“Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and focusing on me, “what’s done is done. We’re not going to get any help from agents like Candida. Why should we? She doesn’t respect weakness. Nobody does. If we’d put up a fight …” He shrugged. “The hell with that.” His voice turned brisk. “We need to make a big splash, something to show that we’re still in business, that we can still outpublish anybody, something that will be noticed.” He put his arms behind his head and tilted his chair back as far as it would go. “Did you know,” he asked, “that Bobby was thinking about bringing Jacqueline Susann here?”
I had heard rumors of this, but it was one of the very few subjects on which Bob had been closemouthed. Susann, who had vaulted to fame as the author of a successful book about her dog, Every Night Josephine!, and a subsequent number-one best-selling novel, Valley of the Dolls, was eager to leave her present publisher and come to S&S for what was then an unprecedented amount of money. This was not Bob’s usual turf, and in the aftermath of his departure, there were those conspiracy theorists who wondered if it had been a signal of his intentions. Some suggested that Bob had involved S&S with Jacqueline Susann as an act of revenge, forever stamping the S&S fiction list as a home for schlock; others thought it might have been Bob’s last great contribution to S&S, exactly the kind of big-time purchase that was needed to liven things up. The likelihood is that none of this was true—it was simply a question of timing. Bob had opened discussions with Jackie Susann, her husband Irving Mansfield, and their lawyer, Artie Hershkowitz, before he had made up his mind to leave; once he made the decision, it simply became one of the major pieces of unfinished business he left behind.
“She doesn’t seem like Bob’s cup of tea,” I said.
Snyder laughed. He had two kinds of laugh—one was without humor, the other with. This was the former. “Bullshit,” he said. “It would have been a good move. Jazz up the list. It’s been a long time since S&S had a big number-one fiction best-seller. He’d have been a hero to the sales reps.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “It’s still not such a bad idea,” he said, musingly.
“How far advanced was the negotiation?”
“I don’t know. There was quite a way to go, I think.” He scribbled a note on a pad in front of him. “I’ll get the details,” he said.
He sat upright and took his feet off the desk, back in action again, eyes sparkling. “Keep it to yourself,” he warned. “Don’t tell anybody. The only way to make this fly is to keep it a surprise.” He waved me out of his office. “If we bring this one off, everything else will be easy,” he predicted.
And as usual, he was right.
CHAPTER 19
In some ways, my previous experience suited me well for taking on Jacqueline Susann—after all, when it came to commercial fiction, I had already had an apprenticeship that included Harold Robbins, and so far as “difficult” or “demanding” authors were concerned, who could be more difficult and demanding than the Durants? I had no reason to doubt my ability to deal with Jacqueline Susann and Irving Mansfield, nor was I among those who had been shocked by the success of her previous books, which did not signify to me, as they did to so many others, the beginning of the end of Western civilization.
In book publishing, however, vulgarity was still frowned upon. Bad taste frightened publishers. Bennett Cerf might flutter around the edges of show business, a Broadway groupie, joke anthologist, and panel member on What’s My Line?, but when it came to his publishing persona, he expected to be taken seriously and worried about books “in bad taste.” Max’s ambition as a publisher was to load the S&S list with works of philosophy, history, and great literature, and he put his ears back and shied at the idea of anything that might be in bad taste carrying his name.
It was simply understood that one did not stoop to a certain level of vulgarity; in fact, one of the reasons why people went into book publishing in the first place was in order to avoid the vulgarity, celebrity worship, and indifference to bad taste that were all too clearly the norm in the movie business, the television industry, and the tabloid press.
Then, in 1966, came Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, a huge best-seller that for the first time brought the worlds of Hollywood, TV, tabloids, and Broadway press agentry together to sell a novel in which they were all the subject. Jackie, then forty-eight, with her spiky false eyelashes, her gravelly chain-smoker’s voice, her glittery dresses, her thick pancake makeup, and her feisty, tough-broad image seemed to many of the old guard of book publishing like the beginning of the end, Hollywood vulgarity at the door of the temple of culture.
