Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  I was simply trying to write a good book—and an honest one—after struggling with a book that kept falling apart. I was living in the suburbs and feeling isolated, cut off from the city. I constructed a small and painful event, and I wrote a novel around it—a man’s wife falls to the ground, without any underwear, and is seen by an anti-Semitic neighbor. I hoped the book would be published and that afterward I wouldn’t be run out of the country. I’m quite serious. I thought I’d hide in Paris until it all blew over. Such ego. It’s not as if I had a dozen book ideas to choose from. Stern was the one I had—the story felt compelling—and that’s the one I wrote.

  This main character was not your typical macho, male literary hero; he was fearful about many things, including sex.

  I certainly had that side at the time. All writing is autobiographical, in my view, including scientific papers.

  Stern was a book that was in direct contrast to the short stories I had written up to that time. I’m told that it was a departure from much of the era’s fiction. The New Yorker literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the first true Freudian novel.” It only sold six thousand copies. The editor, Robert Gottlieb, who edited Catch-22, which was published just before Stern, told me that they were the “right copies.” I remember wondering what it would have been like if it sold a hundred thousand wrong copies.

  The only book that had a distant echo was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. And, of course, John Cheever’s stories, which touched on suburban alienation in New England.

  Do you think that Stern influenced Revolutionary Road, which was written around the same time?

  I doubt it, but I do know that Yates was aware of it. I knew Yates when I was working as an editor in the fifties and sixties, at the Magazine Management Co., which published men’s adventure magazines. He just showed up without explanation for a few weeks, this man with a handsome and ruined, disheveled look, and attached himself to our little group—and then he disappeared. From time to time he’d call me from the Midwest to ask if I could get him a job. It annoyed me that he thought of me as a publisher or producer. Never once did he acknowledge that I was a writer. But I later learned that Stern was one of the few novels that he taught in his writing classes.

  Yates had a difficult life. He was a major alcoholic, and he always struggled for money. In other words, your basic serious novelist.

  It’s a shame that Yates’s life was so difficult. He was a brilliant writer, and a very funny one.

  I agree. He was a gifted man—his writing was pitch-perfect—but he probably had a demon or two more than the rest of us. He’d complain that if Catch-22 hadn’t been such a big hit, Revolutionary Road would have been a bestseller.

  There was an incident in which a few writers and editors, including myself, went out for a drink in the early seventies, and Yates joined us. He drank so much that he collapsed and fell forward, hitting his head on the table. My secretary at the time, who hadn’t paid much attention to him, pulled him to his feet, and off they went together. I never saw either of them again. They ended up living together.

  Tell me about your experience editing adventure magazines in the 1950s and 1960s for the Magazine Management Co. What were some of the publications under the company’s umbrella?

  There were more than a hundred, in every category—movies, adventure, confession, paperback books, Stan Lee’s comic books. Stan worked there for years and years. The office was located on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. I was responsible for about five magazines. One was called Focus. It was a smaller version of People, before that magazine was even published.

  I also worked as editor of Swank. Every now and then the publisher, Martin Goodman, would appear at my office door and say, “I am throwing you another magazine.” Some others that were “thrown” at me included Male, Men, Man’s World, and True Action.

  Swank was not the pornographic magazine we know today, I assume?

  Entirely different, and I don’t say that with pride. Mr. Goodman—his own brother called him “Mr. Goodman”—told me to publish a “takeoff” on Esquire. This was difficult. I had a staff of one, the magazine was published on cheap paper, and it contained dozens of ads for automotive equipment and trusses, which are medical devices for hernia patients.

  When I was there, it wasn’t even soft-core porn; it was flabby porn. There was no nudity, God forbid, but there were some pictures of women wearing bathing suits—not even bikinis—and winking. There were also stories from the trunk—deep in the trunk—from literary luminaries such as [novelist and playwright] William Saroyan and Graham Greene and Erskine Caldwell [author of the novel Tobacco Road]. When sales lagged, Mr. Goodman instructed me to “throw ’em a few ‘hot’ words.” Nympho was one that was considered to be arousing. Dark triangle would be put into play when the magazine was in desperate straits. We once used it in an article called “The Rock-Around Dolls of New Orleans.”

  In doing research for this interview, I read issues of these magazines and found many of the articles to be incredibly funny and entertaining.

  We tried to keep to a high standard, within the limits of our pathetic budget. Some awfully good writers passed through the company. The adventure magazines had huge circulations and were mostly geared to blue-collar types, war veterans, young men—up to one million readers, with no paid subscribers. But their popularity faded when World War II vets grew older and more explicit magazines became readily available. The only reader I’ve ever actually met in person is my brother-in-law.

  Were these types of magazines called armpit slicks?

  Only by the competition. They were also called jockstrap magazines.

  Believe it or not, there was a lot of status involved. True magazine considered itself the Oxford University Press of the group and sniffed at us. We, in turn, sniffed at magazines we felt were shoddier than ours. There was a lot of sniffing going on.

  We published a variety of story types. People being nibbled to death by animals was one type: “I Battled a Giant Otter.” There was no explanation as to why these stories fascinated readers for many years.

