Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  J.K. and infant Susanna, 1957.

  Through a wrench in perception, an exercise in cognitive assonance, we managed to live with the prospect of nuclear warfare while enjoying a time of economic growth and rampant consumerism. We had become “Utopia Limited in the Fat 1950s.” The Affluent Society, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it in his classic 1958 book. In line with its growing control over our behavior and its demonic power to create desire, advertising—“Madison Avenue,” familiarly—was the hot profession of the decade: glamorous, well paid, extravagantly self-marketed, and intrinsically fascinating. The daily capitalist soap opera had its distinctive cast of characters, “account executives” and “creative” people who carried attaché cases and bowed before “clients.” At the end of their working day, they drank martinis and played gin rummy in the New Haven Railroad club car on their way home to Westport, archetypal exurb for people in the “advertising game.” One of my authors at Simon and Schuster referred to me as his “account executive”—I set him straight with a few coarse words.

  In the 1950s Annie and I were reading best-sellers like Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters (its hero chooses “a sincere tie” to wear at a crucial interview), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, Martin Mayer’s Madison Avenue, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, one of Dick Simon’s most notable successes (Simon’s protegé, Richard L. Grossman, posed for the jacket picture of the iconic Man). Writers we knew worked in advertising: William Gaddis, Anatole Broyard, James Dickey, L. E. Sissman, Joseph Heller, Richard Yates. Like movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn’s malapropisms, advertising maxims, genuine or apocryphal, became part of our jokey language. “Run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes,” “Smear it on the cat and see if she licks it off,” “Put it on the 6:28 and see if it gets off at Westport,” “Throw it in the pool and see if it comes up for air”: the “it” being whatever slogan, headline, or campaign idea that might go over with agency bosses, clients, and eventually, us, the target public.

  Advertising entertained us, but at the same time we knew we were surrendering some degree of control over our lives to enticing headlines and talking animals, to beer, razor blade, and laundry detergent jingles we couldn’t get out of our heads. We were becoming part of a great homogenized American public with no will of its own, only a set of conditioned reflexes profitably studied by motivational researchers. (One expert, possibly fictional, is supposed to have predicted the quick demise of the Ford Edsel because of the vaginal shape of its front grille—“You can’t sell a thing like that without hair around it.”) There was plenty of informed support for this feeling of helplessness. According to the reasoned conclusions of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd we had become “outerdirected” rather than “inner-directed,” consumers rather than producers, on the edge of alienation. William H. Whyte Jr.’s The Organization Man, an important book acquired and skillfully published for Simon and Schuster by Joe Barnes, narrowed the focus to corporate culture. As a way of subverting conformity, a thumb in the eye for personnel managers, Whyte provided a valuable appendix titled “How to Cheat on Personality Tests.”

  What spoke to me even more directly, because they combined disciplined analysis, polemic, and a sort of Old Testament indignation, were two books by the maverick Columbia sociologist

  C. Wright Mills: White Collar and The Power Elite. Walt Whitman heard “America singing . . . strong melodious songs” of democratic joy and well-being. Wright Mills heard an upper-class oligarchy reveling in its ascendant strength, “money talking in its husky, silky voice of cash, power, celebrity.” “American capitalism is now in considerable part a military capitalism,” Mills wrote in 1956, five years before even Eisenhower, in a farewell address to the American people, warned of the “misplaced power” of “the military-industrial complex.” Like Fidel Castro (for a while), like F. O. Matthiessen (who killed himself in 1950), Wright Mills was an intellectual hero of the time and bearer of our best hopes, destined for failure though they were. He called himself objective but not detached, “a spiritual Wobbly,” “a North American aboriginal.” When I learned through his literary agent, James Oliver Brown, that Mills wanted to leave Oxford University Press, his publisher until then, I reported this to the Simon and Schuster editorial board. They allowed me to offer Mills an advance of $5,000 for a new book, to be called The Causes of World War Three. It turned out to be a typical Wright Mills effusion—bold, passionate, indignant, unsparing, totally engaged, a little grandiose and windy, a pamphleteering attack on what he called the “crackpot realism” that shaped the disaster-bound military and diplomatic policies of the United States and the Soviets. “For the first time in world history,” Mills wrote, “men find themselves preparing for a war which, they admit among themselves, none of the combatants could win. . . . Yet men of power, even as they talk about peace, practice for war.” The work of a Jeremiah, no longer an academic sociologist, Mills’s book was perhaps overwrought, but it was important, and I worked harder than I had ever before done in publishing to promote it to a general readership and to a core audience of “opinion makers,” in the jargon of the trade. Early one morning I dragged Mills off to appear on the Today show, a grotesque forum, given its commercial auspices and usual content, for doomsday convictions voiced by a combination of John the Baptist and Chicken Little.

