“Rocco, why are you doing that with your teeth? You’re drawing blood, or is it only this red sauce?” Maxi offered him her napkin in concern.
“Put that away, I’ve got my own napkin, damn it! I think I bit right through a giant hot pepper. Hell!”
“I warned you to be careful.” Maxi looked around Chez Leonie, a First Avenue restaurant only big enough to hold six tables but full of an atmosphere she loved: old records of old Caribbean melodies being played on an old phonograph somewhere in the back; candelabras everywhere, dripping wax as if it were a Cocteau movie; the softest, almost yellow walls on which Leonie’s family photographs were hung here and there. It made Maxi feel as if she’d gone on an Island holiday. Obviously Rocco had become so Madison Avenue that he didn’t understand the poetry of this place. And that from a man who used to live on hot peppers. Sad.
“Which classic mistake?” Rocco asked again, his dignity restored.
“Of not understanding that I have two customers for each copy: the reader and the advertiser. You can’t get the ads without the readers and you can’t get readers without ads, because they’re suspicious of a thin magazine. That’s why I practically gave away the advertising space for the first six months. Well, I didn’t give it entirely, but it is much, much cheaper than it should be. Absurdly cheap. The first issue is going to be nice and heavy and reassuring, like a great plump chicken. My reader will be able to just heft it and know that at a dollar fifty she’s getting a bargain. Rocco, leave some room for the main course.”
“Isn’t this it?”
“Wait,” said Maxi with a particularly provoking smile, her beauty spot riding above the perfect bow of her upper lip in a way that made Rocco feel the impulse to give her a good slap and see what would happen.
“There’s only one problem you don’t seem to think you have all figured out,” he said, “and that’s how to get your magazine distributed. You can have the world’s most beautiful book, with every other page a four-color ad, and you still have to scare up those millions of readers you’ve been assuming you’ll get. And if people can’t find B&B how can they buy it?”
“Rocco, did you ever hear of a man named Joe Shore?”
“Nope.”
Maxi sighed. “He was a wonderful old man but he’s been dead for, oh, fifteen years I guess. I used to go to the track with him right up to the end. He let me have as many hot dogs as I could eat. He died the way he would have wanted to, in his box at Belmont Park, with a winner. Of course he’d only bet two dollars, but still he’d won.”
“Maxi, what are you talking about?”
“Uncle Joe, Uncle Barney’s father. Well, naturally I’ve never lost touch with Uncle Barney. He was awfully upset when I divorced Laddie Kirkgordon … he loved my being a countess. He and his wife came to visit us at Castle Dread and they had a wonderful time.”
“Uncle Barney? J. Bernard Shore? The head of Crescent?” Rocco waved away the enormous platter of braised pork ribs, chicken, yellow rice and roast duck. “Crescent?” His voice cracked.
“Well of course, Crescent. You have to have a national distributor, Rocco,” Maxi explained with sweet patience.
“I’m fully aware of that, Maxi,” Rocco said carefully. She was trying to kill him. Creole food and aggravation, red hot peppers and deliberate malice. He wondered if he had an ulcer yet or was he just getting one now? Crescent was the most important national distributor in the United States. Naturally Amberville Publications was an important account for them, but as for B&B, they’d just laugh. Or should, if they had any sense.
“Anyway, I went to see Uncle Barney and told him my problem. He knows that I’ve always been able to pick a winner, ever since I was three, and so I signed a contract with him. Of course they get their usual ten percent of the cover price, he couldn’t do anything to lower that, but he did put me onto the Front Line Rack. Rocco! Leonie! Come quick, I think he’s choking. My God, Leonie, were there fishbones in that gumbo? Rocco, put your arms above your head, no, Leonie, don’t hit him on the back, Rocco, do you want the Hug of Life? The Heimlich maneuver? Oh, make up your mind! Run your fingers across your throat if you can’t breathe … oh, you’re O.K.… Christ … you frightened me. I’ll never bring you here again, so help me. Leonie, could I have some of your Haitian cognac, please? I feel faint.”
“The Front Line Rack?” Rocco whispered, gasping between each word. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”
“Absolutely. He said he’d make the space if he had to build bigger racks himself.”
