Another Life (18 page)

Clearly, if book publishers were going to take their companies public for big bucks or merge with each other in pursuit of market share (a hitherto unknown concept in the book business), both their employees and their authors would soon be looking for better deals. Book publishers had always been inclined to tell young job-seekers, with a certain amount of pride, that this wasn’t the right business to be in if you wanted to get rich—publishing wasn’t about
money
, it was about
books
. You had to love doing it, and most people did.

One reason why publishing had remained a kind of upper-class WASP enclave for so long was that you really needed an independent
income to live a decent life on the kind of salary most publishers were still paying in the 1950s. For years, secretaries had traditionally been hired from the ranks of well-off friends’ daughters, as if a few years as a publishing assistant after Wellesley or Radcliffe or Smith was a kind of finishing school. Editors did not fare much better.

The word
exploitation
would have shocked people like Dick Simon or Bennett Cerf, but in fact the wage patterns of the book business bore some resemblance to those of the sweatshop, with the difference that since the book business wasn’t supposed to be about money, the owners actually claimed that better salaries and benefits for employees or better advances for authors would destroy whatever it was that made producing books different from producing other, less exalted articles of trade. The subject of money was felt to be unseemly, the kind of thing that a gentleman ought not to think or talk about, let alone a lady. If publishers could be said to believe in anything, it was that book publishing was “an occupation for gentlemen,” so much so that one book publisher even used the phrase as the title of his memoirs.

If the “new,” mostly Jewish, publishing houses shared anything in common with their WASP predecessors and rivals it was the genial assumption that people who worked in the book business did it—or
ought
to do it—for the love of books. Since few white-collar workers in the book industry are unionized, there was no particular pressure on publishers to raise salaries or increase benefits. Furthermore, so long as most of the big firms were privately owned, nobody knew exactly what anybody else was making, let alone what the owners were taking home in profits.

The Random House decision to go public inadvertently put an end to this cozy tradition of silence. A company that is traded publicly has to list what it pays its directors and senior corporate officers, as well as its principal stockholders. The owners of the major publishing houses had always lived well, though usually with a certain discretion, since none of them was anxious to stimulate greed and envy among their employees and authors. Most publishers carefully avoided such obvious displays of wealth as chauffeured limousines and private dining rooms. Indeed, the only person who ever parked a Rolls-Royce in the courtyard of the Random House mansion at Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street was the author John O’Hara, on his annual visit to his publisher.

Now, with publishers getting rich overnight by selling their companies or going public with them, the sense of embarrassment about
money that people in publishing circles had always affected vanished just as quickly. Contrary to what had always been believed, it appeared there
was
a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and everybody wanted a share of it.

M
Y OWN
regular salary review was invariably an occasion very similar to that of asking a headmaster a question about sex, and it produced a similar combination of embarrassment and evasion, along with a long and self-pitying account of how disappointing the results of the previous year had been and the sad state of the book business in general. I was lucky, Henry Simon (or later, Peter Schwed) would tell me sorrowfully, to be getting a raise at all, and small as it might seem to me in financial terms, it represented a real vote of confidence in my future at S&S. Max Schuster, it goes without saying, was protected from having to talk about money at all, and Leon Shimkin, to whom this distasteful task was usually delegated, had been known to cry real tears when describing the firm’s financial affairs and the state of the industry to those who came to him seeking a raise.

At about the same time as the Random House/Knopf merger made the headlines, however, Paul Gitlin made his appearance at S&S and changed the hitherto even course of my life.

