Another Life (40 page)

“Fuck ’em,” he said.

He sat down and put his feet up on his desk—a trademark posture, I was beginning to learn—and briefly admired the shine on his shoes. Among the changes that followed his ascent to the twenty-eighth floor was the arrival every morning of an elderly black man with a shoeshine box. Never one to hog his perks, Dick had signaled the availability of the shoeshine man to the more senior S&S editors, but I was the only one to take advantage of his daily presence, the rest having some qualms about being seen with him crouching on his knees before them on the floor at a time when the civil-rights struggle was at its height.

Dick took off his glasses for a moment and stared out the door of his office, as if taking in the reality of what he had been left to deal with. He had been given the opportunity of a lifetime, he believed (and so it turned out to be), only to find himself second in command on what
seemed to be a sinking ship—sunk, in his view, by its captain. Still, though he was unsentimentally clear-eyed, he thought he could make it work and was determined to use whatever assets he found. If he didn’t have Bob, he would make me his editorial partner; if he had lost Schulte, he would take over marketing himself; if Nina Bourne had gone he would find a replacement who could at least mimic her style. Unlike Shimkin, who ran the company like a man driving a car with his eyes closed, Dick looked ahead. On a clear day he could see, if nothing else, where he wanted to go and sometimes even a hint of how to get there.

“Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and focusing on me, “what’s done is done. We’re not going to get any help from agents like Candida. Why should we? She doesn’t respect weakness. Nobody does. If we’d put up a fight …” He shrugged. “The hell with that.” His voice turned brisk. “We need to make a big splash, something to show that we’re still in business, that we can still outpublish anybody, something that will be
noticed
.” He put his arms behind his head and tilted his chair back as far as it would go. “Did you know,” he asked, “that Bobby was thinking about bringing Jacqueline Susann here?”

I had heard rumors of this, but it was one of the very few subjects on which Bob had been closemouthed. Susann, who had vaulted to fame as the author of a successful book about her dog,
Every Night Josephine!
, and a subsequent number-one best-selling novel,
Valley of the Dolls
, was eager to leave her present publisher and come to S&S for what was then an unprecedented amount of money. This was not Bob’s usual turf, and in the aftermath of his departure, there were those conspiracy theorists who wondered if it had been a signal of his intentions. Some suggested that Bob had involved S&S with Jacqueline Susann as an act of revenge, forever stamping the S&S fiction list as a home for schlock; others thought it might have been Bob’s last great contribution to S&S, exactly the kind of big-time purchase that was needed to liven things up. The likelihood is that none of this was true—it was simply a question of timing. Bob had opened discussions with Jackie Susann, her husband Irving Mansfield, and their lawyer, Artie Hershkowitz, before he had made up his mind to leave; once he made the decision, it simply became one of the major pieces of unfinished business he left behind.

“She doesn’t seem like Bob’s cup of tea,” I said.

Snyder laughed. He had two kinds of laugh—one was without humor, the other with. This was the former. “Bullshit,” he said. “It would have been a good move. Jazz up the list. It’s been a long time
since S&S had a big number-one fiction best-seller. He’d have been a hero to the sales reps.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “It’s still not such a bad idea,” he said, musingly.

“How far advanced was the negotiation?”

“I don’t know. There was quite a way to go, I think.” He scribbled a note on a pad in front of him. “I’ll get the details,” he said.

He sat upright and took his feet off the desk, back in action again, eyes sparkling. “Keep it to yourself,” he warned. “Don’t tell anybody. The only way to make this fly is to keep it a surprise.” He waved me out of his office. “If we bring this one off, everything else will be easy,” he predicted.

And as usual, he was right.

CHAPTER 19

I
n some ways, my previous experience suited me well for taking on Jacqueline Susann—after all, when it came to commercial fiction, I had already had an apprenticeship that included Harold Robbins, and so far as “difficult” or “demanding” authors were concerned, who could be more difficult and demanding than the Durants? I had no reason to doubt my ability to deal with Jacqueline Susann and Irving Mansfield, nor was I among those who had been shocked by the success of her previous books, which did not signify to me, as they did to so many others, the beginning of the end of Western civilization.

In book publishing, however, vulgarity was still frowned upon. Bad taste frightened publishers. Bennett Cerf might flutter around the edges of show business, a Broadway groupie, joke anthologist, and panel member on
What’s My Line?
, but when it came to his publishing persona, he expected to be taken seriously and worried about books “in bad taste.” Max’s ambition as a publisher was to load the S&S list with works of philosophy, history, and great literature, and he put his ears back and shied at the idea of anything that might be in bad taste carrying his name.

It was simply understood that one did not stoop to a certain level of vulgarity; in fact, one of the reasons why people went into book publishing in the first place was in order to avoid the vulgarity, celebrity worship, and indifference to bad taste that were all too clearly the norm in the movie business, the television industry, and the tabloid press.

Then, in 1966, came Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls
, a huge best-seller that for the first time brought the worlds of Hollywood, TV,
tabloids, and Broadway press agentry together to sell a novel in which they were all the subject. Jackie, then forty-eight, with her spiky false eyelashes, her gravelly chain-smoker’s voice, her glittery dresses, her thick pancake makeup, and her feisty, tough-broad image seemed to many of the old guard of book publishing like the beginning of the end, Hollywood vulgarity at the door of the temple of culture.

Jackie herself was in many ways a much more lively creation than her novels, hugely successful as they were. She had arrived in New York from her native Philadelphia with show-business ambitions in 1936 as a high school beauty-contest winner. She emerged from a family in which her father, a successful if somewhat flashy society portrait painter, was a handsome, high-living, charming womanizer, while her mother was a hard-driving, long-suffering perfectionist who wanted Jackie to go to college.