“How much?”
“Well, that’s another problem. I have to pay the retailer directly for that. About five dollars every three weeks. Per store, I mean. Surely you don’t think that the supermarkets put magazines at the checkout counter out of charity, Rocco? Is that how People and the National Inquirer and Cosmo get up front where you can’t miss them? After all, business is business,” Maxi said briskly, recovering from the shock of Rocco’s choking fit by eating his portion of chili-flavored ribs as well as her own.
“You’re going to lose a fucking fortune!” he roared.
“Rocco, will you keep your voice down—or at least moderate your language? Maybe I will lose a fortune but my eyes are open and I’m betting on me. And so is Uncle Barney … he’s acting as my banker for the Front Line Racks for a year. I picked an Exacta for him once. The only time it ever happened in his whole life … and I was only three, couldn’t even read. Oh, Rocco, for heaven’s sake, have some of my cognac … I’m worried about you. Have you thought of having a checkup? I know a good internist who specializes in nervous advertising men, as if there were any other kind.”
It was a solemn group that descended from the plane at the airport in Lynchburg, Virginia, on the day that the first issue of B&B was to go to press, printed at the gigantic Meredith/Burda plant located outside of Lynchburg. On arrival, they separated into two groups because one rental car wasn’t big enough to hold all seven of them. Justin, who had come along to lend Maxi moral support, drove the first car, with Maxi beside him and Julie and Brick Greenfield in the back. The second car was driven by Allenby Winston Montgomery, the managing editor suggested by Pavka. His long, gloomy face was set in its normal expression of someone who, with resignation, dignity and patience, is mounting the steps of the guillotine, but his personality had changed a little on the day that Maxi decided that “Monty” suited him better as a nickname than “General.” He had actually smiled at her once, and although he hadn’t smiled since, he seemed, to those who observed him, quite likely to smile again before the year was out. He was accompanied by Angelica, who had refused to let Maxi get on the plane without her, school or no school, and by Harper O’Malley from Editorial Control, whose job it would be, every month, to stay at the printing plant during the entire printing process, inspecting copies as they came off the presses and making sure that they were being printed correctly, and, if not, making immediate changes.
Maxi clutched the precious bundle of First Color Proofs on which she, Brick Greenfield and Monty had made their final corrections, after the two preliminary sets of “Blues” and Second Color Proofs had already undergone the process of correction and been returned to Meredith/Burda. Maxi’s eyes didn’t register the Virginia countryside as she tried to remember when she had last felt the same set of emotions that she was now enduring, and which she would have scorned to call fear if she honestly could.
Yes, she had it now. It had happened before, about three days before Angelica’s birth. She and Rocco had gone to a movie and suddenly, during the film, she had been overcome by the knowledge that the baby inside her, the baby she had blithely carried for almost nine months, had no exit from her body except one. This unspeakably absolute fact, which somehow she had managed to ignore until that moment, had struck her with such force that she had only one thought: how to get out of it. There must be, there simply had to be some way to avoid having the baby. But as she looked at her enormous lap, even Maxi had had to bow
to a certain incontrovertible logic. There was no way around the fear. She had to go through with it. The pile of proofs that lay on her lap now had to go to press just as Angelica had had to come into the world. She relaxed slightly and patted the proofs lovingly. Whatever their future, she had given them the best she could give.
Except to Harper O’Malley and Brick Greenfield, who had been to the plant when they had worked for other magazines, the sheer size of Meredith/Burda was enough to inspire awe if not downright terror. Inside the plant the gigantic automated presses snaked around the vast room, five stories high, where a few of the top printers waited to greet them. The noise, drowning, deafening, almost unimaginable, made conversation impossible, but they all shook hands and mimed greetings as Maxi handed over the proofs. It was like being trapped inside of Chaplin’s Modern Times, she thought, with Star Wars improvements. Computers blinked here and there, constantly checking the yellows, reds and blues of the inks, and the little group from B&B waited, huddled together, tense and unsmiling, for the first copy to come off the press. In spite of automation and computers, there was still the need, there would always be the need, of a human eye to scan each page and make sure that the page looked as it had been intended to look. When the first copy appeared they all crowded around and flipped through it.