Previously, literary agents had played a fairly small role in the publishing business, as they were resented deeply by the older generation of publishers. Even the more powerful agents, such as Harold Matson or Paul Reynolds, were reasonable enough when it came time to negotiate a contract for one of their authors and more likely to counsel their clients toward patience and compromise than greed and threats. Far from attacking the publishing establishment, they felt themselves to be part of it and behaved with a certain self-conscious dignity, as if to make it clear that literary agenting was a respectable profession, like being a lawyer or a clergyman. Theirs, too, was a WASP profession, apart from a few newcomers such as Scott Meredith, and they looked down with undisguised contempt on the kind of vulgar “10 percenters” who proliferated in Hollywood. Even so, there remained among publishers of a certain age a certain suspicion of agents, however Ivy League their origins, rather resembling that which has surrounded snakes ever since Eve’s unfortunate slip in the Garden of Eden. Besides, a good many authors,
Hemingway and the Durants among them, managed to do without one.

Into this cozy world swept Gitlin, a partner in a firm of literary-minded lawyers, Ernst, Cane, and Gitlin. Short, rotund, stocky, Gitlin tended to lean forward on the balls of his feet, like a man walking into a powerful wind, and somehow gave the impression that he was on a collision course with you, and possibly the rest of the world as well. His voice was an aggressive growl, usually sharpened with impatience and, when opposed, a large measure of rasping, scalding contempt. Gitlin was tough and smart and made no effort to hide it, nor was he a man to mince words or take fools lightly.

He had approached the world of book publishing indirectly. The founder of his law firm, the late, great Morris Ernst, had been a formidable advocate of free speech, and his partner, Melville Cane, a man of great learning and refined literary taste. Gitlin’s personality was more that of a street fighter than a civil libertarian or an aesthete—though he concealed a certain intuitive good taste—but he enjoyed the company of writers and had a profound respect for the written word, to whatever purposes his clients were to put it. Having taken over the job of looking after the Thomas Wolfe estate, as well as that of counsel to the Matson Agency, Gitlin soon found that there were no great mysteries to agenting. Indeed, he developed a certain contempt for agents who negotiated without a lawyer’s eye and who had to rely on him to point out unacceptable or contradictory language. Most of them, he felt, were timid souls, unwilling to bluff or threaten publishers and unable to see the big picture.

It was then still usual to sell hardcover rights to one book at a time and to let the publisher handle the mass-market paperback rights for half (or in the case of a major best-selling writer, slightly less than half) of the proceeds. Gitlin was the first to see that if you sold a publisher three or four books by a major author and made it pay for the mass-market rights and the foreign rights at the same time, you would come up with a very substantial amount of money. With the right kind of legal and tax structure, a really successful writer might become
seriously
rich, instead of having to live from book to book, anxiously waiting for the next royalty check.

A glance at the correspondence between Hemingway and Perkins is enough to demonstrate that Gitlin was onto something. Hemingway never took advances against his novels and was forever pleading with
Perkins or Charlie Scribner to transfer relatively small amounts of money to his bank account. The notion that a writer should have to beg for money—
his
money—from his publisher, as if he were a child trying to wheedle an advance against his allowance out of a reluctant and all-powerful parent, was deeply repugnant to Gitlin. He was determined to put an end to that sort of paternalism.

G
ITLIN ENTERED
my life as the agent for Cornelius Ryan, a successful war correspondent and writer for
Reader’s Digest
who had just been finishing his classic account of D-Day,
The Longest Day
, when I arrived at S&S. Since I happened to be a fanatic student of military history, I was eventually drafted by Peter Schwed, Ryan’s editor, into the small group of people who struggled to keep pace with Ryan’s remarkable capacity for infinite military detail. Ryan’s previous career as a writer of books had been modest—he had written, among other things, a ghosted autobiography of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer, called
I Aimed for the Stars
, which Ryan, who had a wicked Irish wit, joked ought to have been called
I Aimed for the Stars—But Sometimes I Hit London
.

