Back Then (31 page)

It never occurred to me that I was “juggling” anything. The feminist movement—at least this particular phase of it—was too soft to be heard and I considered myself incredibly lucky to be able to do the two things I most wanted to do, namely to write fiction and have children.

CHAPTER 13

Over the years I had stayed
in touch with Max Schuster, gone to his parties, and visited him and his wife at Cow Neck Farm, his place on Long Island Sound. One Sunday we went sailing on the Chinese junk that Robert Ripley, originator of the popular cartoon feature
Believe It or Not
, had ordered built for his floating residence. Off Lloyd Neck Harbor we hailed and boarded
Sea Cloud
, the largest private yacht afloat, owned by Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Davies, heiress to a Post Toasties fortune. And there were other bizarre encounters. I rarely saw the Schusters except when they were in glittering company. From time to time
Max had sent me books by authors he was especially proud to publish, among them Nikos Kazantzakis and Bertrand Russell. He came to our wedding in July 1954, and in November, doubtless swayed by the fact that I was now the son-in-law of the father of public relations, he invited me to work for him. Max was fifty-seven, chairman of Simon and Schuster's board of directors, and I was to be his personal assistant with a promise of promotion to editor. He set up a noonday meeting at his office in Rockefeller Center to “spell out,” as he said, my “duties and privileges.” Perhaps it was a matter of contagion, but even after knowing him for some time I was invariably twitchy and uncomfortable in his presence and expected to be more so with him as my boss. On my way to our meeting I thought it a good idea to stop off for a vodka martini at the bar of the New Weston Hotel off Madison Avenue—I might well have ordered a second drink if I had had more than an inkling of what the years to come would be like. But I thought better of this, made a final attempt at self-composure, passed the gilded statue of Atlas at the entrance to the International Building, and ascended to the twenty-eighth floor.

Max had written out the agenda for our meeting on a three-by-five pink slip and, as I noticed later, in a minuscule script that only someone as thickly spectacled as Max himself could read or write without a magnifying glass. Crammed onto this bit of paper were thirty or so headings, each of which, as he talked, he elaborated with tutorial verve, occasionally clicking his ballpoint pen for emphasis. His briefing notes covered the obligations of my job with him: to pursue “better books” and “younger authors” for the S&S list; to review the backlist with an eye to our joining the ongoing “paperback revolution” in trade publishing; to deal diplomatically with Kazantzakis, Russell, Bernard Berenson, and Will Durant, aging thoroughbreds in Max's stable of authors. Several times, interrupting the logic and continuity of his notes, he reminded me not to discuss internal affairs with his wife. At the end of our session, while Max was out of the room, I retrieved his crumpled briefing notes from the wastebasket.

And so I came to work in the office next to his, regularly seeing him open his door a crack and peer out to be sure that the corridor was clear of authors and employees before he scurried like the White Rabbit on his way to the elevator. As I discovered, he always appeared to be busier than he was and more remote from the editorial operations of his publishing house than he realized. Once, overcoming his ingrained reluctance to deal with literary agents, he called Sterling Lord to express interest in the autobiography of the boxer Rocky Graziano,
Somebody Up There Likes Me.
“But, Mr. Schuster,” Lord replied, “You've already published that book.”

My small room had a window that looked out over the Rockefeller Center skating rink. At the zenith—that is, at the beginning—of my career at Simon and Schuster, along with a private bathroom, Max and I shared two secretaries, both of them male. When they eventually left Max's employ, either out of exhaustion or despair at occupying a gender-anomalous role without much of a future, I was charged with interviewing and hiring their male replacements. The candidates were not, as a rule, an impressive lot. Mrs. Schuster had ordered this unbending arrangement—office romances leading to either marriage or the divorce courts were part of the firm's rich history of improvisation. Dick Simon, her husband's partner, had married the switchboard receptionist; one of Ray Schuster's sons-in-law had taken up with an editorial secretary. Ray saw no reason to test her luck by putting Max in the way of temptation. At least once during my time she ordered the purging of employees engaged in intramural affairs.