Jackie herself was in many ways a much more lively creation than her novels, hugely successful as they were. She had arrived in New York from her native Philadelphia with show-business ambitions in 1936 as a high school beauty-contest winner. She emerged from a family in which her father, a successful if somewhat flashy society portrait painter, was a handsome, high-living, charming womanizer, while her mother was a hard-driving, long-suffering perfectionist who wanted Jackie to go to college.
Although Jackie talked about her childhood in Philadelphia as if she had been a princess there, it does not seem likely that with a painter and part-time art teacher as a father and a Russian Jewish schoolteacher mother, Jackie could have found acceptance even among the wealthy (and stuffy) German-Jewish aristocracy of the City of Brotherly Love, let alone among the daughters of Main Liners.
Jackie’s family life, if she was to be believed, was a curious mixture of decadence on her father’s side and prim rectitude on her mother’s, though both parents traced their ancestry back through countless generations of upwardly mobile and deeply religious Eastern European Jews, none of whom, one guesses, would have been pleased to have a fast-living and highly assimilated portrait painter as a descendant, let alone a best-selling popular novelist.
From Barbara Seaman’s biography of Jackie Susann, we learn that as a child Jackie’s favorite book had been Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—surprisingly, in view of her adult success as the author of torrid roman à clef potboilers—but although Jackie always claimed to have had writing ambitions even as a child, in fact she came to authorhood late in life, after a checkered career as a stage actress, a model, a disk jockey, and a television personality.
Jackie adored her father and never stopped talking about him. In Barbara Seaman’s biography of her it is alleged that when Jackie was a teenager she actually saw her father “humping” another woman on his studio couch—if true it would explain a lot about the way sex is treated in her fiction—but if so, the incident made her father only more attractive to Jackie. He seems to have treated his gawky, adolescent daughter as if she were a date, taking her to the movies, to fashionable restaurants, and even to speakeasies. One senses a certain collusion between father and daughter that reached its peak when Robert Susann, picked to be a judge at a beauty contest that was to choose the most beautiful girl in Philadelphia, not only encouraged Jackie to enter but made sure she won. Apart from a silver trophy that she held on to for the rest of her life, winning the contest carried with it a trip to New York City and a screen test—opportunities that Jackie was not about to waste and that were shortly to make the college plans her mother had for her superfluous.
She wanted to be an actress (or failing that, a model), but she never quite made it as either. What she got, however—and it was probably what she wanted most—was a chance to lead an independent life in New York City, as a single girl on the fringes of show business, instead of going to college.
Showbiz, as she always called it, attracted her like a magnet; she was an unapologetic star fucker—even in the literal sense: She had an affair with Eddie Cantor, for which she never forgave him, getting her revenge by turning him into the loathsome comedian Christy Lane in her second novel, The Love Machine. It was her passion for Broadway that brought about her marriage to Irving Mansfield, a press agent, promoter, and “producer” (of what, it was somewhat hard to say, or fin
d out), who talked and acted as if he were a character straight out of Guys and Dolls, and was comfortable only at places like Lindy’s, the Stage Delicatessen, and Sardi’s (although late in life he managed to settle into the West Coast equivalent: a bungalow and a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel and a table at the Polo Lounge).
Jackie was around celebrities so much that she became a kind of celebrity herself, relentlessly plugged by Irving and the various Broadway gossip columnists of the day. The only thing she didn’t have for full-scale celebrityhood was a talent or even a “gimmick,” but this problem was solved, as if by miracle, in 1953, when she saw a poodle in the window of a Lexington Avenue pet shop. She bought her, named her Josephine, and a star was born—two stars, actually, for Josephine became America’s most famous dog in 1963 when Jackie published Every Night Josephine! Jackie had discovered, after so many false starts, what she could do. Irving Mansfield finally had something to promote.