  The Causes of World War Three was only a moderate success, as might be expected of a book that told people what they didn’t want to hear, but Mills became my friend. He was big, voracious, and impulsive, a person of apparently ungovernable energies and often rudely indifferent to eastern and academic etiquette. He was “a figure of power,” the critic Irving Howe said, “a fiercely grinding power that came down like a fist.” Mills turned conventional sociology on its head: what he cared about was the flow of history, not “statistical stuff,” “block surveys” that reported what people were thinking or how much they spent on whiskey. He had dozens of as-yet unwritten books and articles in mind, including Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Wanting to rescue lower-case “marxism” from upper-case “Communism,” he remained a Fidelista after Fidel became the State Department’s chief local villain. Castro’s betrayal of Cuban democracy left Mills behind the curl of history, even though he believed he was riding it into shore.

  Given Mills’s appetites, ambitions, and restless intellect, there could never be enough time for him to do all he wanted to do. He started the morning by brewing a quart of espresso on his kitchen machine—this was a potion that might have felled other people but only got him revved up to cruising speeds at his typewriter. He dressed like the foreman of a cattle ranch (he was born in Waco) in jeans, work shirts, and biker boots and drove around town, and to the house he was building in West Nyack, on a big supercharged BMW hog. Mills had earned a mechanic’s certificate from the BMW motorcycle works in Germany, and as Annie and I realized at dinner one night, when we tried to steer the conversation away from motorcycles, he was prouder of his grease-monkey’s diploma than of any of his academic degrees and honors. Drinking bourbon, eating cheese and walnuts all the while, although his doctor had warned him he was at risk of heart disease, he kept on talking about motorcycles at Castro-like length and to the exclusion of any other subject.

  Another night he summoned us to his apartment near Columbia to see a newly arrived piece of teakwood furniture made to his specifications in Denmark. He took each of us by the arm and led us into the presence. We saw an altarlike hybrid of sideboard and bureau with drawers for Wright’s shirts and pajamas and, above, about a dozen large pigeonholes that he had just finished labeling. socks and handkerchiefs filled two of them. The others, also labeled, held notes and drafts of lectures, articles, and books. “Isn’t that something!” he said, running his hands over the oiled teakwood. For a brief moment at least he had put the world in order.

  Max Schuster entrusted me with editing of perhaps the most considerable literary book he was to publish, the poet Kimon Friar’
s translation (from the Greek) of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, a 33,333-line epic by Nikos Kazantzakis, perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. “Blind Homer sings again!” Max announced to the trade—“A masterpiece of contemporary literature.” I went through the enormous manuscript word by word and line by line, looking out for anachronisms and vagaries of meter and idiom. Meanwhile I had to deal with Kimon Friar’s oily, insinuating, and spiderish personality. (The poet James Merrill called it “appalling.” Merrill’s father, founder of Merrill Lynch, had once threatened to have Kimon “rubbed out” for seducing his son.) Equally trying were Kimon’s absences: when most urgently needed to answer editing queries, he was found to be visiting an uncle in practically unreachable Antofagasta, Chile. He even managed to be unreachable when a proofreader discovered at the last minute that two of the 33,333 lines were missing. From time to time Kimon complained to Max that Harvard had covered me with too “many thin layers of reticence” for me to be properly ecstatic about his work. He tried to get me fired, but face-to-face, over long lunches on my expense account, he was accommodating enough. And he did one thing that to my mind almost redeemed him. He had invited me to a twenty-fourth-birthday party he was giving for a young Greek poet, Stratis Haviaras, and I went reluctantly, as a professional duty. I had told Annie that the party wasn’t worth getting a baby-sitter for and that she was lucky to be able to stay home. At one in the morning in Friar’s dingy apartment off upper Columbus Avenue, I found myself dancing with Marilyn Monroe and gently kneading the little tire of baby fat around her waist. Her husband, Arthur Miller, looked on glumly as the party wore on. Friar, as I learned, was tutoring him in prosody.