My first morning at work I found on my desk a message from Max. “Just a note to say Hello and greet you at the beginning of a creative adventure.” The adventure got off to a soggy start with a novel by a retired Chinese diplomat, Dr. Chang Hsin-hai, whom Max had met at someone's house on Long Island. Dr. Chang was at work on the story of a concubine named “Golden Orchid,” who plied her trade during the Boxer Rebellion, married the Chinese ambassador to Germany and Russia, and became a power in the dowager empress's court. According to Chang, his novel-in-progress had everything—sex, violence, intrigue, exotic settings, historical authority, a journey on horseback through Poland, Russia, and Outer Mongolia, and similar episodes with great production values for a film epic. Without seeing a word but sensing he had made a great discovery outside of conventional publishing channels (he liked to bypass his editors and the agents they dealt with), Max decided
The Fabulous Concubine
—Chang's title—was a bonanza, with fabulous trade sales, book club, reprint, and movie potential. Violating one of his basic precepts, “Don't overstimulate authors,” he made the mistake of telling all this to Dr. Chang over a festive lunch, practically unhinging him with visions of wealth and liberation from his academic post at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey, an uncomfortable commute from his house in Great Neck. Out of esteem and personal affection, Max announced, without a flicker of hesitation, that he was going to ask for only 25 percent of the movie rights “instead of the usual 50.” (“The usual 50” was purely imaginary; 10 percent was more like it.)

Duly delivered in person and with Mandarin ceremoniousness, Dr. Chang's enormous manuscript, hardbound in buckram so that the pages couldn't be removed and murkily typed on what felt like tissue paper, turned out to be a catastrophe, a train wreck of mangled plot, character, and storytelling. I reported to Max that anything short of incineration—certainly pencil editing, even paste-and-scissors editing—would be pointless. Unfazed, he gave me a little pep talk about “creative editing” and quoted (somewhat inaptly, I thought) Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn—“A jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one.” He set me carpenter-wise to putting the entire manuscript through my manual typewriter. I did this over the course of a couple of weeks, all the while enduring Dr. Chang's daily and sometimes hourly phone calls, a Chinese water torture drip-drip of noodges, kibitzing, and second thoughts.

What the book needed, to cite an old joke, was not monkey glands but a whole new monkey. Chang's concern for his misshapen offspring became even more exigent as the day approached for its release. Max's “fiction event of the year” (one of the shopworn clichés of the book trade) passed in silence, unnoted by reviewers and booksellers, despite a fancy jacket reproducing a Chinese silk painting and Max's hypomanic promotion and advertising copy. Dr. Chang's awful novel, which Max believed should have been at least a
succès de scandale
because of its sexy story, wasn't even a flop
d'estime
. Max accepted its failure with an endearing mix of resignation and amusement, the response of a thirty-year veteran of a largely inspirational business notorious for its peaks and valleys. Dr. Chang's telephone calls tapered off into aggrieved silence.

With the exception of Nikos Kazantzakis's Dionysian and life-celebrating
Zorba the Greek
, fiction was not Max's best hold.

Warning that I was dealing with “one of the world's great analytic minds,” Max had me, over his signature, negotiate royalty percentages, advances, scheduling, and the division of rights with Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher, and winner (in 1950) of the Nobel Prize for literature. Russell had had a great popular and financial success with his
History of Western Philosophy,
published by Simon and Schuster in 1945. Since then Max had obediently issued a stream of Russell's books, most of them of minor importance, in the hope of eventually acquiring the rights to Russell's autobiography. Fidelity, marital and otherwise, had never been one of the philosopher's virtues—he eventually auctioned off his two-volume autobiography to Little, Brown.

Max also had me sweet-talk and haggle contract terms, this time face-to-face with the legendary financier, presidential adviser, and park-bench blowhard Bernard Baruch. “With my major enthusiasm and big best-seller campaign,” Max cabled me from Palm Beach, “we can sell at least fifty thousand copies plus big reprint deal and excellent chance of book club selection.” During one of my sessions with Baruch in his Fifth Avenue apartment, I heard him deflect a phone call from his mistress of long standing, Clare Boothe Luce. “Tell her I'm asleep,” he instructed his assistant. Baruch wasn't any more forthright with us than Russell had been. He sold his memoirs to another house, having used our offer to bump up their terms.

