Another Life (42 page)

She was also a phenomenally hard worker. She absorbed our notes and, with a total lack of prima donna behavior, carved out, with our help, a plot and structure that sounded pretty damned good and with any luck might even sound OK the next morning. I was impressed and relieved.

(Years later, at an ABA convention in Washington, D.C., I mentioned this to Bob Gottlieb, and he sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it’s true. Jackie
was
a pro. But you must be wary of thinking that’s a good thing for a writer to be.”)

I asked Jackie if she thought she could meet our deadline. She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You bet your fucking ass,” she said.

“Heh, heh,” Irving said. “What did I tell you? Isn’t she
great?
” Did we know that Jackie could also sing? Irving wanted to know. We shook
our heads. He produced a tape and played a recording of Jackie singing “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” in a flat, harsh, totally tuneless baritone. It was, apparently, her theme song. We heard it twice, in awe, while Irving kept time with his right hand, clearly having the time of his life. Later on, people were to tell me that Irving used Jackie, but I knew better. No man ever loved a woman more than Irving loved Jackie. Only love could explain his listening to that recording for the umpteenth time with unfeigned pleasure.

“Am I right, or am I wrong? Isn’t she great?” he asked. He gave us each a copy of the tape as a souvenir. “Let’s go eat.”

Dolger, eyes rolling, pleaded another engagement and went home with a bundle of manuscript, his notes, and his tape of Jackie singing, but the Mansfields were not about to let me escape that easily. I was to have dinner with them—they would hear of nothing else, otherwise Jackie’s feelings would be hurt. Abby Hirsch, Jackie’s publicity assistant, whose salary had been a source of endless kvetching during the contract negotiations, since the Mansfields were determined that S&S should pay it, turned up from the bedroom, where she had presumably been baby-sitting Josephine, and booked a table for us at Danny’s Hideaway. Abby bore a remarkable resemblance to a younger and prettier version of Jackie—it was rumored that she wore the same dress size as Jackie and could therefore try on clothes for her, saving Jackie the trouble of shopping.

Before we left, however, Jackie was determined to change my appearance. At the time, in keeping with what was then the publishing tradition, I wore an old tweed hacking jacket from my Oxford days, with suede leather patches on the elbows. Jackie looked at me critically. “You’re a big-shot editor,” she told me, “but you dress like a bum.” Irving was wearing a brand-new dark blue cashmere blazer, cut in the Hollywood, Sy Devore style, with dramatic wide lapels and gold buttons engraved with an ankh. The ankh, an ancient Egyptian good luck symbol, was Jackie’s latest obsession. It was to play a major role in the plot of
The Love Machine
, and we created ankh pendants on gold chains for important lady booksellers and ankh rings for men, and we put gold-stamped ankhs on everything in sight. Some people involved with the book soon wore so many ankhs that they clanked and jingled like Gypsies at every step. We eventually came to refer to the ankh as “the ancient Egyptian symbol for schlock,” though never within Jackie’s
hearing. She took the ankh seriously and made Dick Snyder spend thousands of dollars of S&S’s money at her favorite L.A. jewelers for ankh items.

“Give him your blazer, honey,” Jackie told Irving. For once, Irving rebelled. The blazer had just arrived from his tailor that morning, he was devoted to it, it had eighteen-karat gold buttons—all to no avail. Over his protests (and mine, for it was the last thing I wanted), Irving was forced to relinquish it. As I tried it on, I noticed that the lining was embroidered with ankhs too—the Mansfields never did things by half. I wondered in whose promotion budget the cost of Irving’s blazer had been buried, the movie company’s or ours? Unfortunately, Irving and I were different shapes. He was much bigger around the waist and had long arms, like those of a chimpanzee, I thought, as I surveyed myself in Jackie’s mirror, draped in folds of blue cashmere. With some relief, I pointed out that it didn’t fit.

Jackie was not to be contradicted, however. “It fits fine,” she said, bunching the material up behind my back. “It looks great on you, doll. Maybe you should get the sleeves shortened a bit, but it’ll do fine for tonight.” I protested that I couldn’t take it from Irving. “He wants you to have it,” Jackie said firmly. And poor Irving, tears in his eyes, recognizing defeat, said, this time sadly, without the chuckle, “Isn’t she great?”