Although Jackie talked about her childhood in Philadelphia as if she had been a princess there, it does not seem likely that with a painter and part-time art teacher as a father and a Russian Jewish schoolteacher mother, Jackie could have found acceptance even among the wealthy (and stuffy) German-Jewish aristocracy of the City of Brotherly Love, let alone among the daughters of Main Liners.

Jackie’s family life, if she was to be believed, was a curious mixture of decadence on her father’s side and prim rectitude on her mother’s, though both parents traced their ancestry back through countless generations of upwardly mobile and deeply religious Eastern European Jews, none of whom, one guesses, would have been pleased to have a fast-living and highly assimilated portrait painter as a descendant, let alone a best-selling popular novelist.

From Barbara Seaman’s biography of Jackie Susann, we learn that as a child Jackie’s favorite book had been
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
—surprisingly, in view of her adult success as the author of torrid roman à clef potboilers—but although Jackie always claimed to have had writing ambitions even as a child, in fact she came to authorhood late in life, after a checkered career as a stage actress, a model, a disk jockey, and a television personality.

Jackie adored her father and never stopped talking about him. In Barbara Seaman’s biography of her it is alleged that when Jackie was a teenager she actually saw her father “humping” another woman on his studio couch—if true it would explain a lot about the way sex is treated in her fiction—but if so, the incident made her father only more attractive
to Jackie. He seems to have treated his gawky, adolescent daughter as if she were a date, taking her to the movies, to fashionable restaurants, and even to speakeasies. One senses a certain collusion between father and daughter that reached its peak when Robert Susann, picked to be a judge at a beauty contest that was to choose the most beautiful girl in Philadelphia, not only encouraged Jackie to enter but made sure she won. Apart from a silver trophy that she held on to for the rest of her life, winning the contest carried with it a trip to New York City and a screen test—opportunities that Jackie was not about to waste and that were shortly to make the college plans her mother had for her superfluous.

She wanted to be an actress (or failing that, a model), but she never quite made it as either. What she got, however—and it was probably what she wanted most—was a chance to lead an independent life in New York City, as a single girl on the fringes of show business, instead of going to college.

Showbiz, as she always called it, attracted her like a magnet; she was an unapologetic star fucker—even in the literal sense: She had an affair with Eddie Cantor, for which she never forgave him, getting her revenge by turning him into the loathsome comedian Christy Lane in her second novel,
The Love Machine
. It was her passion for Broadway that brought about her marriage to Irving Mansfield, a press agent, promoter, and “producer” (of what, it was somewhat hard to say, or find out), who talked and acted as if he were a character straight out of
Guys and Dolls
, and was comfortable only at places like Lindy’s, the Stage Delicatessen, and Sardi’s (although late in life he managed to settle into the West Coast equivalent: a bungalow and a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel and a table at the Polo Lounge).

Jackie was around celebrities so much that she
became
a kind of celebrity herself, relentlessly plugged by Irving and the various Broadway gossip columnists of the day. The only thing she didn’t have for full-scale celebrityhood was a talent or even a “gimmick,” but this problem was solved, as if by miracle, in 1953, when she saw a poodle in the window of a Lexington Avenue pet shop. She bought her, named her Josephine, and a star was born—two stars, actually, for Josephine became America’s most famous dog in 1963 when Jackie published
Every Night Josephine!
Jackie had discovered, after so many false starts, what she could
do
. Irving Mansfield finally had something to promote.

Between the two of them (or
three
of them, if you include “Josie,” as Jackie called her, who was very much part of the promotion), they
put Jackie’s first book on the map, then went on to make Jackie’s next book,
Valley of the Dolls
, a brilliant combination of soap opera, show-business gossip, and tearjerker, a worldwide number-one best-seller in hardcover and mass-market paperback and later a successful movie. Jackie had invented her own unique brand of fiction: shopgirl romance, brought up to date with lots of dirty talk, the suggestion of some pretty rough sex, and an unsentimental view of men. Jackie’s fictional men were not modeled on Heathcliff but on her father: They were tall, handsome, sexy, and as emotionally tough as nails, and her heroines broke their hearts over them. (Amanda, in
The Love Machine
, was not untypical in that she carried Robin Stone’s soiled face towels around in her handbag.) Jackie had uncovered a deep well of emotional masochism in American women, and far from exploiting it she simply shared it. She also understood, as if by instinct, that her readers were ready for the raw side of love, for abortions, suicide, and crass male behavior. (Christy Lane, for example, talks to his mistress while sitting on the toilet defecating noisily, with the bathroom door open.) She brought to her novels the equivalent of the case histories of Sacher-Masoch (whom she had never read) and a whole lifetime of familiarity with the seamy side of show business and blended it all with the more traditional elements of women’s fiction. As Irving Mansfield liked to say, she “cried all the way to the bank.”

Perhaps more important, Bernard Geis (her publisher), Jackie, and Irving created a new way of
selling
a novel, a shameless blend of column plants, celebrity appearances, and Hollywood gossip that was new to book publishing but was old hat for the theater and movies. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the television set without hearing about Jackie and her novel. Irving Mansfield put the book’s cover in subway advertisements, something that had hitherto been thought more appropriate for hemorrhoid remedies than books, while Jackie actually got up at dawn to visit the warehouses from which her books were shipped to shake hands with the men who put them on the trucks and with the drivers themselves.