Max's restless mind generated some queer, short-lived ideas, among them a children's book that floated in the bathtub and a three-wheeled vehicle that he proposed to the Ford Motor Company. With
The People's Shakespeare
laid to rest, he planned an edition of the plays and poems that would be “something different,” he said, “an act of creative publishing.” He had been won over by a book published in 1920,
“Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford
, the work of an amateur scholar named Thomas J. Looney. Max decided this “something different” should be an edition giving full credit to the earl of Oxford and titled
Looney's “Shakespeare.”
Title and author's name apart, I had to convince Max that although several other great minds, including Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain, had bought into the Oxford authorship theory, hard evidence—including textual references in the later plays to events that occurred after Oxford's death in 1604—suggested that Dr. Chang had only a slightly weaker claim than the earl to have written
The Tempest
. Subsequently, Max assigned me to deflect the trickle of Oxfordians, Baconians, religious enthusiasts, Bible decipherers, and possessors of the secret of the universe who showed up from time to time at the reception desk determined to be heard. I had to remind myself that if these monomaniacs insisted the moon was made of green cheese the burden of proof was on them.

Another of Max's back-channel acquaintances, a cultivated refugee businessman named Martin Lederman, had written a diet book called
The Slim Gourmet.
It argued that if you want to lose weight you don't have to give up the rich, fattening foods you love, just eat smaller portions of them. Lederman managed to spread this astounding one-sentence idea over a couple of hundred pages, demonstrating a bloat principle that he planned to apply, in a second book, to the subject of canned soup, inevitably Campbell's, since Campbell's accounted for about 80 percent of all canned soup sales. Max was taken with the prospect of selling thousands and thousands of Lederman's special soup book to Campbell's, who would offer it to soup lovers as a tie-in and promotional premium, the sort of thing you'd get for sending in fifty cents and the label peeled off a can. He assigned me to put together a prototype, to which Lederman contributed a watery text extolling the convenience and versatility of canned soup. It also explained the wonders of the book's gimmick (and sole reason for existence)—a windowed cardboard wheel showing which two or three or four canned soups could go together, with appropriate garnishes, in delicious, novel, and calorie-frugal combinations.

After preliminary negotiations that entailed my visit to Campbell's Camden, New Jersey, headquarters, housing museum-style the world's largest collection of soup tureens, I invited the Campbell's executives to a midday meeting in a private room of the Rockefeller Center Lunch Club. I had hoped to loosen up the Campbell delegation with cocktails in preparation for our sales pitch, but they followed the lead of their stony-faced boss and declined alcohol in favor of Campbell's Beef Bouillon on the rocks (a concoction known as a “Bull-shot”). An executive from the sales department and I did the same. Our guests listened glumly to our presentation, went back to Camden, and that was the last we saw of them. No doubt they wondered, and with good reason, whether their customers, the great soup-slurping public, needed Lederman's magic wheel to tell them they could make puree mongole by mixing cans of tomato and green pea soup.

We had better success with the Mobil Corporation on a series of regional restaurant and lodging guides that Max had pitched to one of Mobil's directors, Grayson Kirk, Dwight Eisenhower's successor as president of Columbia University. The proposed Mobil guides were to be America's answer to the famous
Guides Michelin
. Michelin used forks as rating symbols (they had the sense not to choose tires or inflatable little men). Max wanted to use the Mobil emblem, a flying red horse, a great idea if you were rating filling stations. It took some doing on my part, not all of it tactful, to convince him that despite their promotional value, Mobil's horses shouldn't be on customers' minds as they cut into their Chateaubriands. Who would want to spend the night, I asked him, at a four-horse motel? For such mouthiness he came close to exiling me to Texas to do a dry run rating chili parlors.