Between the two of them (or three of them, if you include “Josie,” as Jackie called her, who was very much part of the promotion), they put Jackie’s first book on the map, then went on to make Jackie’s next book, Valley of the Dolls, a brilliant combination of soap opera, show-business gossip, and tearjerker, a worldwide number-one best-seller in hardcover and mass-market paperback and later a successful movie. Jackie had invented her own unique brand of fiction: shopgirl romance, brought up to date with lots of dirty talk, the suggestion of some pretty rough sex, and an unsentimental view of men. Jackie’s fictional men were not modeled on Heathcliff but on her father: They were tall, handsome, sexy, and as emotionally tough as nails, and her heroines broke their hearts over them. (Amanda, in The Love Machine, was not untypical in that she carried Robin Stone’s soiled face towels around in her handbag.) Jackie had uncovered a deep well of emotional masochism in American women, and far from exploiting it she simply shared it. She also understood, as if by instinct, that her readers were ready for the raw side of love, for abortions, suicide, and crass male behavior. (Christy Lane, for example, talks to his mistress while sitting on the toilet defecating noisily, with the bathroom door open.) She brought to her novels the equivalent of the case histories of Sacher-Masoch (whom she had never read) and a whole lifetime of familiarity with the seamy side of show business and blended it all with the more traditional elements of women’s fiction. As Irving Mansfield liked to say, she “cried all the way to the bank.”
Perhaps more important, Bernard Geis (her publisher), Jackie, and Irving created a new way of selling a novel, a shameless blend of column plants, celebrity appearances, and Hollywood gossip that was new to book publishing but was old hat for the theater and movies. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the television set without hearing about Jackie and her novel. Irving Mansfield put the book’s cover in subway advertisements, something that had hitherto been thought more appropriate for hemorrhoid remedies than books, while Jackie actually got up at dawn to visit the warehouses from which her books were shipped to shake hands with the men who put them on the trucks and with the drivers themselves.
Publishers lusted after her sales but hesitated “to get into bed” (a favorite Irving/Jackie phrase) with the Mansfields—so much so that while Random House, somewhat shamefacedly, distributed both Every Night Josephine! and Valley of the Dolls, the books were actually published by Bernard Geis, himself something of an outsider. Geis’s indifference to what was then thought of as good taste had been demonstrated to most of the more conventional publishing hands when he came up with the title of Helen Gurley Brown’s first book, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1962 and shocked the old guard by making a huge best-seller of it.
Geis had a distribution deal with Random House that predated Jackie, so the Random House sales force sold his list. Random House’s honor was saved by this semitransparent fig leaf. The only person who wasn’t satisfied by this arrangement, though nobody knew it at the time, was Jackie herself, who fretted at not being given the same treatment as other best-selling authors, particularly Truman Capote, with whom she had traded insults on TV talk shows. Capote had likened her to “a truck driver in drag”—strong words for the time—and said of her skills as a writer, “She doesn’t write, she types”; Jackie—who had a way with words (she had remarked of Philip Roth, then tasting fame as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and popularizer of masturbation, “I don’t mind reading his book, but I don’t want to shake his hand!”)—had made savage fun of Capote’s lisp.
Still, Jackie envied writers like Capote, and it was her ambition to be the star author on a major publisher’s list that swept her into my life, changing it forever, not to speak of the industry in which I worked. Of course, I wasn’t the magnet that drew Jackie to S&S. First of all, she wanted money, a ton of it, and a deal that would be the envy of other writers. Above all, she wanted status, the number-one place on a big-time publisher’s fiction list, with first-class treatment all the way. As Irving Mansfield put it, “She just wants her publisher to love her, that’s all.”
Class mattered to her a lot, which was why the Mansfields approached Bob Gottlieb in the first place. They might not spend their evenings reading literature, but they were avid readers of Publishers Weekly, and they knew class when they saw it. Bob was erudite, brilliant, probably unavailable, and therefore exactly the editor Jackie wanted. His departure for Knopf almost ended the Mansfields’ interest in S&S, particularly when it became apparent that Jackie was definitely not on the list of writers he wanted to take there. Eventually, Dick Snyder managed to make contact with their lawyer/agent, Artie Hershkowitz, and get things moving again.
It did not hurt that, when I was proposed to them as a replacement for Bob, they discovered that my uncle was Alexander Korda and my aunt Merle Oberon, for though they pretended otherwise, they were snobs and suckers for showbiz aristocracy. It was not for nothing that Jackie’s motto was “too much is not enough,” and her passion for upper-crust brand names was such that when one reporter eavesdropped on her conversation at a party, all she could hear, she said, was “Gucci-Gucci, Pucci-Pucci.”
