Another Life (33 page)

That period, 1963 to 1965, saw a lot of celebrity books, as well as an increasing sense that if you paid out money to an author, however famous he or she was, you ought to get something back in the way of a manuscript—or at least enough pages to prove that work was being done, if only by a ghostwriter. This was a novel idea in most publishing houses and by no means a welcome one. Publishers had always shied away from asking for their money back, partly because gentlemen didn’t do that sort of thing and partly because most publishing houses weren’t efficient enough to do it on any reasonable scale—besides, the thinking went, the sums of money were usually relatively small, and most authors stoutly resisted repaying.

Public sympathy, moreover, was usually on the side of the writer in such cases. This was an attitude largely shared by editors, most of whom were quite used to waiting for years for a manuscript to come in and to treating the delivery date on a contract as infinitely elastic, fiercely resisting any attempt on the part of “the business people” to go after authors for late delivery, however much water had flowed under the bridge since the contract was signed. Bob Gottlieb, for instance, leaped to the passionate defense of writers whom he himself accused of being deadbeats at the first sign of interest in them from the business department.

The gap between “us”—editors, intellectuals, people of a certain
sensibility
—and “them”—suit-wearing
apparatchiki
who went around turning off the lights and didn’t read books—was nowhere greater than at S&S, where the slightest intervention of the business people in editorial matters was seen as part of Shimkin’s long struggle to gain control of S&S and deprive editors of their cherished privileges and independence. Even those who did not like Max Schuster—or dismissed him as a henpecked figure of fun—preferred him to the alternative, which was Shimkin.

I
T IS
the misfortune of most men that they achieve what they have always wanted at the point when it is too late for them to enjoy it or make good use of it, and Shimkin was no exception. Shrewd and patient, one of the rare figures in publishing who was a businessman first and actually preferred going over the account books to reading the books the company published, Shimkin was to secure complete control over S&S long after his energy and vision had already been eclipsed.

By the time that Shimkin and Schuster were equal partners in S&S (they rotated the offices of president and chairman of the board on a yearly basis), Shimkin was in almost as much danger of becoming a caricature of himself as Max was, despite the fact that he was by many years the younger man. Max’s many eccentricities were equaled by Shimkin’s endless financial homilies—the summit of his wisdom was “Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing,” which he managed to work into every conversation at least once—not to speak of his unconvincing (and undependable) facade of Pickwickian good humor, his unflagging attention to unimportant details, his struggle with depression, and his growing drinking problem. To see the two men together was to be exposed to such a catalog of tics, quirks, manias, idées fixes, and compulsive behavior as to call for the talent of Dr. Oliver Sacks.

By the early 1960s, though Shimkin was in sight of his goal—as Max’s deterioration and declining health began to be obvious—he was an angry and embittered man, no longer in complete control of himself. Already, it was well known throughout the company that there was no point in seeing Shimkin about anything that mattered after lunch, when two or three stiff martinis would have ignited his suspicion and his temper to a white-hot glow. His motherly secretary kept a pitcher of martinis
ready in a thermos bottle for the late afternoon, when the ones he had drunk at lunchtime were beginning to wear off. By the end of the day, when he left for home, he was rolling unsteadily on his feet as he stood on Fiftieth Street looking for his car and very often looking for a fight as well.

CHAPTER 16

T
he mid-sixties were a troubled and uncertain time for everybody at S&S, as they were, by and large, for the rest of the publishing industry. Although on the surface it might have seemed that at S&S the real question was how long Max could hold on to his half of the company, Shimkin’s eventual ascendancy led to the sale of the company to a total stranger—a kind of Pyrrhic victory for Shimkin. In much the same way, Cerf, having brought off an astonishing coup with the purchase of Knopf and having taken Random House public shortly afterward, sold his beloved company to RCA. What had been unleashed throughout the industry was a kind of Gadarene rush to exchange the ownership of publishing houses for stock as fast as possible, before the game was up—a game that is still going on today as many of the bigger houses, themselves the result of numerous acquisitions and mergers, are put on the block for sale by their corporate owners, most of whom never wanted to be in the book-publishing business in the first place.

