Another Life (24 page)

There might be problems, I told him. The sales department would probably raise all sorts of objections, as might the Book-of-the-Month Club. But I didn’t think the general public would be affected one way or the other. What mattered most was his own comfort and peace of mind. It might even be a good opportunity to get some publicity for the Durants, who complained constantly that Will had never been on the cover of
Time
or a guest on the
Today
show and that Max had failed to procure the Nobel Prize for his work. I said I would talk to Max as soon as I was back in New York.

Tears welled up in Will’s eyes, and he grasped my hand. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Shortly afterward—I could not help suspecting that she had been listening at the door—Ariel arrived with a tray on which were three mugs of steaming herb tea and a plate of stale Fig Newtons. The tea was something special, she said—very good for the health. She and Will were great believers in it and drank several cups a day. It was without caffeine and absolutely unstimulating. The mugs were odd, heavy, gnarly things, cast by some amateur potter and glazed in a kind of jungle
green. Was their daughter an amateur potter? I wondered. The taste of the tea was distinctly medicinal, with a bitter, unpleasant aftertaste. I drank mine quickly, anxious to get back out into the sunshine and tawdriness of Sunset Boulevard, as far away as possible from the Durants’ glum and Sisyphean struggle with world history. I made a mental note to myself to seek out the most trashy double feature I could find and spend the evening as unculturally as possible; unfortunately for me, Ariel’s tea had a pronounced laxative effect, and instead I spent most of the night in my hotel bathroom. I was still there the next morning, when Casey arrived from New York, and suffered off and on from severe stomach spasms all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.

Perhaps for that reason, we did not enjoy the second honeymoon that we had discussed somewhat wistfully in New York. We visited San Simeon, stopped to have a hamburger at Nepenthe in Big Sur, stayed the night in a hotel where it was possible to bathe in a warm natural spring. Despite all this, the romantic mood was lacking.

By the time we had reached San Francisco, we had decided to take what was in those days the inevitable step toward healing a marriage: to have a child.

It is hard now, almost thirty-seven years later, to remember that period before the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism when married couples who didn’t have children were looked upon with some combination of suspicion and pity and felt not to be really grown-up. Casey was ahead of the curve when it came to sex and feminism, but she too felt that a child would put everything right between us, as well as validating her adulthood in the eyes of her mother and grandmother. No doubt it would do the same to me, I thought, in the eyes of my father.

On the flight back, we discussed the future. I would cut down working every night and weekend, we would take vacations like civilized people, I would put S&S in proportion.…

It all made sense. Or would have, had I not been flying back to a series of events that was to change S&S—and ultimately the rest of the publishing industry—beyond recognition.

CHAPTER 11

“
B
ig things from small acorns grow.” Truer words have never been written. In 1961, S&S was lurching along much as it had for several years, undisturbed except by the minor, everyday fracases and turf wars of office politics and the growing split between Leon Shimkin and Max Schuster. There is no law that says partners have to feel about each other like Damon and Pythias. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House were umbilically linked in friendship and sometimes took vacations together; Alfred and Blanche Knopf were married, if not happily then certainly successfully. No doubt it would have been nice had the two remaining owners of S&S followed that pattern, but it need not have been fatal that they did not. After all, even before Shimkin became an owner, Dick Simon and Max Schuster were beginning to drift apart. As young men they had been partners in the most exciting adventure of their lives, but whether they had ever really been
friends
is open to doubt.

I mention all this only to explain that S&S was by no means the simple, happy place about which old-timers were later to reminisce—no place ever is. There was a certain amount of jockeying for position among those who felt themselves qualified for higher office. Some attached themselves to Shimkin, who seemed the person most likely to end up in control of the company—nobody assumed that Max Schuster could go on running it for very long. Others merely sought a better, more secure foothold.

