Another Life (44 page)

I demurred. I liked Jackie, but I had no desire to be in her debt for a gold watch. Soon, however, we were in a shouting match, with Irving accusing me of turning down Jackie’s gift out of ingratitude and Jackie accusing me of having insulted her. The more I thought about it, the more stupid and puritanical my resistance seemed. God knows I had
earned
a Cartier watch, with or without my name on it. Why should I not accept one when it had been offered to me? I caved in as gracefully as I could, and we embraced and parted company, the Mansfields for their cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, me for home.

The next day, as I was sitting at my desk, my assistant buzzed me on the intercom to say that there was a man on the telephone who had to speak to me about a watch.

Expecting that it was Cartier on the telephone, asking for my address, I took the call. A rich, deep, vibrant voice, gravelly, hoarse, with a distinct Brooklyn accent, told me it wasn’t anybody from Cartier. “You Mike Korda?” he asked. “Irving and Jackie’s friend?”

I acknowledged both facts and asked who he was.

“This is Sol,” he said. “I’m down on Forty-seventh Street. It’s about your watch.”

“My watch? I don’t get it. Isn’t it coming from Cartier when it’s ready?” In those days Cartier still delivered jewelry by hand on request, with a solemn messenger wearing a gray chauffeur’s uniform, with breeches and leggings, and bearing the pale blue Cartier box. I had expected my watch, eventually, to arrive like that.

Sol snorted with impatience. “Hey,” he said, “it has to be hand lettered. I got to put on the whatchamacallit? The fucking ankh.”

“You do this for Cartier?”

“Cartier,
Shmartier
. You’re getting a real Cartier watch, with the dial hand lettered—are you ready for this?—at wholesale! How do you like them apples,
bubbi
?”

There was a silence while I worked this out in my head. However I juggled them apples, what I was looking at was that
I
was apparently buying the watch, not the Mansfields. How much was this going to cost me? I asked.

I could tell from Sol’s rasping voice that he was offended. “Cost? What are you talking about, cost? They asked me to give you the best deal I could. You tell me where you can beat wholesale on a Cartier watch?”

“Yes, but what are we talking about in numbers? Ballpark figure?”

A long, resentful sigh. “One large,” he said. “With the lettering and the whatchamacallit maybe a little more. Say twelve hundred.”

I tried to think of a way that I could explain to my wife why I had spent $1,200 on a gold Cartier watch I didn’t need, with my name painted on the dial and an ankh. I couldn’t do it. “Keep the watch,” I said.

There was a long silence at the other end. “Make it nine hundred, I’ll throw in the dial,” Sol said. “You pay cash, and we forget about the sales tax.”

“No.” Even $900 was out of the question, I explained. It was a point of honor. The watch was supposed to be a gift.

“What am I going to do with the watch?” Sol asked, panic in his voice now. Sell it to someone else, I suggested. “Someone
else
? My boy already lettered your first name on the goddamn dial! Who I am going to sell a Cartier watch to whose first name is Michael?”

“Somebody whose family name has five letters,” I said and hung up.

I was not out of the woods yet, however. The next day, Irving called me from Los Angeles. Jackie was in the bathroom crying her heart out, he told me accusingly, all because I had rejected her gift. I pointed out that it
wasn’t
a gift. I was going to have to pay for it, after all.

“She thought you were different from the others,” he said. “She thought we were
friends
.”

“We
are
friends,” I said. “I just don’t want the watch. Tell her company policy prevents me from accepting it.”

Irving thought about this. He was not an unreasonable man when he was treated like an equal partner. “I’ll explain it to Jackie,” he said, in his
best, confidential, man-to-man voice. An hour later, he called back and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Heh, heh, you’re in the clear.”

And I guess I was. Jackie and I stayed on a friendly basis, even though she left S&S rancorously before her next book,
Once Is Not Enough
, causing Dick to send her a single rose on the publication day with a note that read, “For us, once
was
enough.” From time to time I met Irving Mansfield on the street, outside “21,” or on Central Park South, waiting for Josephine to do her business. In a strange way, I was grateful to them: They had taught me, after all, that books could be merchandised, just like anything else, something that a lot of publishers have still to learn.