Shimkin was to be one of the first victims in the early stages of this game of corporate dominos. He
could
, no doubt, once he had rid himself of Max, have arranged to pass the company on eventually, by gradual stages, to his son, Michael, who had already demonstrated his interest in the business by opening a successful bookstore; or he could have chosen to preserve the company’s independence by other means; instead, no sooner had he secured 100 percent of it than he was trying to sell it—an odd reaction to the culmination of a forty-year-old ambition.

Beyond the fact that Cerf, Shimkin, the Knopfs, and any number of others wanted to cash in their chips, there was no real reason for the wave of mergers and sales that began to hit the publishing industry in the sixties and continued through the seventies and eighties at an accelerating pace. Once the process had started, it was impossible to
stop. The bigger publishing houses became, the more they enjoyed “economies of scale”—the ability to buy paper in larger quantities at lower prices, for example, or to share the cost of the sales force and the accounting department between a number of different imprints. In theory, the larger a publishing house became, the more profitably it could be operated—hence the logic of Random House’s acquisitions of Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Ballantine, and, eventually, innumerable British publishing houses, or S&S’s eventual acquisitions of Prentice-Hall and Macmillan (which had already acquired Atheneum and Scribner’s). All this lay far in the future in the mid-sixties, but the seeds were already sown for the stronger houses, with more powerful financial backing, to swallow the smaller and weaker ones.

Shimkin could read the writing on the wall, but he was not in any position to take advantage of that ability. Schuster was still his partner, and the last thing Max wanted to do was expand S&S or acquire other houses. On the contrary, Max’s sole ambition was to hang on by his fingernails for as long as possible—or, perhaps, for as long as his health would permit him to do so. There were days when it must have seemed to Shimkin that Max’s health was better than his own—say what you like, at least Max wasn’t immobilized by episodes of depression.

Max’s deterioration, by contrast, was undramatic and by small degrees. Those who worked close to him noticed, for example, that the shaking that had always affected his hands was growing more severe, that he often left large patches of his face unshaved, presumably because he could no longer hold a razor steadily enough to reach them, that his gait was more and more unsteady, so that in motion he resembled a windup toy—one had the feeling that a gentle push would send him backward out of control until he fell over. These were the signs, I recognized, of Parkinson’s disease, from which my maternal grandfather, Octavius Musgrove, had suffered during his last years, and the one thing I knew about Parkinson’s was that it didn’t get better.

I have no doubt that Max knew it too, but he never mentioned his illness and took great pains to ensure, even more than before, that nobody saw him coming or going in the halls by arriving early and leaving late. Seated behind his desk, all one noticed was the trembling hands, and Max tried to hide that by clutching the arms of his chair as if he were holding on for dear life—as in a sense he was.

Given this weak and divided authority at the top, it is hardly surprising that there was a certain amount of not very discreet jockeying
for power below. This resulted in the resignation of Henry Simon, ostensibly for reasons of health but actually because he had been badly outmaneuvered by his peers. As Max declined, Henry must have had every expectation of getting—at long last—a chance to wield some kind of power. But by the time Max got around to relinquishing some of his powers, Henry was old, cranky, embittered, and simply too tired to take on a real fight against younger, hungrier men. Peter Schwed was promoted over him to become de facto publisher, while Bob Gottlieb made his peace with Schwed and became managing editor.

What this meant, in practice, was that the two people who most disliked Henry Simon were now running exactly those parts of the company that affected him most closely. The bottom line was that his books were neither exciting enough nor profitable enough to reward him with the kind of position he craved. Bob had brought in a whole roster of new talent, while Schwed was responsible, despite his London trips, for a solid list of sports books and fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. In the final analysis, in book publishing nothing really matters but the books, and Henry had simply been outpaced by his rivals.

I had long since switched, with whatever pangs of conscience, to the winning side, and Henry knew it—and he wasn’t about to forgive my defection. When I said good-bye to him as he was leaving his office, he shook my hand limply, an ironic smile on his gaunt face. “Good luck,” he said. Then, with a bitter expression, he added, “but I don’t think you’ll need it.”

