Authors: Michael Korda
Even though the time had not yet arrived when Dick and I were to get together in the evenings over a drink in his office to invent meaningless titles in order to lure senior editorial talent from other houses to S&S (“Vice president and associate publisher?” “Chairman emeritus of the editorial board?” “Senior editor and corporate vice president?”), nobody with their head screwed on tight could possibly believe that an editor’s title held any genuine significance. Then, as now, editors were judged by the books they acquired, the authors on their list, and the number of best-sellers they published every year. Whereas titles in the corporate world usually defined not only a person’s function but his or her place in the pecking order—one knew, after all, what the treasurer or the vice president of human resources or manufacturing
did
, in principle, and who reported to whom—titles when given to editors usually mean nothing and are likely to have been awarded either in lieu of a raise or to stave off some crisis of self-doubt on the part of the editor. Occasional attempts were made at S&S, as at most publishing houses, to
bolster the self-esteem of those editors who had titles by giving them, for example, engraved business cards and stationery, as opposed to the ordinary printed kind, but most people regarded the whole business, quite rightly, as something of a swindle, which explains perhaps why the idea of being editor in chief wasn’t a burning ambition of mine at the time.
Still, the idea of somebody else being editor in chief wasn’t something I wanted to see, particularly since a high-powered person coming to S&S from elsewhere might either regard me as a threat or expect me to report to him or her—something that had never been the case between me and Bob.
Gradually, it dawned on me that this was a case in which symbolism was all. The moment Bob left, his office was left empty, the door shut and locked, as if it were a shrine. Since it was by far the largest and nicest editorial office, I staked my claim to it by arguing that whatever the company chose to do about Bob’s title, I was certainly next in line for his office and that it was both foolish and depressing to the staff to leave it empty. To my surprise, they gave in (although they made it clear that it was only for the time being and that I might have to move out if a new person was hired to replace Bob), which might not have been the case had I demanded the title or a significant raise. I moved into it immediately and soon had it painted light blue; I ordered a blue office couch and blue wall-to-wall carpeting and even a blue IBM Selectric typewriter, thus reinforcing my claim to occupancy. Either because of that or out of sheer inertia, the search for a successor to Bob fizzled out. I was sitting at his desk and in his office, and very soon I was given his title without having to threaten to leave or even bring the subject up.
It was thought at the time better to make as little fuss over this promotion as possible, since it could only draw more attention to the fact that Bob had left S&S for Knopf. No celebration took place, therefore—indeed, seldom has anybody received a promotion with less fanfare or amid a greater sense of gloom—and as Shimkin assured me, the title itself was a more than ample reward and would not, for the moment, be accompanied by any change in my salary. Had anybody told me that I would still be editor in chief of S&S thirty years later, I would have been amazed and perhaps disconcerted.
In the meantime, we were besieged by agents as their authors jumped ship. Almost immediately we received calls asking for the release of Joseph Heller, Robert Crichton, Chaim Potok, Mordecai Richler,
Charles Portis, Jessica Mitford, Bruce Jay Friedman, Rona Jaffe, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and many others—almost everybody, in fact, whom Bob had under contract or option. This was a difficult and delicate problem, but what made it worse was that it represented the more or less unanimous judgment among agents that those of us who remained at S&S were going to fail and, perhaps worse still, that we weren’t worthy of their clients. It was rather like being kicked in the stomach once you’ve been knocked down in a fight. A small number of Bob’s authors announced their loyalty to S&S and elected to stay, though I could not help noticing with a sinking heart—since they would be my responsibility—that at least two of them, Meyer Levin, the litigious author of
Compulsion
, and S. J. Perelman, were so notoriously difficult that Bob might almost have persuaded them to stay.