I must have been on Jackie’s list of friends, too, for I continued to receive PR releases and even birthday cards. Years later, one night at home, the telephone rang at some ungodly hour. My wife picked up, listened for a moment, and, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, whispered: “There’s a drunken woman on the phone asking for you.”

I took the receiver groggily and at once recognized Jackie’s voice, not drunk but hoarse and inarticulate with grief. “I just wanted you to know,” she said haltingly, “Josephine is dead.”

And in some strange way I felt sad—though I had never known Josephine in her prime. To tell the truth, Josephine had never much liked me. I had the impression, in fact, that she didn’t much like men in general, not even Irving, though it was possible that she merely resented being relegated to the background. In the old days, Josephine had been the star, not Jackie, and went everywhere with her owners: restaurants, nightclubs, talk shows. Then, as Jackie herself became the star, Josephine was eclipsed, left behind, loved perhaps but no longer in the limelight, which probably explained why she sulked and occasionally snarled at Irving. Still, with her death, it was as if a chapter of what Jackie liked to call “the book of life” had come to an end, though I couldn’t have guessed Jackie’s own life would end so soon, in 1974.

In her own way, she changed the course of popular fiction, a prophet without honor to whom John Grisham, Robert James Waller, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Danielle Steel all owe a debt. Jackie, after all, reinvented the woman’s novel, the mainstay of popular fiction, opened it up to a franker sexuality, to a tougher kind of story, to romance with tears
and
oral sex, to heroes with good looks and icy cruelty. She introduced readers of fiction to a rawer kind of sensation than had hitherto been acceptable to members of the Literary Guild and fiction
buyers at the Doubleday bookstores, while, at the same time, introducing into the genre the first big dose of celebrity worship that was to blossom into the full-scale celebrity cults of the eighties and the nineties.

Jackie was ahead of that curve. More important, she taught everybody in book publishing a lesson: not just that books are merchandise and that nobody who wants to be a good publisher should ever forget that, but also that what most people want to read more than anything else is, quite simply, a good
story
. The rags to riches, poor little miss nobody in love with her all-powerful boss, the understudy who gets her chance to strut the stage in the star’s role and becomes a star—these are not just clichés, as reviewers would have us believe, but part of the very reason why people buy novels in the first place: to get out of their own lives and troubles by reading about other people’s.

Maybe Jackie picked that up from her mother, a great reader, or maybe she picked it up from being around her father, in what passed for the Philadelphia Jewish version of
la vie de bohème
, or maybe it was just all those hours as a kid reading
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, but wherever it came from, she knew it better than anyone before or since.

CHAPTER 20

T
he Love Machine sold more copies than any work of fiction S&S had ever published and even garnered some good reviews, including perhaps the most selling review ever to appear in the staid, stuffy, and august
New York Times Book Review
, in which Nora Ephron called it “a long, delicious gossip column” and summed it all up by writing that “it shined like a rhinestone in a trash can.” Perhaps for the first time in publishing history, a book’s editor was quoted in a
Times
review (up until then, editors, like valets and tailors, remained silent). “You have to push this book beyond regular book buyers,” I said (correctly), “to people who haven’t been in a bookstore since
Valley of the Dolls
was published.” Ephron noted that we had paid $250,000 for the book (a fortune in those days) and that Twentieth Century–Fox had offered a million dollars for the movie rights (which the Mansfields turned down)—the first time that the grubby subject of money had been raised there—and
also brought up the hitherto taboo subjects of masochism, nymphomania, and incest. She also quoted me as saying, in regard to the competition between Philip Roth and Jackie Susann for first place on the best-seller list, “It’s wild! You have these two books out at the same time, and their merits aside, one of them is about masturbation and the other is about successful heterosexual love. If there’s any justice in the world,
The Love Machine
ought to knock
Portnoy
off the top simply because it’s a step in the right direction.” (This comment was to cause me untold grief when the wheel of life turned and cast me, years later, as Roth’s editor.)
Newsweek
compared Jackie to “an Egyptian love goddess,” called the book “an engaging sex-power fantasy,” and compared her (unfavorably) to Thomas Wolfe.