D
ANNY
’
S
H
IDEAWAY
was one of those quintessentially dark New York steak boîtes that cater to celebrities. By the time we sat down to dinner, our party consisted of Jackie, Irving, Abby Hirsch, myself, Myron Cohen (the borscht belt/Las Vegas comedian), Peter Lawford, and Lawford’s date, a stunningly beautiful young woman whose eyes were thickly glazed, like homemade pottery. Lawford himself was drunk and seemed to have been captured by the Mansfields without knowing who they were. At times, he slept, noisily, his face on the table. At other times, he was rude and hostile. He alternated between quarreling with his girl and sticking his hand under her dress or his tongue in her ear, while she tried feebly to fend him off. “I could use a piece of that,” Cohen said wistfully—he too seemed to be unsure what he was doing at the table, but like most comedians he wasn’t about to refuse a free meal.

By now it was late, at any rate for me—well past ten o’clock—and I was starving. Every time the maître d’ came over, bearing vast, gold-tasseled red velvet menus the size of doors, Jackie shooed him away and ordered another round of drinks. I had consumed the entire basket of breadsticks and rolls and was feeling queasy before Jackie finally allowed us to have menus. I didn’t even look at mine. I ordered a steak and a baked potato and prayed for its swift arrival. In the meantime, Irving Mansfield had been regaling us with the story of his shoes: He had gone to his shoemaker in Beverly Hills and ordered a pair of slip-on loafers in alligator hide, the most expensive shoes he had ever owned. How much had they cost? Cohen asked. Two hundred and fifty bucks, Irving replied. Cohen shook his head. He had a pair of shoes that cost more than that, made for him in Vegas in baby Cuban caiman hide. He took one of them off and passed it to Irving, who examined it with envy, then passed it around the table so each of us could examine it in turn. When it got to Lawford, Lawford glanced at it with contempt, took off one of his shoes and banged it down in the center of the table. “Unborn baby turtle,” he said. Five hundred dollars a pair and worth every penny. You didn’t even know you had shoes on, they were so comfortable. Myron Cohen and Irving Mansfield looked as wistfully at Lawford’s shoe as they had at his girl. Each of them carefully wrote down the name of Lawford’s shoemaker as the food was served.

I was reminded of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, but my hunger was so great that I didn’t care. I picked up my knife and fork and prepared to eat my steak, but Jackie, noticing what I had ordered, was upset. I could get a steak any fucking where, she said. Danny’s was famous for its lobster
Fra Diavolo
, which she had ordered, or its calf’s liver
Veneziana
, which Irving was having. I could not eat at Danny’s without giving them a try. She took a big spoonful of her lobster and dumped it on top of my steak, then put some of Irving’s calf’s liver on top of that. I glanced sadly at the mess on my plate, while Irving said, cheerfully again this time, “Isn’t she great?”

I decided to go home and raid the refrigerator. I made my good-byes, pleading work to be done, my wife’s health, a sick child, a headache. Luckily, by this time, neither Jackie nor Irving tried to stop me.

As I was collecting my briefcase from the hatcheck girl, the maître d’ came running after me, anxiety written large on his face. I was afraid that Jackie was demanding my return. Instead, he handed me the check. “Mr. Mansfield says you’re the publisher, so you’re paying,” he said. I
glanced at the bill. It was the largest restaurant check I’d ever seen. I signed it boldly, added a humongous tip, and told him to send it over to S&S. A few days later, when somebody from the accounting department called to ask if I was out of my mind, I told him to charge it to the Mansfields’ promotion budget.

S&S, like all publishers, was mildly conservative about expense accounts. Nobody made much of a fuss on the subject, but it was understood that you didn’t splurge or spend more on a meal than Max would have spent, and he was a cautious spender, except where Ray was concerned.

That was about to change, along with much else. We were in show business now.

