Another Life (19 page)

Gitlin and I soon became close friends, though I was careful not to be sucked into his social life, which seemed to consist largely of sitting around in restaurants or hotel suites and drinking with his clients or flying to L.A. or Cannes to hold Harold Robbins’s hand while he gestated another novel.

As for the stories about Robbins’s writing habits, I soon learned that they were, if anything, less dramatic than the reality. Robbins invariably waited until the last possible moment before beginning a novel, usually a couple of months before the finished book was supposed to be shipped. To this psychological burden, he added the fact that he always
spent his income, substantial as it was, the moment it was received, without putting anything away for taxes. Thus, when he finally sat down to write, Robbins had given himself not only an impossible deadline but the added pressure of IRS liens—not to speak of the expenses of keeping houses full of servants in L.A. and Acapulco, plus the yacht, with its crew of four, in Cannes, and his wife, Grace. Once the wolf was at the door, Robbins would sit down reluctantly, often in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and start typing. Only after he had passed a certain number of manuscript pages under the door would Gitlin allow room service to send a meal in. Even then Robbins had been known to escape out a window to Palm Springs or Las Vegas unless Gitlin watched him like a jailer.

Compared to this, Irving Wallace seemed normal, although the subject of his novel raised eyebrows at S&S, except for those of Peter Schwed, who was hugely enthusiastic.
The Chapman Report
was based on a sex survey very much like that of Dr. Kinsey, a subject which seemed shocking at the time.

Whereas most agents make a point of spreading their major authors over a number of different publishing houses, Gitlin made a deliberate decision to put Ryan, Robbins, and Wallace in the same place and even, in time, in the hands of the same editor. He calculated that having three best-selling authors at one place would give him more leverage—it might even, in the long run, make the house dependent on him, so that he could pretty much get whatever he asked for. But no large publishing house can ever really become dependent on one or two authors, however many copies their books sell, and very few authors go on writing best-seller after best-seller forever. Anyway, if you publish two or three hundred books a year, other best-sellers are almost certainly going to come along sooner or later. Successful as, say, James Michener and John O’Hara were, Random House would have survived the loss of either or both of them, just as S&S and Pocket Books would have survived the loss of Robbins, Wallace, and Ryan. Publishers are, on the whole, more likely to tie themselves up in knots over the writers they don’t have but want than over those they already have, particularly when it’s a question of multibook deals spread over several years.

*
It is a measure of things to come in the publishing industry that Atheneum was later acquired by Macmillan, after the latter firm was taken over by that leviathan of corporate crookery Robert Maxwell, and vanished altogether as an imprint after S&S acquired Macmillan in the wake of Maxwell’s mysterious death.

CHAPTER 10

“T
elevision is the best thing that’s happened to kids since the invention of mother’s milk,” Bennett Cerf, ever the optimist, announced ebulliently to an audience of librarians in the summer of 1960. The librarians had been indulging in that pastime common to all those involved in books since the invention of movable type: the prediction that culture is about to go belly-up once and for all and that the next generation will be, or already is, functionally illiterate.

Considering that Cerf would shortly sell Random House to RCA, which owned a TV network, his enthusiasm for television might not have been entirely objective. He himself was not always immune to the pessimism of those who make their living from books. A few years before, struck by the fact that booksellers were always predicting that the bookshop would one day go the way of the village blacksmith, Cerf had commissioned some research into the subject that produced the alarming information that not only did blacksmiths greatly outnumber bookstores in America but the per capita purchase of books by Americans was less than that of Thailand.

By 1961, however, the age-old pessimism of book publishing had been erased by a sudden burst of confidence, prompting
Life
magazine to devote a long, yea-saying piece headlined,
NO MORE A HEADACHE
,
BOOK BUSINESS BOOMS!
According to
Life
, publishing stocks were soaring, the proliferation of mergers was a sign of the industry’s growth, and the founding of new publishing firms such as Atheneum and Bernard Geis Associates pointed to a rosy future. (Hardly any of the new firms founded in that era survived.)

Book publishing, “the business that capitalism forgot” in
Life
’s words, was suddenly glamorous, along with such businesses as “electronics [and] vending machines” and was being revolutionized by the use of some “mechanical brain” that could predict or create best-sellers. Indeed, Doubleday,
Life
reported, was already experimenting with an ambitious new sales program that would take the guesswork out of the book business. Doubleday salesmen were to be “armed with portable dictating machines” and sent out to take continuous inventory of the Doubleday titles at bookstores across the nation. These reports would be airmailed back to New York, where Doubleday’s executives would be able to plot how many copies of each title had sold and how many were still on booksellers’ shelves. “With uncanny accuracy,”
Life
marveled, Doubleday statisticians would then be able to predict the sales of a book and identify a best-seller, “just as an election night statistician can predict the outcome of an election from the early results of a few scattered precincts.”

Since Doubleday’s ratio of best-sellers to failures was about the same as anyone else’s throughout the sixties, it can be presumed that this futuristic scheme failed to pay off. It was, however, typical of the sudden optimism that overcame publishers and investors at the time. Wacky ideas proliferated as share prices rose: instead of editors choosing which books to publish by reading them, “sales experts” would determine the right “product mix” for each list; “books would be sold through the mail to people who read magazines” (as if the book club had not already been invented); and publishers would strive for market share, since “the only way to get more books read is to put more on the shelves,” in the words of Doubleday’s then-chairman Douglas Black, who had apparently not been told that they were returnable.

The Wall Street Journal
, too, commented on the “book boom,” though more cautiously, noting that book publishing was now “a growth industry.” But it pointed out that many of “the perplexing problems” of the business—like picking the winners from the losers—had yet to be licked and described the process as “a gigantic dice game.”