There were two immediate consequences. The first was that Dick and I were proven right. We had gambled big and won, and there could henceforth be no doubt that I belonged in the editor in chief’s office or that Dick’s ascent to the top would be seriously delayed, least of all by Peter Schwed. The second was that having been quoted again and again in the press on the subject of Jacqueline Susann, I glimpsed, for the first time, the possibility that an editor need not necessarily be mute and invisible—that he or she might become as much of a celebrity as the best-selling authors were. Reporters, reviewers, professional deep thinkers called, one replied to their questions, and lo and behold, the next day there were one’s words, appearing in print all across America and, for that matter, around the world. That this might turn out to be a two-edged sword had not yet occurred to me, but in the meantime Jackie Susann and Irving Mansfield had dragged me all too willingly into the limelight, and I was reluctant to fall back into the shadows.

In a curious way,
The Love Machine
sharply changed the stakes for both Dick and me. In the first place, we had proven ourselves as a team—a fact of more importance to us than to the rest of the world—and in the second place, perhaps more important, Dick had demonstrated his skill as a publisher in conditions of extreme stress. Successfully articulating the publication of a big book is the test of good publishing, involving the ability to keep in one’s head not only the numbers and their daily fluctuation but the harmonious synchronizing of publicity, manufacturing, advertising, and sales—departments often run as independent fiefdoms. Dick established immediate control over the whole process and won universal respect (if not affection) by his absolute
recall of even the smallest bit of information and by the fact that he was usually a step ahead of everybody else. Whatever the subject was, he knew the right questions to ask and also knew when he wasn’t being given a straight answer. When a book is selling fast and in big numbers, the publisher has no option but to go back to press blindly for more printings of the book for fear of running out of stock, with the result that when sales start to slow down or stop, there is still a torrent of books coming in from the printer. Many best-sellers end up
losing
money for the publisher because of overprinting, while, of course, uncounted best-sellers that might have been fail to happen because the publisher prints too cautiously or fails to respond quickly enough to demand. (The adoption of the computer was supposed to cure this problem but has made no difference at all—returns of unsold hardcover books still run at a crippling 35 to 40 percent—which is proof that it is really a question of
Fingerspitzengefühl
rather than lack of information.)

Dick had the guts to go for a major reprint when he thought it was the right moment and—far harder—to risk going out of stock rather than reprinting when he felt that the sales curve was descending. The latter strategy drove the Mansfields wild with rage, and they called at every hour of the day and night, threatening, cursing, begging, and demanding for more printings. The book was number one on the
Times
list, they saw it running out of the stores, and the possibility that we might run out of books petrified them. But Dick, a cooler player by far, could sense that sales had peaked and also understood that there were plenty of books in the pipeline, even if they were invisible to the Mansfields or to S&S’s own sales department. There were books at the jobbers, books in trucks and in transit all over the United States, and cartons of books in the storerooms of bookstores that could be moved to stores where the demand was stronger. Dick was determined not to give back the profit S&S had made by ending up with a warehouse full of returns or, worse still, of overprinted books.

When the Mansfields complained bitterly to Shimkin, Dick still refused to give in, with the dual result that we had very nearly a “clean sale” of
The Love Machine
and that the Mansfields never forgave him. “If I could say no to Jackie and Irving, I could say no to anyone,” he said later, summing up a crucial learning experience, but what in fact mattered even more was that Dick gained absolute faith in his own ability and the sense that he could control the process, as well as the loyalty
of everybody at S&S who had been involved. He always argued that it was better to be lucky than smart, but for the moment he was lucky
and
smart—a hard combination to beat.