Unlike some people at S&S, who found him overbearing, I
liked
Ryan, who under a veneer of charm and a remarkably thin skin was in fact an acute historian and a man of very considerable courage. We were to grow much closer over the years—particularly since my father was the art director and one of the animating spirits of the all-star movie of
The Longest Day
that helped make Ryan an international celebrity and, by the standards of magazine journalism, a rich man. My main task, however, with Ryan grew to be that of a kind of British aide-de-camp, advising him on the many illogical and eccentric points of British military rank and organization (I was perhaps the only person in American publishing who knew that in the Household Cavalry, sergeants, for reasons lost in the mists of time, are called “Corporals of Horse,” or that the rank of Field-Marshal is never written without the hyphen or with two
l
’s), helping out Frank Metz, our art director, with the transformation of his military maps into four-color endpapers, and fact-checking German military nomenclature. Schwed remained his editor.

Since Ryan saw no reason why Gitlin could not do for him and military history what he had done for Harold Robbins and popular fiction, Gitlin’s attention was inevitably drawn toward me. I picked up the telephone one day to hear a rasping, low-pitched voice, full of menace, say, “Listen, kid, Connie says you’re being helpful to him—I just want you to make goddamn sure that he’s your first fucking priority, whatever anybody else tells you.” Gitlin always referred to his writers as “clients,” perhaps to emphasize his status as a lawyer instead of a mere agent and that his bark was, at least in my case, considerably worse than his bite.

In any case, he invited me out to lunch (ordered me, actually) and I found myself sitting next to him a couple of days later at the Café Louis XIV in Rockefeller Center, then his favorite hangout, being helped to a slice of Gitlin’s wisdom of life as he knocked back a scotch on the rocks. “How much are they paying you?” he asked. When I told him, he snorted, eyes squinting like a bull’s about to charge a tourist at Pamplona. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Leon, put him straight.”

Gitlin’s care for his clients was all encompassing, and later came to include me and my family. Loyalty he prized above all other virtues (actually, he had a certain contempt for the others), with the result that I was to work with Ryan (alongside Schwed) until the very end, taking the last pages of his final book away from him as he lay dying of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

G
ITLIN
’
S PURPOSE
—apart from deciding if I was friend or foe—might have been to see if I was suitable material to edit Harold Robbins at some future point. Apparently, in the elaborate organization that had been handcrafted to publish Robbins, this was the only element that had not been engraved in stone. Not, Gitlin assured me quickly, that Robbins
needed
a lot of editing, the man was a natural writer, whatever people said of him, but from time to time it was necessary for somebody to pass a sharpened pencil over his prose.

Did Robbins take well to being edited? I inquired. Gitlin shot me a look of pure fury. Harold was no fucking prima donna, he told me. Besides, Robbins would do whatever Gitlin told him to do, and I should
never fucking forget it. I had a dim perception even then that by merely lunching with Gitlin I was doing the equivalent of signing on for a voyage before the mast, with Gitlin as my Captain Bligh. “So long as all this doesn’t backfire on me,” I said, knowing that nothing was more likely, given the state of relations between Schuster and Shimkin. Gitlin looked at me as soulfully as he could manage. “You have my word, kid,” he said, and he would prove to be true to his word, as he always was.

Having settled that (it would be some time before it took effect, since Robbins would be edited for several books more by Cynthia White of Pocket Books), he leaned closer to me. “I hear you’re going to be helping out Peter Schwed with Irving Wallace’s new book,” he said. It was news to me. Wallace was a former Knopf author and screenwriter who had written a book about P. T. Barnum, which I had read more or less by accident, and whom Peter Schwed was trying to bring to S&S, which would be a major coup for him.

“What’s the book about?” I asked.

Gitlin gave me a roguish wink. “Sex.”

A
ND THUS
I turned another corner. My career, which had been moving toward fairly serious nonfiction (the Durants, plus all of Max Schuster’s friends), Dariel Telfer’s novel notwithstanding, now suddenly moved toward mainstream best-selling fiction. I was also being drawn into the no-man’s-land between Schuster and Shimkin. Each of Gitlin’s deals had Pocket Books publish the mass-market edition of the book and S&S the hardcover edition, with the author getting 100 percent of both royalties, instead of splitting the paperback royalty with his publisher.