Publishers have always been eager to eliminate the risk factor, either by branching out into what might seem to be more “secure” businesses, such as textbooks or “information” (dictionaries, encyclopedias, et cetera), or by concentrating on “staples,” such as cookbooks, auto-repair manuals, and the like. As Wall Street beckoned, they became even more concerned to show that theirs was a fundamentally sensible, predictable,
feet-on-the-ground business, not a crapshoot—a business for grownups, not one dominated by spoiled children in the form of editors and authors. Interviews and articles tended to emphasize marketing and merchandising, as if the editorial side of the book business didn’t exist. About this time, a business expert called in to evaluate S&S came to the conclusion that we would be better off if we published only bestsellers—advice that was passed on to us with a straight face by Leon Shimkin, whose pained expression made it seem as if we were stubbornly resisting the obvious. He had charts drawn up to show how much better off we would be by not publishing books that didn’t sell and concentrating our energies on those that did. Just think, he would whisper hoarsely, how much
work
we would save if we published only best-sellers!

I
F THERE
was one thing I had learned after almost two years in book publishing, it was that the amount of work invested in a book seldom bears any relationship to its success. Most editors, in fact (I am no exception) spend a lot of their time on the literary equivalent of rescuing stray animals. Every editor has a list of projects that looked compelling when they were bought but have since become proverbial albatrosses around one’s neck: novels that have grown out of control, the pages multiplying crazily like kudzu beside Southern roads; nonfiction projects that have taken sharp turns away from the original premise of the work; books that have been delayed far beyond their deadlines until nobody can remember why they were bought in the first place or even who bought them.

To this day, I dread going over the “inventory” of my undelivered books, since it never fails to reveal projects I have forgotten about altogether or which were bought when the current managing editor was still in school. No matter how late an author is with a book, it’s my tendency to say, “Oh, don’t worry, he’s working on it,” rather than pull the plug and terminate the contract for lateness.

It’s not just a certain sympathy for writers, being one myself, or a degree of optimism, without which one would never become an editor in the first place—it’s also that in my first years as an editor I gravitated naturally toward “problem” books and authors, or they toward me. Having bought a book, I hadn’t the luxury of writing it off or letting it fail, as older, more successful editors can do. I felt myself responsible
for getting it in and making it publishable, however late, off course, or unreadable it might have become over time.

This can be a positive, character-building experience, but it might also derive from a stubborn determination not to admit to a mistake. In either case, I became something of a specialist in the long-term resuscitation of doubtful projects that most editors would have left to die merciful deaths. I simply could
not
let them go and was willing to spend hours beyond counting to make them as readable as possible, only too often over the objections of the author—the worse somebody writes, the more they are likely to cling to their prose.

Early on in our friendship, I remember Bob Gottlieb handing me a badly written and unnumbered manuscript, heavily etched with laborious, inked revisions and second thoughts in an unreadable hand. “See if you can get this to the point where it’s not a shame before the neighbors,” he said—a
shondeh
, to use the Yiddish. It took almost twelve years before the novel saw the light of day, only to sink like the
Titanic
. By the time it was published, Bob was no longer at S&S, and during that long period the author’s own life became as melodramatic as the plot of his book. All the while, every six months or so, another package of badly typed manuscript would arrive on my desk from him, together with a long letter chronicling yet another round of disasters, and pleading for something,
anything
by express mail, even if only fifty or a hundred dollars, to keep his head above water. “
My life is in your hands!
” one letter ended dramatically. Each time, I faithfully trudged down to the office of Shimkin’s latest financial watchdog to beg for a check, despite the facts that the novel was equally out of control and nobody had read it but me.

In these circumstances, it is easy to persuade oneself that one is dealing with a work of genius, if only to justify the amount of time and energy spent on it or the endlessly growing file full of ill-spelled, single-spaced, stream-of-consciousness letters. Once a writer is far enough from shore, his or her editor invariably takes on something of the nature of a life buoy thrown to a drowning man—a relationship that is at once deeply flattering and profoundly wearisome for the editor, who can neither pry loose the kind of money that might help nor guarantee the eventual success of the book. This is not always an easy cross to bear. It is hard enough to be responsible for what happens to somebody’s work—very often their lifework at that, in every meaning of that word—but being responsible for their
life
is something else again.

With age and experience, one learns to avoid playing this role, but in 1961 it was still a heady challenge to which I responded only too eagerly. I became involved in the rescue of a would-be novelist who had descended from job to job until he was living in a tar-paper shack in Northern California, reduced to the point where we had to send him typing paper so he could continue an interminable novel that we eventually published with one of the lowest net sales in S&S’s history. Then I became entangled in the darkly comic life of a self-taught historian and respected businessman whose apparently prim and proper suburban marriage went adrift when his white churchgoing wife, the mother of his two children, ran off with a black dope dealer from Newark. A pioneering student of animal psychology persuaded me to buy a book he proposed to write about his attempt to make wolves in Alaska bring up his infant son as one of their pack. This was not exactly an original idea, but having spent a part of my own childhood watching my Uncle Zoltan and my father on the set of
The Jungle Book
, I was interested enough to persuade S&S to put up $2,500 to send him on his way to Alaska, where he promptly disappeared into the tundra with the boy, never to be heard from again, leaving me to many years of difficult correspondence with the boy’s mother. Another of my authors, an old friend from Oxford, fled to a Tibetan monastery with his advance; another, apparently driven to a suicide attempt by writer’s block, wound up in a padded cell at Payne-Whitney, where I visited him almost daily in the hope of rekindling his interest in his book.