I was in an ambiguous position myself. On paper, I still worked for Henry; however, Bob was my friend, and I was also doing a lot of editing for Peter Schwed. Not for the first time in my career, I was obliged to steer a middle course between people whom I liked but who disliked each other. I consoled myself with the fact that I was welcome, for the moment, in every camp and that everybody—Schwed, Simon, Gottlieb, even Max—wanted me to work on their books. Perhaps because I had nothing at stake, I was the first to notice that the power structure had changed insensibly, as if an invisible hand were shaking it from below.

Which, in a way, was the truth.

•  •  •

I
N THE
meantime, however, everybody’s attention at S&S was diverted by an ice swan.

The ice swan is a relic of a past age of opulent display, when the great international hotels of the world had five-star restaurants, and the summit of luxury was still the transatlantic liner. In those days, any self-respecting hotel kitchen or ocean-liner galley had a sous-chef whose task it was to carve sculptures out of huge blocks of ice, often gleaming fantasies of vaguely nationalistic appeal. These sculptures, by definition ephemeral, usually four to five feet high, were carved in bulk and stored in the freezer, to be brought out to form the centerpiece in the first-class dining saloon at dinnertime. Caviar was usually presented in a life-size ice swan, its back hollowed out to hold about a kilo. On the big Cunard liners, smaller ice swans were also used for caviar at cocktail parties, either the purser’s, to which all the more important and distinguished first-class passengers were invited on the first night at sea, or at ones given by the more social passengers in their own staterooms during the voyage. On my mother’s side of the family, I actually had a distant relative who was chief purser of the
Queen Mary
, and I remember him taking me down to see a big, brightly lit freezer compartment stacked with ice sculptures, like an Aladdin’s cave of frozen treasures, in the center of which a heavily dressed and gloved member of the kitchen staff, his breath condensing in clouds of vapor as he chipped away with a mallet and chisel, was carving a swan out of a block of ice about five feet long and four feet across, to add to a whole row of swans, lined up neatly like a ballet chorus, on the floor.

It was therefore with some surprise that I found an ice swan in the shower stall of the men’s toilet at Simon and Schuster late one morning, its elegant, curved beak coldly mimicking that slightly supercilious smile that swans have as it dripped on the floor. The hole in its back was empty, so I surmised that the can of caviar it contained must have been removed before it was parked here to drip to death. It was a spectacle that produced a certain melancholy—so much effort, melting away so fast and unseen—as well as inevitable curiosity.

It soon transpired that I was, unfortunately, neither the first nor the only person to have seen the swan. It had been delivered on a trolley by two men earlier in the morning, and, as fate would have it, they had
brought it up to the twenty-eighth floor in a passenger elevator with, of all people, Ray Schuster. At that time, the caviar was still in place, as was a card suspended from its beak.

There could have been no greater sign of the kind of hanky-panky that Ray most feared was taking place behind her back, so, to the great indignation of the two deliverymen, she ripped the envelope off the bird’s beak and, bursting into Max’s office, slapped it down on his desk. “Explain
this!
” she cried.

Poor Max bumbled and mumbled, his confusion no doubt passing for guilt in Ray’s eyes, but when he at last had worked out the whole story, he discovered that the swan was destined for Phyllis S. Levy, Bob Gottlieb’s assistant. Tall, thin, svelte, with the high-cheekboned, long-necked beauty of a model, Phyllis was the antithesis of the grubbiness that usually defines book publishing. Perfectly dressed and coiffed in the style that Jackie Kennedy was already making famous, Phyllis maintained a small cubicle that was as elegant and carefully tended as she was. Bob had more or less inherited Phyllis when Jack Goodman, then the publisher and the heir apparent of S&S, died unexpectedly. Both of them had worked for Goodman, whom they had worshiped, Bob as an editorial assistant and Phyllis as a secretary.

The best friend and college roommate of Rona Jaffe and instrumental in bringing
The Best of Everything
to S&S, Phyllis had a shrewd eye for popular fiction, great charm, a wicked sense of humor, a sharp intelligence, and a small but steady flame of ambition. The swan had, in fact, been sent to Phyllis by Aubrey Goodman, a first-time author whose hand she had been holding on behalf of Bob. Goodman’s book,
The Golden Youth of Lee Prince
, was a flagrantly autobiographical novel about the New York
jeunesse dorée
that Phyllis had brought to Bob’s attention. At Phyllis’s urging, the book had been given a dust jacket made of metallic gold foil, an innovation that failed in the stores, since all the jackets wrinkled and tore in shipment. Nevertheless, Goodman wanted to express his gratitude, and since an ice swan was mentioned in the book, he sent one to Phyllis.