Except for Angelica and Justin, they each thought that they knew exactly what to expect, for they had gone over every word and picture many hundreds of times, but it was a totally different experience to see the magazine bound and trimmed, between covers, than it had been to see it in segments and double spreads; almost as different, Maxi thought, as the mound she’d seen in her lap at the movies and the baby she’d seen in the delivery room. Almost but not quite.
After she, Monty, O’Malley and Greenfield had each given their final approval, the first run of B&B started to come off the press, bound by huge machines into big bales tied in plastic strips and conveyed on belts to an outside loading dock where a great fleet of trucks was standing ready. Within four days of distribution there would be copies of the new magazine on every major newsstand and in every major supermarket and drugstore chain in the United States.
Maxi, followed by the others, walked out to the loading dock to watch the first trucks leave. Monty shattered the sudden silence as, with a note in his voice that almost broke, he said, “Well, there they go.” Suddenly he smiled as if watching a flock of baby birds taking their first flight. Maxi sighed deeply and Angelica, who was standing next to her, turned and lifted her a few inches off the dock, gave her a crushing hug and a kiss on each cheek.
“Hey, Ma,” she said, “what’s going on? You’re crying!”
21
Maxi prowled around the Eastern newsstand in the Pan Am Building. It is one of the largest and best stocked in Manhattan since many hundreds of thousands of people pass it every morning and evening, looking for something to read. It is located at one of the key intersections of New York, a building that must be crossed or entered to get to a hundred different places, including the subway and Grand Central Station. Every publisher, from Newhouse to Annenberg, from Forbes to Hearst, has its representatives checking out the sales situation at the Eastern newsstand a dozen times a day whenever the new issue of its magazine goes on sale. Experts with searching eyes circle the newsstand, people who can calculate the number of copies left in a stack and, returning in an hour, recount and know immediately whether the cover photo or blurbs have pulled a big audience or bombed out, or performed as usual.
It had been four full days since B&B hit the loading dock in Virginia and Maxi had forced herself to wait till this evening before going to the Eastern newsstand. She had refused to let anybody from the office go with her. This was not a communal effort as putting together the first issue had been. This was a solitary affair. Playing roulette was something you did in a group but when you went to cash in your winning chips or else rose nonchalantly from your chair after you’d lost everything, it was better to do it without company or fanfare.
Slowly circling, she moved in closer and closer, at first confused by the sheer abundance of magazines and the hurly-burly of customers around the newsstand, but little by little the scene came into close focus. Uncle Barney had told Meredith/Burda how many copies to send to each of the local wholesalers in different parts of the United States. Normally the wholesalers decided how many to send to each retailer, on the basis of past experience. In the case of B&B, since the magazine was brand-new, Uncle Barney himself had indicated the numbers he thought should be distributed. A newsstand doesn’t have the same few choice checkout positions as a supermarket, but it will inevitably group the fastest-selling magazines together so that customers don’t have to hunt for them. To give B&B a fighting chance it was supposed to be stacked—for this month only, since even Uncle Barney, with all his power, could do no more—next to Cosmo. Cosmo sold ninety-two percent of its copies as individual newsstand or supermarket purchases and just being next to it would give B&B a special opportunity to be noticed by women.
Maxi located the stacks of Cosmo, which had come out a few days earlier, and realized that they were half-depleted compared to the still-high stacks of most of the other women’s magazines. She inched closer, peering anxiously right and left, but nowhere could she spot the screaming red cover of B&B that Rocco had chosen because it was precisely the color of a stop sign, the one color everyone had to pause and notice except the color-blind. And she damn well wasn’t color-blind, Maxi thought. Could the magazine not have been delivered yet? That seemed impossible. Four days was the period in which every single city and bus stop in the country was supposed to have its copies. The Eastern newsstand had unquestionably had them as soon as, or sooner than, anyone else.