Shortly afterward, Bob moved into Henry’s corner office, I moved into Bob’s, and Dick Snyder moved upstairs to join us on the twenty-eighth floor.

I was perfectly content and assumed that there would be no more changes for a long, long time. In fact, they had only just begun.

P
UBLISHING
,
DESPITE
a lot of humbug to the contrary, is a
reactive
business—which is to say that publishers and editors do not as a rule make taste or determine people’s political opinions or effect major social changes. In the final analysis, they adapt, however unwillingly or hesitantly, to the demands, taste, and opinions of the marketplace or they go under. That is not to say that there are no exceptions. From time to time a book published in a spirit of stubborn contrarianism—written
and published against the flow, so to speak—will become a major bestseller, but in retrospect this has often been because it accidentally tapped some nascent change in public opinion. To take a famous example,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of American publishing, is often credited with having created in its many millions of readers a revulsion against slavery that led directly to the Civil War—even Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, remarked that she was the little lady who had written the book that had begun the big war—but the truth is that the book capitalized on feelings that were already there. The success of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
merely signified that there were more people opposed to slavery—and to any compromise on slavery with the Southern states—than politicians, including Lincoln, had hitherto supposed; indeed, had the bestseller list existed in the mid-nineteenth century, Southerners might have viewed the success of Stowe’s novel in the rest of the country—and the civilized world—as a good indication of the overwhelming number of people ranged against their cause.

To take another example, Wendell Willkie’s
One World
, which S&S published in extraordinary numbers in 1943, did not convince the public that the United Nations was a desirable idea—the public had already formed that opinion and were therefore in sympathy with Willkie’s book when it appeared. Despite the huge success of Laura Z. Hobson’s
Gentleman’s Agreement
, her novel did not change most Americans’ feelings about social anti-Semitism—on the contrary, it succeeded precisely because the war and the Holocaust had made most literate people uncomfortable with anti-Semitism, even of the mild, social kind, and therefore willing to read a book condemning that kind of behavior. Books
follow
events, they do not cause them.

Most publishers are slow to pick up on change, in part because they are merchants, in part because they have a vested interest in the status quo. If they put an ear to the ground, it is usually to listen to what the bookstores are saying (via the sales reps), rather than to learn what is going on in the streets. Then, too, the more successful publishers are part of the “establishment” (the less successful ones merely aspire to be) and tend to share the opinions of those who are, or fancy themselves to be, like themselves: wealthy and powerful. Max Schuster and Bennett Cerf were somewhat more liberal in their politics than their WASP competitors, but they were not by any means radical or inclined to make waves. They held the more or less middle-of-the-road liberal opinions
of their social group, which is to say that they voted Democratic, had admired Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, had preferred Truman to Eisenhower, supported (cautiously) Israel, had their doubts (even more cautiously) about Alger Hiss’s guilt, and believed in the First Amendment without necessarily wanting to publish, or even read,
Lolita
or
The Story of O
themselves. Their spiritual center, as it were, was
The New York Times
, and few of their opinions differed from those expressed on its editorial page, which is not by any means the worst thing one can say about somebody.

As a consequence they were caught flat-footed by the violent social changes that engulfed the nation in the sixties, at just the point when it seemed to most people of fifty and above that after the Depression and the war things were pretty good and only going to get better. Then the pace of events speeded up dizzily, moving too fast for the usual leisurely pace of book publishing, in which it takes a year or two for somebody to write the book and nine months to a year for somebody to publish it. Before the returns were even in on the various panegyrics to Camelot, publishers were rushing out illustrated souvenir books on JFK’s funeral, always one step behind the weekly newsmagazines and two steps behind television. The civil-rights crisis caught them not only unprepared but undecided and embarrassed. Book publishing, as an industry, was pretty much a white man’s business, and while it gradually and with many delays and complaints began to accept women in positions of executive authority during the sixties, it was hard to find a single black person outside the mailroom in most publishing houses. This left book publishers in the uncomfortable position of being in favor of civil rights and racial equality everywhere but in their own offices (a position that has not changed noticeably some thirty years later).