Another Life (11 page)

Henry shrugged. “You bet,” he said glumly.

The two men sat for a few moments, apparently contemplating the state of marriage in a spirit of mutual gloom. Max, it was said, lived in fear of Ray Schuster’s piercing voice, while Henry’s bride was allegedly
disliked by everyone at S&S, as well as by the rest of the widespread Simon family. She was reputed to make small dolls of those whom she disliked and stick pins in them.

“Ariel sits by Will’s side and turns the pages as he reads,” Max said. He did not say it with envy. His own ambition, it was said, was to lock himself in the library with his favorite books where Mrs. Schuster couldn’t get at him. “Well, you get the idea. You have to include her, listen to her ideas, treat her as if she were Will’s partner. Walk on eggshells, yes?”

I got the idea.

“It’s a great opportunity for a young man like yourself,” Max went on, more upbeat. “This is a monumental project, you know. Each volume is a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and a guaranteed best-seller. Why, Harry Scherman often calls the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘the house that Will Durant built.’ … This is commerce, you see, as well as culture. You’ll be working with one of the great thinkers of our time.… I envy you. Of course, you’ll have to be careful not to take too much time away from the work you’re doing for Henry,” Max added hastily. “We have a contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I promised Will and Ariel we’d have the book out in September, so you’ll have your work cut out for you. Come to me with any problem. My door will always be open to you.” He paused. “Within reason.”

Max’s buzzer was keening noisily before we were out the door. On his assistant’s desk was a huge stack of manuscript, neatly tied with string. It showed no sign of having been opened by Max. I looked at it with a certain degree of awe mixed with apprehension. It was almost unimaginable that any living human being could have written this number of pages without going blind. “If Durant is such a prize, why is he getting a junior editor?” I asked Henry.

Henry lit a cigarette and coughed. “The Durants are a little … ah … 
difficult
,” he said cautiously.

“How difficult?”

“On a scale of one to ten, ten. They won’t work with me because they hate academics. They feel that everybody in the academic world looks down on Will as a popularizer. Which, of course, he
is
. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it gives them a monumental inferiority complex, as well as a chip on the shoulder.… It’s not that Will’s books need a lot of editing, by the way—it’s just that he and Ariel are very fussy
about details. My advice is to keep them away from Max as much as you can.”

“I thought he liked them.”

Henry grimaced. “Oh, Max likes them all right,” he said. “He just doesn’t want to
see
them.”

F
ULL AS
S&S was of odd people, Max Schuster was far and away the oddest. Office legend had it that because of Max’s shyness when faced with a member of the opposite sex, he had married the wrong woman. Max had been a bachelor until well into his middle age, living a fairly hermitlike existence except when he was obliged to entertain authors or agents and apparently content with his lot. At some point in the thirties, he had apparently rented a house for the summer in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island—Gatsby territory. His next-door neighbor turned out to be a well-preserved recent widow named Ray Levinson, who had three daughters. The late Mr. Levinson had been a local landscape and nursery czar, and his widow was wealthy, but with social ambitions that went beyond gardens and pools. At some point during that summer, Max fell in love with one of the daughters. Max’s courtship was pursued so timidly that the young woman might not even have been aware of the feelings of her ungainly suitor, but at some point he finally got the nerve up to talk to her mother and seek her permission to propose to her daughter.

Max visited the widow Levinson and haltingly managed to approach the reason for his visit. He was, he told her, in love, and felt he had to unburden himself of his feelings. Ray put her fingers to his lips and in a sharp, piercing voice, strongly marked by a Russian-Jewish accent, cried out: “Shush! Not another word!” Alarmed, Max fell silent. “I know just what you are going to say, Max,” Ray went on. “I accept.”

Whether from sheer timidity or the undeniable fact that Ray Levinson’s willpower and determination were positively Nietzschean, Max stayed silent and soon afterward married her, no doubt going to the altar in something of the sprit of a condemned man mounting the steps to the gallows.