Curiously, the fact that we felt ourselves to be legally in the right made the literati even angrier. After all, none of the contracts gave the authors a right to leave simply because their editor had left (such “editor’s clauses” came into being after Bob’s departure but remained limited to a very small number of major writers and invariably contained any number of complicated loopholes); the writers had signed a contract with S&S and taken S&S’s money. Nothing obliged us to release them, especially under threat, and indeed it seemed to both Dick and me that a mass release of Bob’s authors to Knopf would create such an atmosphere of failure at S&S and seem such a confession of inferiority and defeat that the company might never recover its self-confidence or momentum. As I was going down in the elevator one evening, Dick got on at the twenty-seventh floor, looking tired and glum. “They’re going to hand it over to you and me just as it crashes,” he said. “No authors, the agents hate us, and everybody’s waiting to see us fail.” His face suddenly lit up with a broad smile. “It’s a great way to start,” he said. “We can only go up from here.”
This optimism was soon overshadowed by real anger, however, first of all at the “literary community,” which Dick perceived as being out to get us and as having written us off in favor of Bob. Dick saw it as a simple problem. Those who owed us a book should be made to deliver it, and that was that. After that, once we had published it, if they still wanted to leave us and go to Knopf, fine, but first they had to live up to their contractual obligation. A contract was a contract. If a writer could unilaterally cancel it, pay back the money, and leave for another publisher, why have contracts at all or option clauses? To this, the agents
replied that writers are not indentured servants or slaves, they were artists. They couldn’t be treated like inanimate objects. If they were prevented from following their editor, their ability to write might be impaired. Did we want to be responsible for destroying their creative ability? Were we aware that many of them had said that if they couldn’t go with Bob, they wouldn’t write a word for S&S? Both Dick and I were well aware of these threats, resented them bitterly, and didn’t believe a word of them. Both of us were in agreement that this kind of emotional blackmail was at once ridiculous and unlikely to last. If we kept up a firm front, refused to let anybody go, and above all refused to make exceptions, sooner or later the fuss would die down. If there is one thing that’s true about writers, it’s that they need to write; it would not be long before even the most adamant of them sat back down at the typewriter. In the end, we might gain more respect from having toughed it out than from giving in. Certainly, so far as Dick could see, we had nothing to lose.
Peter Schwed, however, did not altogether agree. Persuaded that S&S would gain in the long run from behaving in an honorable and decent way, he let a couple of the writers who were closest to Bob go (most of them Candida Donadio’s clients, for she was the most vociferous in her demands), thus undercutting Dick’s position. After all, Dick argued, if we were willing to let Joe Heller go, what argument could we make for keeping, say, Wallace Markfield?
This was to be a fateful difference of opinion in many ways. In the first place, it confirmed Dick in what was to become his “us against them” view of the literary world and thereby set the tone for much of what was to follow; second, it led to a certain enmity between Dick and Schwed, with the result that in the very moment when Schwed’s career seemed to have been capped by assuming complete authority over S&S, Dick was already determined to take his place.
I
HAD
a stormy drink date with Candida Donadio that to this day stands out in my mind as one of the more unpleasant and demeaning social occasions of a lifetime. I don’t remember where Candida and I met—probably the Italian Pavilion. Bubbling over with enthusiasm and gossip, sharp-tongued and endowed with a wicked sense of humor, Candida resembled a Sicilian Earth Mother, her heavy frame wrapped
like an untidy, bulky package in yards and layers of black
schmatta
, her enormous handbag weighted down with the manuscripts of her clients. A one-woman fountain of publishing news, she spent her life on the telephone. If you were about to get fired or lose a major author, Candida was likely to know about it before you did and spread the news from one end of publishing to the other before you’d had a chance to digest it yourself. In the days of the blockbuster paperback auctions, when rights sales were the big news, the rights managers of the major publishers were the source of every rumor, leak, and gossip item, their phone lines glowing red-hot from use. Candida was one of the few non-rights people plugged into their network and reveled in being the first to know whatever the hot secret of the day was.
She had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant that made her no friends, and she was not shy about letting editors know that they didn’t come up to the standards of her clients. Her loyalty to her clients was unquestioned, though not a few of them may have found it suffocating, which perhaps explains why some left her as soon as they had succeeded. She was also endowed with that rarest of commodities in the world of book publishing: a sharp, shrewd, sure taste for interesting new fiction. Whatever her other faults, you had to admire her judgment about books. When she really liked something, she was never halfhearted about it and almost always right.