Dick and I negotiated laboriously with Hershkowitz, for whom the words fine print were the Holy Grail, and eventually a deal was concluded, on terms that left Shimkin breathless and shaking. Now it only remained to meet the author. It was thus that I first went to meet Jackie Susann in her apartment at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. I was accompanied by Jonathan Dolger, another S&S editor, Dick’s theory being that we had spent so much money—and agreed to such onerous terms—to acquire The Love Machine that everybody involved needed an understudy.
Our mission was a delicate one: We were the first people at S&S to have actually read a portion of the manuscript, for Mansfield and Hershkowitz had sold us Jackie’s novel without providing a page of manuscript to read, something of an innovation at the time. It was Jackie—and the sales curve of Dolls—that Irving was selling, not, as he put it indignantly when challenged, “some goddamn pile of paper.” Once the ink was dry on the contracts, we received, after much prodding on our part, about a hundred pages of what Irving referred to as “rough draft,” for once only too accurately.
The prospect of turning these pages into publishable prose in the time allotted to us had rendered us briefly speechless. Jackie wrote on pink paper, and despite Truman Capote’s insult, typing was not her forte. Although she had two best-sellers to her credit, it appeared she had not yet discovered the shift key on her pink IBM Selectric, since she wrote everything in caps, like a long telegram, revising in a large, forceful, circular hand, with what looked like a blunt eyebrow pencil.
Neither the plot nor the structure was readily apparent, despite numerous “notes to the editor” written on cocktail napkins from the Beverly Hills Hotel and Danny’s Hideaway, a show-business bar and steak house in New York City. Once Dolger had read the manuscript, he called me late at night in panic and asked, “What are we going to tell Dick Snyder?”
Dick’s instructions to us the next d
ay were simple and Napoleonic: “Just turn it into a goddamn book somehow, that’s all I ask,” he said, and that was that.
• • •
THE PURPOSE of our visit, though ostensibly social, was in fact to see if we could turn Jackie’s pages into a book—or rather how, for Dick had made it clear that failure was not an option. Too much was at stake: his career, mine, and the whole question of whether S&S could make a go of it with high-stakes “commercial” fiction.
Dick, though he had no objection to solid nonfiction—if anything, he preferred it, since it was less of a gamble—had seen the future, and it included Pocket Books, movie tie-ins, and hype. He was already working night and day to launch The Love Machine with an unprecedented promotion campaign, every detail of which was subject to the Mansfields’ approval. Plans for everything were being made on a scale exceeding even that for Dolls: sales dumps, displays, posters, Jackie’s book tour, promotional material for the sales reps, a publication party to be “hosted” by gossip columnist Leonard Lyons and his wife, Sylvia, a party at the ABA convention for five hundred booksellers (at which they would be served a Love Machine cocktail, specially invented for the occasion by the bartender of Danny’s Hideaway), giveaways, even a theme song, to be written by Sammy Cahn and sung by Tony Bennett. The one small, missing element of the enterprise remained the book itself, which Dolger and I had to squeeze out of Jackie (and rewrite) in a matter of weeks.
This was our mission, made more difficult by the fact that the Mansfields, schooled in the Hollywood art of holding out until the very last moment, both as a matter of prestige and as a way of extorting every last concession and advantage they could, however minor, resisted every attempt on our part to pin them down on such matters as when, exactly, Jackie intended to finish the book, or whether she would even listen to our suggestions for revisions. All Irving Mansfield said, with the chuckle that was a trademark of his conversation, was that we shouldn’t worry, Jackie was a pro. In the meantime, would I remind Snyder that Jackie’s “publicity girl,” Abby Hirsch, flew first-class, the same as Jackie and Irving (she accompanied them everywhere, carrying Jackie’s wig box), that Jackie always got a stretch limo, not a sedan or normal-size limo, that the driver had to be dressed in a black suit, wearing a chauffeur’s cap, and that she expected the presidential suite in any hotel we sent her to. This was all minor crap, Mansfield said, hardly even worth mentioning, but I should understand that if Jackie thought we were going to nickel-and-dime her over chickenshit stuff like this, the way Bernie Geis had, she might conclude we didn’t really love and respect her, and her unhappiness would inevitably slow up her work on the book (“heh, heh”). I had to bear in mind that Jackie was a very sensitive human being.
Another Life Page 31