Another Life (41 page)

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 day were simple and Napoleonic: “Just turn it into a goddamn book somehow, that’s all I ask,” he said, and that was that.

•  •  •

T
HE 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.

I bore it in mind all the way through the lobby of the Mansfields’ building—in which there was a fountain with fresh gardenias floating in it, the first of its kind I had seen outside Beverly Hills—and up the elevator to their apartment, where Jackie herself opened the door. My first thought was that Truman Capote was onto something: She
did
look a bit like a truck driver in drag, or at least there was something very mannish about her appearance. She was tall, broad shouldered, large bosomed, with the deep, husky voice of a longshoreman, and she wore stage makeup that looked as if it had been put on with a trowel and then baked. Her face was an improbable dark tan, her lips a glossy bloodred, and her spiked eyelashes, striking on TV, were truly alarming close up. Her eyes were dark, bright, and very, very shrewd and tough. She offered her cheek, and I kissed it. “Irving’s out walking Josephine,” she said. She appraised me carefully. “Christ, I thought I was going to get a top editor,” she said. “You look just like a kid.”

“And you look just like a girl,” I said, stealing Milton Greene’s line to Marilyn Monroe.

It had worked for Milton on Marilyn, and it worked for me on Jackie. She gave a big grin and took us into the tiny kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Dom Perignon. I was interested to see that except for a can of dog food and an empty jar of cocktail capers, the refrigerator was bare. The Mansfields were not homebodies. She handed me the bottle and said, “Pop it, kid.”

I popped it—a European education pays dividends sooner or later—and the three of us sat down in the living room, where glasses were already waiting on the coffee table. I noticed that they were from the Beverly Hills Hotel, as were the cocktail napkins. The Mansfields, as I was to discover, expected to be comped everything. When they stayed in a hotel, they left with a supply of soap, toilet paper, and Kleenex.

I struggled to sit upright while I poured. Jackie’s upholstery—mostly some kind of shimmery gold fabric with a nubby weave—was protected by transparent plastic slipcovers so slippery that it was hard
not to slide off the furniture. We were just toasting each other when the door opened and Irving came in with Josephine on a leash. Mansfield was a promoter and hustler and prided himself on being a tough guy, though all he was, in fact, was Jackie’s spokesman—
she
was the tough one, not him. His ambition in life was to be a Broadway “character,” to which end he had mastered the gruff voice, the sharp clothes, the hat cocked at a rakish angle, like Walter Winchell’s, the “don’t fuck with me” stare and the shameless chutzpah of that vanishing breed. He never quite brought it off, however—in some hard-to-define way he always looked like a small-timer, though he was deeply suspicious of being taken for one. I had the impression, then and later, that most of his life consisted of hanging around with his hands in his pockets telling people, “Jackie will be down in five minutes.”

“Did Josie do her business, honey?” Jackie asked, with genuine concern.

“Yeh, yeh,” Irving said, with the look of a man who hadn’t noticed. He put Josephine in the bedroom, came back, and poured himself a glass of champagne. “So what do you think of Jackie?” he asked. “Isn’t she great?”

As we were soon to discover, this was Irving’s refrain. Whatever Jackie said or did, Irving chuckled and, as if he were her impresario, said, “Isn’t she great?”

Great or not, it soon became apparent that as far as her books were concerned, Jackie
was
a pro, just as Irving had promised. The pink paper was not a whim. She typed each draft of her manuscript on a different color paper—pink was for her first, rough draft. What is more, though Irving liked to insist that she never needed nor accepted editorial advice, Jackie herself was a realist—she took what seemed useful to her and understood perfectly what her special strengths were. “I write for women who read me in the goddamn subways on the way home from work,” she explained. “I know who they are because that’s who I used to be. Remember
Stella Dallas?
My readers are like Stella. They want to press their noses against the windows of other people’s houses and get a look at the parties they’ll never be invited to, the dresses they’ll never get to wear, the lives they’ll never live, the guys they’ll never fuck.” Jackie—a chain-smoker—exhaled out of both nostrils like a dragon. “But here’s the catch: All the people they envy in my books, the ones who are glamorous or beautiful or rich or talented, they have to
come to a bad end, see, because
that
way the people who read me can get off the subway and go home feeling better about their own crappy lives and
luckier
than the people they’ve been reading about.”

“Isn’t she great?” Irving said with a chuckle.

In fact, I soon decided, in her own way, Jackie
was
great. Leavis could not have put it better in all the volumes of
Scrutiny
. She understood exactly what she was doing. In those days, when the TV industry was still glamorous, she had elected to write a novel about television, to this day the only successful one and the best. “The love machine” was not only the nickname for Robin Stone, the fabulously successful television executive who was the book’s hero (and who was based on Jim Aubrey), but was also Stone’s name for the television set itself. Jackie already understood that the television set was like a kind of lover, always present in the bedroom, available twenty-four hours a day, establishing a new kind of intimacy with the viewer. She didn’t need Marshall McLuhan to teach her that. It was one of the reasons she was such a good promoter on television: She was, as she herself described it, “a natural on the boob tube.”

Dumb she wasn’t. She even had a theory about popular fiction that, so far as I am concerned, has yet to be bettered and that, if followed with a certain amount of energy, can hardly fail: a love story with a heroine every woman reader will identify with (in those days a pretty victim), a powerful man torn between his work and his love, and a cast of characters who are almost identifiable as celebrities.