S
HOW BUSINESS
had swept into the S&S promotion and publicity departments with a bang. Where, formerly, a spot on the
Today
show and a modest cocktail party at the Schusters’ apartment had been about par for the course for launching a book, we were now orchestrating huge parties on both coasts, sending out gift ankhs in plush-lined leatherette presentation cases shaped like books (accompanied by a personal note from Jackie on special
Love Machine
stationery), and ordering cakes in the shape of the book, with the cover to be reproduced in icing. For the first time in publishing history, the author’s photograph seemed to be as important as the contents of the book, and hitherto unheard-of sums were spent on brand-name photographers and, inevitably, retouchers. While much of this did not concern me—I was busy transforming Jackie’s scrawl into prose and engaging in a daily “story conference” to work out the plot—I was soon thrust into the role of S&S’s ambassador-at-large to the Mansfields, since almost from the word go they had quarreled violently with Dick, whose role in the enterprise was to say no to their more extreme demands.
No
was not a word Jackie was accustomed to hearing, and while Irving had heard it often enough in
his
lifetime, he was reluctant to pass it on to Jackie. “You go back and tell Snyder that this is a deal breaker,” I heard several times a day.

Of course, plans for the cakes had to be placed on hold until we
had
a dust jacket for the bakers to copy. This was no easy task. The Mansfields had strong ideas about what they wanted. Poor Irving came to jacket meetings with color swatches Jackie had given him, from which it
was apparent that pink was her favorite color. Most authors, even major ones, took very little interest in their book jackets in those innocent days. In the case of very important authors, the publisher might show him or her the sketch for the jacket, but there was seldom any question of the author’s approval. The Mansfields had it written into their contract and took it seriously; packaging, a concept that had not yet come into widespread use among book publishers,
mattered
to them, a lot. They sent every jacket suggestion to Hollywood, where, as they put it, there were people who really knew packaging, pros at the game instead of amateurs like us. Eventually, however, after much argument, angst, and innumerable flare-ups of temper by our art director, a
theme
was decided upon. The cover of the novel would resemble a movie poster (surprise, surprise!) featuring a man’s hand touching a woman’s, each of them wearing—what else?—gold ankh rings. Irving instructed us to get the best hand models in New York for the shot, which Frank Metz, our art director, did. When Jackie saw the proof, though, she didn’t like it—she thought the hands were ugly. We explained that we had hired the best hand models in New York, just as Irving had instructed us. Jackie didn’t miss a beat. “Get me the two
second-best
hand models in New York,” she snapped.

“Heh, heh,” Irving chuckled. “Isn’t she great?”

“I
WANT
the name of the girl who put me on hold,” Jackie screeched at me over the phone one day. “I want her fired!
Nobody
puts Jacqueline Susann on hold!”

There were tears at S&S whenever Jackie didn’t get what she wanted or was made to wait even for a moment. This was a new experience for most of the employees. Book publishing had always prided itself rather self-consciously on being a profession in which good manners prevailed. People in book publishing did not, as a rule, raise their voices or shout insults at each other. Above all, they didn’t shout at people who couldn’t shout back. It simply wasn’t done, not on either side of the Atlantic.

Most of the young women who worked in book publishing (“editorial assistants,” never secretaries) were college educated (often from one of the Seven Sisters) and drawn to publishing by either a genuine love of books or the desire to become an editor or a writer. Shamelessly exploited,
they were paid miserable salaries and allowed in compensation to read all the unsolicited manuscripts—the famous slush pile. Many of them were the daughters of publishing executives or well-known authors, unaccustomed to hearing a voice raised at them in anger.

The Mansfields were deaf to these social niceties. So far as Jackie was concerned, the assistants were the help, and therefore she took her anger out on them, if only because they had the least chance of shielding themselves. It was not just being put on hold that made her angry: She didn’t like being told that someone was unavailable or in a meeting or out to lunch, and God help the assistant who didn’t know the answer to any question she might ask, even if it wasn’t her job to know or even her department. When angered, Jackie’s voice rose to the sound of a buzz saw at full throttle—worse yet, she often complained about the assistants to their bosses or even to the top management. She was always asking for people to be fired, and we found the simplest way of handling the problem was to tell her they had been and move them out of sight.

Nor did she always confine her anger to the underlings. According to Barbara Seaman, Jackie once called poor Bernie Geis at three in the morning to complain there weren’t enough books in the stores. When he pointed out the time to her, she replied: “You son of a bitch, I can’t sleep, so why should you?”