He could not have imagined that the swan would get Phyllis fired, nor could she, but it did. The problem, as it transpired, was not so much the swan itself as the fact that Phyllis and Ephraim London, Ray’s favorite son-in-law, had been having a long, passionate affair—one that was to go on, in one form or another, and with many ups and downs, until his death. No doubt Ray, who could hardly have been unaware of
it—who knows about Max?—had been looking for years for an opportunity to punish Phyllis, and the swan inadvertently provided it, or at least a pretext for firing her.

The immediate consequences of Phyllis’s firing caused no more than a temporary inconvenience to Bob, as well as a sense of dismay at the departure of an old friend, but it was interpreted by many as a sign of Max’s weakness. After all, everybody knew that it had been Ray who had asked for Phyllis’s head, and Max who had meekly acquiesced.

A
S IT
happened, it was just the kind of misfortune that was calculated to make Leon Shimkin’s day, since he was looking for signs that Max was incompetent. Though he did not harbor any strong sympathy toward female editorial assistants in general or Phyllis in particular, Shimkin felt that the matter had been badly handled. Shimkin himself was—ostentatiously—a humble family man, whose idea of an exciting time was counting the mail-order coupons as they came in and whose only known diversion from the work of increasing his fortune was a couple of martinis at lunch. Caviar and iced swans were not his kind of thing, nor beautiful editorial assistants; still, he had a sense for how to handle personnel problems, and by his standards Max had failed. Shimkin believed in doing this kind of thing
quietly
, above all.

Several people who had seen Shimkin at meetings or at the little tête-à-tête lunches at the Rainbow Room he favored reported that he had expressed sadness at the way things were going. His dear old friend Max was slipping, he would say, shaking his head solemnly, his opaque, dark eyes tearing as he sipped his martini. Max wasn’t the man he used to be, anybody could see that.

What S&S needed was a strong manager, somebody who could pull the place together, the way he himself had done when he became business manager, a Young Turk, somebody who knew how to keep his eye on the ball.

Shimkin had not yet chosen his man; he preferred to bide his time and let the right man fight his way to the top. Shimkin made no secret of the fact that he didn’t believe in
giving
anybody a job—no, no,
his
way was to give a man an
opportunity
, to see how he overcame obstacles, to find out just what kind of stuff he was made of. If you wanted to feed a
man, you didn’t give him a fish, he would say, you taught him how to catch fish, then he would never go hungry again.

It was not for nothing that Shimkin had been the discoverer of Dale Carnegie, whose lectures he had attended with results that changed both Carnegie’s life and his own:
How to Win Friends and Influence People
became the biggest best-seller in S&S’s history. Whether Carnegie’s teachings brought Shimkin any friends was open to question, but he very often sounded in conversation as if he were reading directly from Carnegie’s book. These homilies did not conceal a certain predatory quality in Shimkin’s gaze, but he rather fancied himself as the voice of reason and usually had a Carnegie phrase ready for any occasion, at any rate before lunch—after it, his conversation was more unpredictable.

Most people beyond his cadre of loyalists had a good deal of difficulty understanding Shimkin, who first of all talked in a low, husky whisper and approached everything in a roundabout way, and second, preferred ambiguity to a straight answer whenever possible.

It didn’t pay to make things easy for people, Shimkin believed—after all, nobody had made things easy for
him
.

CHAPTER 12

L
ike the rest of the heads of the major American publishing houses, Max took a London trip once a year. Sometimes he and Ray went on to Paris, where they were lavishly wined and dined by the heads of the major French houses. Since most French publishers knew no English and the Schusters knew no French, little or no business was done in Paris.