An emotional predicament more calculated to drive Max to his beloved files can hardly be imagined—all the more so since Ray was a
ruthless domestic tyrant, of whom poor Max lived in fear, desperate to please her but apparently unable to. She was a pint-size, Eastern European Jewish version of the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
, and her occasional visits to the office threw not only Max but everyone else into a state of panic, since she was quite likely to insist on having him fire any attractive young woman who happened to cross her path. Ray was apparently under the illusion that Max’s appearance made him a magnetic attraction for women, or, even more improbably, that Max himself might lust after them.

M
AX
’
S FORGETFULNESS
was well noted by his colleagues and spawned many stories, some of them true—indeed, it was one of the bonds he shared with Dick Simon, who lost manuscripts, contracts, letters, and his personal possessions so frequently that everyone who worked for him knew the phone numbers of the major lost-and-found offices in New York City and the surrounding counties. Max usually managed to hang on to his coat, hat, and briefcase, but he was unreliable when it came to names and faces.

At one point before the war, S&S became the publisher of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mystery novel,
The G-String Murders
. Gypsy had always fancied herself to be an intellectual (hence the song in
Pal Joey
in which one of the supporting players does a Gypsy Rose Lee imitation and sings, as she strips, “Zip!—I’m an intellectual”) and writing a book had long been her dream. Her long-term lover Billy Rose took on the task of getting the book published, and when S&S bought the rights it was major news. Gypsy was by then well past her stripping days but was still a formidable woman, tall, voluptuous, and somewhat overpowering. Billy was tiny (he came up to about her waist), so they made an odd couple.

Rose got his start as a boy by taking shorthand from the famous financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, made his fortune in show business, and inspired a good many other short, dark, energetic, and ambitious Jewish boys to follow in his footsteps, including Mike Todd. He was enormously wealthy by the time Gypsy plunged into authorhood—he was perhaps the only man in New York to have a malachite urinal in his downstairs guest bathroom (and a malachite sink
to match it, too)—and made it clear that he expected Gypsy to get first-class treatment, which Max and Dick agreed happily to give her, given Gypsy’s celebrity status.

Alas, like most publishers, they were more interested in Gypsy
before
they bought her book than they were afterward. In publishing as in love, the really heady period is during the courtship, when the author is still being wooed. Once the deal is consummated, the love affair ends, a certain indifference sets in, and the marriage begins. Since neither Dick nor Max were greatly interested in murder mysteries, Gypsy was handed over to S&S’s mystery editor and promptly forgotten by the two owners.

As the publication date approached, Gypsy became more and more anxious about the big party that she assumed would be given to launch her book and increasingly upset to hear nothing about it from her publishers. When it became evident that no party was planned, she was distraught, but Billy Rose cheered her up. Fuck ’em, he told her, if the lousy cheapskates weren’t going to give her a party, he would take her out to dinner to celebrate instead. So Rose booked a table upstairs at “21” and took Gypsy there for dinner. About halfway through the meal, Gypsy looked up and realized that Max Schuster was sitting a few tables away with his wife Ray and another couple. Should she get up and say something to him? she asked Rose. Rose was against it, but finally he could see that nothing was going to hold Gypsy back.

Embarrassed and a little nervous, she walked over to Max’s table and interrupted the conversation to say hello and ask Max how her book was doing. Max beamed up at Gypsy, and before she could say a word, stammered out to her: “Gypsy, how nice to see you! You know, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.” He paused. “One of these days, you ought to write a book.”
^*

I
N MY
own small way, I soon had direct contact with the manic-compulsive side of Max’s personality. The notes I took once a week at the editorial-board meeting had to be typed as a draft on dark yellow paper, triple-spaced, so that Max could rewrite and expand upon them,
often until they bore no relationship at all to what had actually been said or decided. This was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener, first to the fact that Max was living at least part of the time in a dream world, and second, that what passed for facts at S&S were often not facts at all. I knew what had been said and by whom, I had even written it down pretty much verbatim, so it was odd to see how it changed under Max’s relentless blue marks as he expanded his comments, downplayed Schwed’s, and often eliminated Henry’s altogether. Anybody reading the minutes would have supposed that Max talked nonstop throughout the meetings, whereas, in fact, he was usually silent, lips pursed as if blowing bubbles, while Schwed and Henry argued things out between themselves. Max’s revisions gave him a certain statesmanlike air, though for a long time I had some difficulty in deciding why he cared enough to go to this trouble. Most people who got the editorial-board minutes merely looked to see which books we had bought and how much we had paid for them; it was a practical tool, not intended to leave S&S. When I mentioned this to Henry he sighed deeply, his face looking paler and more world-weary than ever. “The only copies Max cares about,” he said, “are the ones that go to Leon Shimkin and to Ray Schuster.”