  “Scratch the surface” stories were also a favorite. These were tales about a sleepy little town where citizens innocently go about their business—girls eating ice cream, boys delivering newspapers—but “scratch the surface” of one of these towns and you’d find a sin pit, a cauldron of vice and general naughtiness.

  The revenge theme was popular, as well—a soldier treated poorly in a prison camp, who would set out to track down his abuser when the war ended. And stories about G.I.s stranded on Pacific islands were a hit among veterans—especially if the islands were populated by nymphos. “G.I. King of Nympho Island” was one title, I recall.

  Sounds convincing.

  Mr. Goodman always asked the same question when we showed him a story: “Is it true?” My answer was, “Sort of.” He’d take a puff of a thin cigar and walk off, apparently satisfied. He was a decent but frightening man.

  Walter Kaylin, a favorite contributor, did a hugely popular story about a G.I. who is stranded on an island and becomes its ruler. The G.I. is carried about on the shoulders of a little man who has washed ashore with him. There wasn’t a nympho on the island, but it worked.

  Who, by and large, wrote for these magazines?

  Gifted, half-broken people—and I was one of them—who didn’t qualify for jobs at Time-Life or at the Hearst Company. I don’t think of them as being hired, so much as having just ended up there. In terms of ability, I would match them against anyone who worked in publishing at the time. We just didn’t look like the cover models for GQ.

  Walter Wager was a contributor, and he went on to write more than twenty-five suspense novels, including, under a pseudonym, the I Spy series. He had a prosthetic hand that he would unscrew and toss on my desk when he delivered a new story. Ernest Tidyman worked for the company; he wrote the Shaft books and the first two movie
s. Also, the screenplay for The French Connection.

  In the early sixties, I was editing Swank when Leicester Hemingway—pronounced “Lester”—came barreling into my office. He was Ernest’s brother, and he looked more like Ernest than Ernest himself. He called Ernest “Ernesto.” He was bluff and cheerful and handsome in the Clark Gable mold. He had gotten off a fishing boat that very day and wanted me to publish one of his stories. How could I say no? This was as close as I’d ever get to the master.

  He left. I read the story. The first line was “Hi, ho, me hearties.” It was totally out of sync with what we were doing, and it was unreadable. I remember it being called “Avast.” So, I was in the position of having to turn down Ernest Hemingway’s brother.

  A few years later, I went to a party given by George Plimpton, and I met Mary Hemingway, the last of Ernest’s four wives. I told her that I’d had the nicest meeting with Leicester. “What a wonderful man he is.”

  “That swine!” she said. “How dare you mention his name in my presence!”

  Apparently, this highly decent man was considered the black sheep of the family—at least by Mary. And that’s really saying something.

  How many stories did you have to purchase for all of your magazines in a typical month?

  Fifty or sixty.

  Per month?

  Yes. I was an incredibly fast reader—a human scanner. My train commute to work took more than two hours each way, a total of close to five hours. I got a lot of work done on that train—much more than I do now with a whole day free and clear. I wrote most of Stern on that train.

  My best move at this job was to hire Mario Puzo, later the author of The Godfather. The candidates for the writing job got winnowed down to Puzo and Arthur Kretchmer, who later became the decades-long editorial director of Playboy. I knew how good Kretchmer was, but I needed someone who could write tons of stories from Day One, so I hired Puzo in 1960 at the princely salary of $150 a week. But there was an opportunity to dash off as many freelance stories as he wanted, thereby boosting his income considerably. He referred to this experience as his first “straight” job. When I called him at home to deliver the news, he kept saying in disbelief, “You mean it? You really mean it?”

  Was Puzo capable of writing humor?

  He was concerned about it. Now and then, at the height of his fame and prominence and commercial success, he would look off wistfully and ask, “How come Hollywood never calls me for comedy?”

  There is some grisly humor in The Godfather. As for setting out consciously to write a funny book—I’m not sure. At the magazines, one of the perks as editor was that I got to choose the cartoons. There was an old cartoon agent, a real old Broadway type who stuttered. He would come stuttering into the office carrying a batch of cartoons, each of which had been rejected eight times already.

  Mario insisted he could have done a better job of choosing the cartoons, but I never allowed him to try. It was the only disagreement we ever had.

  What sort of stories would Puzo write for you?

  You name it—war, women, desert islands, a few mini-Godfathers. At one point we ran out of World War II battles; how many times can you storm Anzio, Italy? So we had to make up a few battles. Puzo wrote one story, about a mythical battle, that drew piles of mail telling him he had misidentified a tank tread—but no one questioned the fictional battle itself.

  There has never been a more natural storyteller. I suppose it was mildly sadistic of me, but I would show him an illustration for a thirty-thousand-word story that had to be written that night. He’d get a little green around the gills, but he’d show up the next morning with the story in hand—a little choppy, but essentially wonderful. He wrote, literally, millions of words for the magazines. I became a hero to him when I faced down the publisher and got him $750 for a story—a hitherto unheard-of figure.

