly a sport. All this was interesting but failed to satisfy Mrs. Casey’s vision of danger.

  Eventually, I made contact with a group of women sky divers in New Jersey who were willing to be interviewed and photographed. After several drinks, dinner, and a couple of bottles of wine, I felt the atmosphere was loose enough to enable me to ask just what they got out of parachute jumping. Was it excitement, the thrill of danger, a sense of liberation—what, in short, made them jump out of an airplane once a week when the weather was right? We batted this back and forth, but no answer was forthcoming, at least none that I thought would satisfy Mrs. Casey. Eventually, late in the evening, a schoolteacher, blushing prettily, leaned close to me and confessed that while excitement, danger, and liberation were all part of it, she, personally, always had an orgasm on the way down, right after opening her chute.

  This, it seemed to me, was something to bring back to Mrs. Casey. Women’s magazines were at that time just beginning to take the plunge into the deep end of the sexual pool that eventually resulted in Helen Gurley Brown’s triumph in resuscitating the moribund Cosmopolitan with the “Cosmo girl,” who was as outspoken about her sexual needs as she was insecure about her weight, manicure, and fashion savvy. Glamour was a long way from that but moving ever more quickly in that direction. The days when its readers could be satisfied by articles on accessorizing, fashions for office wear, and what to say on that first, crucial date were long since gone, and the word orgasm was off the list of taboos—indeed, half the articles seemed to be about sex, and one had the feeling that the magazine was running as hard as it could to catch up with its readers. Still, with any magazine, it’s hard for an outsider to gauge the prevailing, generally unspoken moral code. It was clear that Mrs. Casey ran the magazine with an iron fist, but since we had never met, I wasn’t sure just where and in what areas her limits lay. Sometimes I got away with things that I thought she would never print; on other occasions, things that seemed to me perfectly harmless produced a flurry of anguished calls from Amy and Karlys Daly, the beauty editor. One thing was clear: There was no appeal. Like most women’s magazine editors, Mrs. Casey was an unapologetic tyrant. In my mind’s eye, I thought of her as the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, ready at any moment to shout, “Off with his head!”

  The schoolteacher’s experience, it turned out as the evening went on, had been mirrored by the others in the group. One of the older women confessed that it beat anything she had ever experienced with her husband, and another remarked, with a shy smile, that she sometimes made two or three jumps a day and came every time, “as regular as clockwork.”

  The parachute ladies had another thing in common: They could drink me under the table. I returned to New York with the beginnings of a fierce hangover but happy to have a lead for my story—so happy that I actually decided to present it to the formidable Mrs. Casey in person.

  An audience was arranged, and I arrived ahead of time, feeling rather like a Roman summoned to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. Far from providing a threatening atmosphere, however, Mrs. Casey’s sanctum sanctorum was a riot of yellow and black: Every square inch that could be covered in fake leopard skin was. The walls, the carpets, the upholstery, the pillows were all done in leopard skin, and a profusion of leopard statues of various sizes, as well as drawings of leopards, made it clear what animal Mrs. Casey admired most. Even her signature pens were made of plastic formed to resemble a leopard’s skin, as was her wastepaper basket. I half expected her to have whiskers, fangs, and a snarling countenance, but in fact she was an attractive woman of a certain age with gray hair and a no-nonsense manner.

  Tentatively, I outlined my article, then approached the lead. I described my afternoon and evening with the women sky divers and explained their startling confession. The word orgasm did not frighten Mrs. Casey. She stared at me, her expression ambiguous, nodding slightly to indicate that the subject was neither taboo nor unfamiliar to her. It would, I suggested, be a terrific way to begin the piece—a real attention grabber. (An “attention grabber” was a constant demand from the advertising department.)

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nbsp; Mrs. Casey looked thoughtful. She fiddled with one of her leopard-skin pens for a while. There were three or four other women in attendance, including Amy and Karlys, but none of them said anything. It was rather like being in the headmaster’s office at a boys’ school, after some awful infraction of discipline, or perhaps the Mother Superior’s at a convent. I half expected Mrs. Casey to lunge at me with a ruler, demanding that I hold out my hand. Finally, she spoke. Why, she asked, did I think these women experienced an orgasm while parachuting?

  I had come prepared for this question, with a full Freudian answer. It was, I said, fairly obvious. First you had the physical excitement of the flight, then you stood up and a handsome young jump master put his hands on you—physical contact—and helped you leap into space. The Freudian elements were, surely, all there? Height, speed, adventure, the male touch that sends you spinning into space, the connection between sex and death, for there was always a risk involved when you jumped out of an airplane … I went on, quoting Jung and Reich and drawing on my knowledge of the orgone box.

  Mrs. Casey was silent—by no means hostile but ever so slightly indicating with one elegantly raised eyebrow a certain impatience. When, at last, I paused for breath, she gave a small, ladylike snort of derision. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “It’s the way the harness fits around the crotch.”