Shimkin, of course, I could understand. Max was anxious to show his partner that he was in charge of things. Since Shimkin had known Max since the mid-1920s, I doubted that he was taken in by Max’s mild and harmless deception, but it was really Ray whom Max was trying to impress. Having chosen Max over any number of other suitors (at least if she was to be believed), Ray was obliged to present her Max to the rest of the world as a “genius”—an
eccentric
genius, perhaps, but a genius all the same. Seldom have two people worked so hard to appear devoted to each other.

More than anybody else, Ray had been responsible for the hostility between Max and Shimkin. Many years ago, before the war, Max had prevailed upon Ray to invite Shimkin and his wife, Rebecca, to one of their parties in their apartment at the old Pulitzer mansion. In Ray’s eyes, Shimkin was still “the bookkeeper.” Deeply resentful of being obliged to invite him, she deliberately neglected to tell the Shimkins that it was a black-tie affair, so that they were the only couple not formally dressed, to their great embarrassment. Shimkin never forgave this insult (particularly to his beloved Rebecca), and it went far toward dividing the ownership of S&S into two implacably hostile opposite camps.

By making it obvious that her husband was terrified of her, Ray succeeded in making him seem foolish to his own employees—particularly
the more talented and ambitious among them. This is not to say that she was a stupid woman—on the contrary, there was a side to her that was notably shrewd and smart—but her energy and ambition exceeded her husband’s. Unfortunately, she had been brought up in an age when there was no outlet for those qualities except through poor Max.

This was, in those days, a far more common phenomenon than it is now. Indeed, the model on which Ray based herself was that of Blanche Knopf. Alfred and Blanche Knopf presented themselves as something of a publishing team. Elegant and sharply intellectual, Blanche Knopf was what Ray would like to have been seen as, the loving and equal partner of a famous husband, but unfortunately for her, she had neither the education nor the taste for such a task, nor did Max’s choice in books and authors lend themselves to the kind of literary nurturing that the Knopfs were famous for as a couple.

In the contest for book publishing’s most famous couple, the Knopfs remained light-years ahead in class, and there seemed nothing the Schusters could do about it. While the Knopfs were being photographed with André Gide or publishing the definitive translation of Proust, the Schusters were stuck with the Durants. Max and Ray fought back with what weapons they could, not always with happy results. When, in 1958, after years of labor by Justin Kaplan, Max finally published Kimon Friar’s translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s monumental epic poem,
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
, he sent a copy to all his major publishing colleagues. Alfred Knopf, who had once referred to people like Max and Dick, among others, as “fresh young Jews,” responded with a personal note: “Welcome, at last,” he wrote, “to the ranks of the real publishers.” Since S&S had been in business since 1924, this praise was rather faint; however, Max put on a good face and sent copies of the letter to everyone, as if there were no sting in it.

A further attempt to emulate the Knopfs was the publication of a small book by Max and Ray entitled
Home Thoughts from Abroad
, intended to memorialize one of the Schusters’ yearly transatlantic visits to the great and near great, culminating with a pilgrimage to see “B.B.” (Bernard Berenson) and his constant companion, Nicky Mariano, at I Tatti. Unfortunately, Max was obliged to cut short his trip, while Ray went on undaunted. As a result, their letters to each other make up the bulk of the text. In one, Ray (who was traveling with her daughter Beattie) wrote to Max that they had dined with B.B., that B.B. had placed her
on his right and told her that her visit was like a ray of sunshine in his life and that if he had been a younger man he would have asked her to come and live with him. (What Nicky Mariano thought of this conversation, if it ever took place, is not recorded.) “The next day,” she added, “we went shopping in Florence and bought several thousand dollars worth of antiques, which I am sending home, and which you should clear through customs.”