  At Simon and Schuster it was hard not to be infected by an extraordinarily high level of publishing energy operating in a largely improvisational, psycho-dramatic sort of way. Mysterious newcomers of indeterminate function came and went like Captain Ahab’s “subordinate phantoms” living belowdecks. One of these phantoms, roundly named Rudo S. Globus, shut himself in his office one day and told me, “I’m going to smoke myself to death.” In this freewheeling atmosphere an editor seized publishing opportunities the way the Bolsheviks, a minority faction, had seized political power—in a vacuum, or as it lay in the streets. You had to be ready and on the spot. When Jack Goodman, de facto editor in chief (Max held on to the title), died suddenly of a heart attack, I was on my way to La Guardia airport and two weeks on Cape Cod with Annie and our two baby daughters. I missed the meeting a day later at which the staff divided up Goodman’s authors, projects, and agent contacts. That missed meeting marked my downward turning point.

  Practically everyone at Simon and Schuster was an editor-publisher of sorts. We were derisive when we heard about houses like Prentice-Hall, where every publishing function was strictly compartmentalized. After passing down an assembly line, Prentice-Hall books emerged as “product,” in much the same way packing-house porkers were turned into little breakfast sausages. Resisting tables of organization and lines of authority we kept the “business people” as far away from us as we could. We treated the firm’s chief financial officer as if he were simply an office manager whose job it was to make sure we covered our typewriters and turned off the lights and air conditioners before leaving for the day.

  It was fun to work at Simon and Schuster, not surprising to see editors staying long after hours to talk about books, trade industry gossip, and joke over office bottles of Scotch and gin. In the days before it was absorbed into a conglomerate the house was like a summer camp for intellectually hyperactive children.

  Aside from Max Schuster, my most important tutor in the ways of book publishing was Joseph Barnes, former Moscow correspondent and foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Barnes knew Russian and had traveled widely and often in Soviet Russia. At the opening of the McCarthy era this was enough to qualify him as a target. In 1951 the Senate Internal Security Committee put him through the wringer in a two-hour closed-door inquisition. Five witnesses, including Whittaker Chambers, said that over the years they had “heard” Barnes identified as a Soviet agent. The committee denied him the opportunity to clear his name in an open hearing. Max Schuster never wavered in his support of Joe in the face of pressures from inside and outside the house to have him dismissed as a liability. So far from being a liability he was a major asset, having known practically everyone in the upper levels of government, politics, journalism, and the academy. He had gone to China during the war with Wendell Willkie, worked with Dwight Eisenhower on Crusade in Europe, and cofounded a boldly innovative liberal tabloid, PM. He and his partners on the paper hoped to make a go of it without having to sell advertising. The firm’s intellectual eminence and social model, Joe was its major claim to class in the publishing industry. But the McCarthy ordeal had taken the fight out of him: he did his job, stayed out of office politics and power struggles, and was respected, even revered. After nursing it along for years, Barnes had been responsible for one of S&S’s historic successes, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But there was a sadness about him—I thought he was cut out for bigger things and suspected he thought so, too. In time my closest friend at S&S (I having survived a gentle probation), he introduced me to daunting carafes of martinis at the Century Association and the roast beef hash and lightly seared calves liver at P. J. Moriarty’s on Sixth Avenue. For me, every outing with Joe was an education in the way the world worked when interpreted by a cultivated, tolerant, and seasoned intelligence.