Was it possible, she asked herself, that the newsstand boss had left the bundles of B&B unopened, so busy with his sure-to-sell merchandise that he hadn’t bothered to unstrip the new bales? Monty, in his infinite wisdom, had told her a dozen horror stories like that: when it happened, for whatever reason, you were dead. Dead. Stone-cold dead in the water. No matter how carefully you had planned every detail in the entire publishing business it all depended, in the end, on that special unknown person who opened the bale of magazines or box of books or bundle of newspapers and put them out for sale. If that person had the flu and had been replaced by someone less experienced, you were dead. Or if he were tired or had had a fight with his wife and didn’t hustle as he usually did … dead. Damn the human factor, Maxi thought as she grew more agitated. These things should be done by computer and robots.
Unable to control herself, she stood directly in front of the pile of Cosmo. She gaped, gasped and blinked. A tall stack of The New York Review of Books was nestled right next to Cosmo, where B&B should have been. She should have known! Double-cross! The beastly New York news-dealer, some kind of weirdo intellectual, with utterly phony, pseudo-liberal pretensions, who probably had a son who wrote poetry or even intended to be a harpsichord critic—the bastard had usurped her place! Gaining brownie-points with NYRB for his rotten kid. She’d see about that! Maxi pushed her way into the sacrosanct center of the newsstand, swarming with busy newsboys falling over each other as they tried to make change for impatient customers.
“Where’s the boss?” she demanded at large. “Show me the boss, and fast!”
“You’re not allowed in here, miss. And I’m the boss. Would you move outside?” A large man made a shooing gesture, and almost turned away. New York must be full of beautiful, loony girls, with messed-up hair and furious green eyes.
“The hell I will.” Maxi pulled him around. “Where’d you put B&B, God damn it? Why aren’t they out there next to Cosmo? And don’t try and tell me you didn’t get them because I’m sure you …”
“Did. Yeah, we did, and whatever they are they’re all sold. I called the rep for the retailer and he’s bringing me another couple hundred. So don’t blame me, lady, I’m saving its place with that fink sissy newspaper and that really hurts.�
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“They’re gone?” Maxi whispered. “People bought them?”
“Don’t look at me like that, lady. I don’t know any more about them than you. They just melted away. Never saw anything like it in my life. Hey, lady, stop it! I don’t even know you … stop kissing me, lady … well, all right, just stop crying all over my shirt … mascara, lipstick … sure, I agree, it’s wonderful that I’m not a robot.” Too bad she was crazy, with legs like that: they were gams, real old-fashioned gams like you used to see on Marilyn and Rita and Cyd Charisse. Too bad he was too old for her … anyway she was holding up traffic.
Pavka Mayer and Barney Shore barely knew each other. Although Crescent had been the national distributor for Amberville Publications for almost thirty-seven years the sophisticated, profoundly elegant Artistic Director had had little contact with the rough-and-tumble tycoon whose chief reading material remained the Racing Form. Yet, three days after Maxi went to the newsstand in the Pan Am Building, Pavka Mayer found himself being taken to lunch by Barney Shore at Le Veau d’Or, the kind of small French restaurant in which they both felt at home, a restaurant that had surely been in business longer than either of them, a restaurant as urbane as Pavka, as down-to-earth as Barney, an un-fancy and excellent restaurant not known to non-New Yorkers.
“I had to celebrate with somebody who’d feel the same way I do,” Barney said.
“I’m glad you called me,” Pavka agreed gravely.
“It’s been a week now and it’s sold out in every major city in the country. Nobody’s seen anything like it since that first issue of Life. My computers are going crazy. It didn’t do anything to make peace in the war between Fort Worth and Dallas when the Dallas ladies drove all the way to Fort Worth and the Fort Worth ladies drove to Dallas, all assuming that the other place would have copies. Couldn’t even bribe the clerks at the checkout counters … they couldn’t sell what they’d sold out. Same story in Chicago, L.A., San Diego, Boston, Milwaukee … same story everywhere. I miscalculated, should have printed five times as many … or ten. We persuaded Meredith/Burda to go back to press—they kicked and screamed and we paid double time—so you’d better keep your copy as a first edition, a collector’s item.” Barney Shore’s grin grew broader.
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