Candida was, in short, exactly the person you wanted to have on your side if you were a publisher or editor, which made it all the more aggravating that she wanted to pull her authors away. We sat at a small table near the bar and ordered a drink. Now that we were here, I realized that I had made a mistake. Almost everybody in the bar was in publishing, and it must be perfectly clear to them why I was having a drink with Candida and equally clear from her body language how reluctant she had been to come. I told her, with as much optimism and enthusiasm as I could manage, that Dick and I had great plans for S&S and that we would go out of our way to do everything we could to make her clients happy.
She smiled, a little condescendingly I thought. I had the impression, perhaps mistaken, that Candida enjoyed watching me squirm. Snyder, always the optimist, had sent me on this mission with the warning to be tough. I was to take no prisoners, he advised, and not to retreat an inch—military metaphors had worked their way somehow into his mind, now that “the crunch” was on. But Candida showed no signs of
surrendering. She heard me out, patiently enough, pausing from time to time to wave to people she knew as they came in or out, then shook her head decisively. She had no doubt that we would do well, even without Bob, but she could not think of S&S as a place for her clients anymore. They needed a sympathetic publisher, somebody who understood what they were doing. Peter Schwed liked sports books and writers like P. G. Wodehouse. Nothing wrong with that, but he couldn’t replace Bob Gottlieb. I was probably a perfectly good editor, but not for the type of book her clients wrote, and Snyder, while he already had a reputation for energy and sales acumen, didn’t appear to be somebody for whom literature was a first concern. She wished us nothing but good, but her clients had to go where they would feel comfortable, and that was that.
She wasn’t giving us a chance, I said.
Candida fixed her dark eyes on me implacably. It wasn’t her job to give us a chance. There were plenty of books and authors out there. When one came along that was right for us, she would send it over. In the meantime, the best thing we could do was to expedite the release of her clients from their contracts.
And if we didn’t? She shook her head. I had to understand. All writers were like children, but her writers
were
her children. She felt about them as if she were their mother. If we forced the issue, she would fight tooth and nail to defend them.
We were only trying to protect our contracts, I explained. Once those who owed us a book had delivered it, they could go, but not until then. She—and they—owed us no less.
They don’t owe you anything, she said. You can’t stop it. And if you tried, there isn’t an agent in New York who will send S&S a manuscript. She gave me a benevolent smile, with the air of a woman who has just delivered a piece of good advice to somebody too dumb to take it, gathered up her belongings, and left.
The next day, I waylaid Dick in the hall—he was in the process of moving upstairs from his digs at Pocket Books and slightly overwhelmed by what seemed to be a stroke of luck: He was where he had wanted to be for a long time, with a watching brief over S&S on behalf of Shimkin and a position that would give him as much power as he could amass for himself. I told him about my meeting with Candida. He nodded glumly. He had been going out to meet with agents, too, for the first time, and had been disappointed to find that most of them weren’t even willing to listen to our side of the story.
He took me off to his new office, which was still only partially furnished. It was not particularly large or impressive, in view of what was to come, but was equipped with a small refrigerator and a neat bar. It took no gift of prophecy to guess that this was where anybody who mattered at S&S was going to be after five o’clock, now that Bob was gone, especially since Schwed, always the family man, usually left by five or five-thirty and would therefore not even notice that Snyder was mobilizing his forces for a takeover. There was a comfortable sofa and a clear desk. Dick was perhaps at that time the only executive at S&S who didn’t have a typewriter near at hand, it being still the fashion in those days for publishing executives to prove that they were basically editors at heart and eager to bang out a few pages of well-chosen words with their own fingers at the drop of a hat. Dick, no sentimentalist or follower of traditions, didn’t bother. He made no secret of the fact that he couldn’t type and didn’t even like dialing his own telephone. He was an executive, the spoken word was his area of expertise, the decision his specialty, to command and order was what he did best, and wherever possible he tried to do it face-to-face for greater effect. You got a sense of the man from his telephone conversations, but it was in person that you got the full picture, and it was above all one of a man in charge, confident, energetic, and determined to get his way. Even the style of his secretary, the only one on the floor who was from the outer boroughs instead of the Seven Sisters or Convent of the Sacred Heart (and the only one who brought coffee without making a face or a scene), proclaimed that this was a man of action, not a dreamer.