  A marathon lunch with him and Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, went through cocktails and wine and ended with brandy in the late afternoon. Joe’s strategy for maintaining relative sobriety was to drink beer before cocktails so that he wouldn’t be drinking cocktails out of thirst. Strong drink, the obligatory lubricant of publishing lunches, sales conferences, and trade events, was an occupational hazard for editors and agents. I knew a young editor at Pocket Books who came back from a business lunch practically non compos. His boss sent him out to be sobered up by means of a fire hose played on his naked body at Reilly’s Gymnasium, a place patronized by heavy-drinking actors needing to ready themselves for a performance.

  An inevitable restlessness accompanied the ferment and excitement of working for Max’s publishing house. Daily life there had something of the operatic atmosphere of the imperial Russian court in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Nobles and peasants were in constant turmoil. True and false claimants to the throne walked on and then off the stage. Heads rolled. Richard Simon and Max Schuster seemed to be echoing Boris’s dying words: “I am still czar.” Neither had an heir apparent. “Loyalty,” even in this fiercely liberal, anti-McCarthy political arena, became as important a criterion as editorial initiative. Simon and Schuster rarely spoke to each other. (The third partner, Leon Shimkin, had a separate fiefdom on the floor below.) Max (although not Mrs. Max) was restrained when commenting about Dick; Dick once took me aside to tell me that Max was lazy and had been getting a free ride for years. The two might as well have been headquartered in different boroughs instead of in offices a few yards away from each other, and in effect they were running separate publishing houses that just happened to be using the same production and sales departments. The one time I saw them laughing together was when I showed them a visionary manuscript submission of a business book titled Dow-Jones 1000? (The Dow-Jones average then stood at a little over 500.) They agreed the author was a bit mental.

  Lower-level cabals formed and dissolved after secret conferences to plan breakaway publishing houses, always with an estimated start-up capital of two or three million dollars to come from no one knew where. I collected a drawerful of prospectuses and fiscal projections. George Joel of Dial Press, whom I had once asked for a job, took me to lunch at the Players Club and, on the basis of mischievous misinformation from Herbert Alexander of Pocket Books, offered to sell me 49 percent of his faltering company. Even if I had conceivably been able to raise the money, common sense would have figured 49 percent to be t
he same as zero percent: the controlling interest would still be held by Joel, who had to be, if not a madman or a bunco artist, at least a fool looking for the legendary greater fool. His contract inventory, which he showed me with innocent pride, included, I noticed, several authors who had already taken money from Simon and Schuster for the same unwritten book.

  The partners: Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster.

  A young editor had to learn to be something of a courtier and accommodate attractive overtures and tendentious histories from one faction or another. I heard seriously conflicting accounts of how the house acquired its spectacularly successful self-help book, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. In Max’s version, he discovered Dale Carnegie all on his own, nosed out a potential gold mine, and assigned the firm’s “little bookkeeper” to take Carnegie’s self-improvement course and sign him up. The little bookkeeper, Leon Shimkin, the third S of S&S, remembered this differently: Dale Carnegie had been his idea from the start. During my time Simon, Schuster, and Shimkin were either selling their company to mercantile heir and newspaper owner Marshall Field II, a champion of liberal causes, or buying it back from him, or spinning off their children’s book division, Little Golden Books, or engaging in buyout intrigues against one another or planning a shoot-out at the corral. Squads of dark-suited, attaché-cased lawyers and accountants trooped through the corridors. With all his immense fortune and the power that came with it, Marshall Field seemed bewildered when occasionally he sat in on editorial meetings and got some inkling of how the business was run. Properly attired in dark suit and polished black shoes, he once made me uncomfortable by staring pointedly, and I thought reproachfully, at my chinos and canoe moccasins.