  Do you think this experience later helped when he wrote The Godfather?

  He claimed that it did. If you look at his first novel, The Dark Arena [1955], you’ll see that the ability is there, but there is little in the way of forward motion. He said more than once that he began to learn about the elements of storytelling and narrative at our company.

  I can’t resist telling you this: In 1963, Mario approached me and somewhat sheepishly said he was moonlighting on a novel, and he wanted to try out the title. He said, “I want to call it The Godfather. What do you think?”

  I told him that it didn’t do much for me. “Sounds domestic. Who cares? If I were you, I’d take another shot at it.”

  A look of steel came over his face. He walked off without saying a word. He was usually mild-mannered, but the look was terrifying. Years later, he always denied being “connected,” but anyone who saw that look would have to wonder. The thing is, I was right about the title. It would have been a poor choice for any book other than The Godfather.

  In the mid-sixties, after the sale of the book, I heard him on the phone to his publisher, asking for more money. They said, “Mario, we just gave you two hundred thousand dollars.” He said, “Two hundred grand doesn’t last forever.”

  Wonderful man—perhaps not the most intelligent person I’ve known, but surely the wisest. On one occasion, he saved my life.

  How so?

  I became friendly with the mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo when he was released from prison in 1971. The actor Jerry Orbach, who starred [in 1967] in one of my plays, Scuba Duba, was also a pal of Joey’s.

  Joey had a lot of writer friends—he had read a lot in prison. He loved [Jean-Paul] Sartre but hated [Albert] Camus, whom he called a “pussy.” When Joey was released, there were about fifty contracts out on his life. He was trying to soften his image by hanging around artistic types. His “family” would hold weekly Sunday-night parties at the Orbachs’ town house in Chelsea. I attended a few of these soirees, and I noticed that every twenty minutes or so Joey would go over to the window, pull back the drapes a bit, and peer outside.

  I told Mario that I was attending these parties, and that I wanted to bring my wife and sons along. The food was great—Cuban cigars, everything quite lavish. The actor Ben Gazzara [Husbands] usually showed up, as did Neil Simon, and a great many luminaries. Mario considered what I told him and said, “What you are doing is not intelligent.” And that was it. I was invited to join Joey and a group at Umbertos Clam House the very night [April 7, 1972] he was gunned down. Mario played a part in my saying I had a previous engagement.

  Let’s talk about the characters you create: They are often very likable, even when they shouldn’t be. One character, Harry Towns, who’s been featured in numerous short stories and in two novels since the early 1970s, is a failed screenwriter and father. He’s a drug addict who snorts coke the very day his mother dies. He sleeps with hookers. He takes his son to Las Vegas and basically forgets about him; he’s much more concerned about his own body lice. And yet, in the end, Harry Town remains very funny and likable.

  The late Bill Styron [author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie’s Choice] paid me a compliment that I treasure. He said, “All of your work has great humanity.” Maybe he said that to all of his contemporaries, but he seemed to mean it. I tried to make the character of Harry—for all of his flaws—screamingly and hurtfully honest, and that may have provided some of whatever appeal he has. I’m a little smarter than Harry; he’s a bit more reckless than I am.

  I have about a dozen voices that I can write—my Candide voice, the Noël Coward voice—but I keep coming back to Harry.

  One Harry Towns story, “Just Back from the Coast,” ends with Harry watching the NASA moon landing in his ex-wife’s house, with her overseas and his child off at summer camp. He’s alone. Your characters, including Harry, tend to be very lonely, but your life seems like it was anything but.

  I’m not sure what other lives are like—but one of my favorite words is adventure. With that said, for a Jewish guy an adventure can be
a visit to a strange delicatessen. I have plenty of friends, acquaintances, family, but much of the time I enjoy my own company. Most of writing is thinking, and you can’t do much of it in a crowd. Whenever I used to duck out on a dinner with “the guys,” Mario would defend me by saying, “Bruce is a loner.”

  Can the following be verified? That in the 1970s, you were the one-armed push-up champ at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side New York restaurant that was a gathering place for writers?

  Yes.

  How many did you do?

  Who knows? I was probably too loaded to count.

  Were you surrounded by a crowd of famous authors, cheering you on? Was Woody Allen anxious to compete?

  Not really. But we would have various athletic contests, generally beginning at four in the morning. There were sprints down Second Avenue, for example. It got more macho as the evening progressed.

  I remember [the film director and screenwriter] James Toback trying to perform some push-ups and running out of steam. The restaurant’s owner, Elaine Kaufman, said, “Put a broad under him.”

  Is it true that, in the late sixties, you got into a fistfight with Norman Mailer?

  Yes, at a party he was holding at his town house in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer was looking for a fight. Instead of getting mad, I patted him on his head and said, “Now, now, Norman. Let’s behave.” We made our way to the street, and a crowd formed. We circled each other and we tussled a bit. Eventually he dropped to the ground. I helped him up and he embraced me—but he then bit me on the shoulder. I saw the bite marks once I got home. I rushed to the hospital for a tetanus shot. I was afraid I was going to begin to froth at the mouth.