Another Life (48 page)

My only reservation about
The Country of the Horn
had been its title. That was not the result of any prejudice about cows on my part—in fact, I had at first associated the title with the horn of plenty rather than with cattle—but simply because it didn’t sound to me like a bestseller. McMurtry himself was not passionately attached to the title. When my wife suggested calling it
Movin’ On
, a thought inspired by a recent country-western song, he was not exactly enthusiastic but acquiesced after the
g
had been reinserted. He seemed resigned to the fact that people always wanted to change the titles of his books. The movie people had insisted on changing
Horseman, Pass By
to
Hud
, on the grounds that the book’s title made it sound like a Western, and now I was insisting on changing the title of
The Country of the Horn
to
Moving On
, on the grounds that our sales reps would like it better. McMurtry was willing to give us a sporting chance with the new title, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it, and looking back twenty-nine years later, I suspect he was right.
The Country of the Horn
had a certain dignity to it that
Moving On
lacked, although whether dignity would have made a difference is another story.

The problem, as I discovered the moment I was back in New York, was not the title, it was Patsy. This came as a surprise to me. I had expected to be told that there was too much rodeo in the book and maybe too many cows but not that there was too much Patsy. Every woman who read the book, however, complained that Patsy cried too much. Of course, Patsy had a lot to cry about—none of the men in her life was right for her—so it seemed to me perfectly natural that she should do so. It seemed that way to McMurtry too, who pointed out that most of the women he knew—and certainly all those on whom Patsy was based—cried pretty much all the time. There was certainly plenty for them to cry about in Texas, he pointed out, a place that was notoriously hard on both women and horses.

We had struck, it seemed, a basic difference between the East and the West, or at any rate between Texas and New York City, and there was nothing much we could do about it, since trying to stem the flow of Patsy’s tears would have meant totally rewriting the novel, which McMurtry wasn’t about to do, and I wasn’t about to ask him to. As a kind of counterpunch, I had buttons made up to give away at the ABA convention along with an advance reading copy of the book that read “I’m a Patsy” (they probably should have read “I’m a Patsy for Patsy”). The booksellers wore them all right, but the ones that read the book
came back to the stand to say how much they liked the book except for Patsy’s crying. In the end,
Moving On
did OK—a lot better than McMurtry’s previous books had—and was even taken by one of the major book clubs, but it wasn’t the big blockbuster breakout book I had thought it would be. We had to wait fifteen years until
Lonesome Dove
, a book in which there are remarkably few tears, finally gave McMurtry the attention and reviews he had deserved right from the beginning. Still, we gave it our best shot in every possible way, which was more than you could say for his previous publisher, and to this day
Moving On
remains one of my favorite books.

C
OUNTRY MUSIC
had been on my mind when I flew down to Houston to see McMurtry, in part because I had received in the mail a manuscript from
Atlanta Journal
columnist Paul Hemphill about the country-music business. Our sales rep in Georgia, a gentleman of the old school named J. Felton Covington, Jr., perhaps the most charming book salesman who has ever lived, had buttonholed me at a sales conference and made me promise on my mother’s grave (though she is still very much alive) to read Hemphill’s book myself. Since I not only liked Covington but had long since learned never to say no to a sales rep, I gave it my full attention.

If there was any subject less likely to cause enthusiasm at S&S than country music—except perhaps rodeo, cows, and crying women—I didn’t know it. The point of the book was that country music was no longer a peculiarly Southern phenomenon and was going mainstream. This has certainly happened with a vengeance, but at that time it hadn’t yet reached New York book-publishing circles, where if it was noticed at all it was regarded with disdain. The only person I could find who shared my enthusiasm for country music was a tall young woman named Julie D’Alton, at that time Schwed’s assistant, who seemed to know the words to every country song. As it turned out, she was one of five similarly tall and beautiful sisters who could have, had they wished, formed a country group all of their own, though they were born and bred New Yorkers, educated at Convent of the Sacred Heart.

Encouraged by Julie’s reaction to the manuscript, I called Hemphill in Atlanta and told him how much Julie and I liked his book and how hard it was going to be to sell it to anyone else at S&S. Even my own assistant,
who was up on every aspect of the rock-and-roll scene, turned up her nose at the corniness of country music.

Hell, he could understand all that, Hemphill said, everybody up north still thought of it as hillbilly music, he knew that, but those who had doubts were just plain wrong, that was the long and short of it. Country music was sweeping the nation. Hemphill suggested that we ought to see what he was talking about firsthand. He asked us if we would like to join him on one leg of a bus trip he was making with Bill Anderson and the Poor Boys, a country group that was then fairly hot and beginning to acquire a certain reputation among country fans in the North.

This was an offer that was hard to resist, and it was another opportunity to wear my Stetson. Rationalizing this pleasure trip by saying that I couldn’t edit the book without knowing more about the background from which the music came, we met Hemphill and the band in some godforsaken parking lot in New Jersey. Short of the moment when I had plunged into the bright lights of Madison Square Garden at a canter on a palomino while the band played “California, Here I Come” and thousands of kids twirled little blinking flashlights in the audience, nothing had struck me with such an instant rush as standing onstage behind the Poor Boys in whatever New Jersey town we were visiting.

When Hemphill suggested that we really ought to go to Nashville and see the Grand Ol’ Opry before it moved out of its home in a former church, we flew down and joined him there. I had a whirlwind insider’s tour of Nashville: Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Broadway, the Recording Barn, in which the top country singers cut their records, and the odd experience of standing on the Opry stage next to the legendary blue-grass duo Flatt and Scruggs, and Ernest Tubbs, the grand old man of country music, while a chorus sang a Goo-Goo Candy Cluster commercial and fans fired off cameras with electronic flashes in the faces of the performers.

“It sounds like a joyride,” Dick said, not without reason, when I got back, but eventually I was to end up publishing the memoirs of Tammy Wynette, Minnie Pearl, and Willie Nelson. It was just a question of going there, after all.

A
LL THE
same, I was all too familiar with the fact that
celui qui est absent a toujours tort
. I put away my Stetson for the time being and decided
to stay put for a while. As it happened, fate was about to throw a celebrity of a very different kind in my path. “Celebrity publishing” was then in its infancy, and the era in which millions of dollars were spent by publishers to persuade major celebrities to put their name on an autobiography they hadn’t written or even read and then go out and promote it was yet to come. “Lazarland” (since this kind of book was his specialty) was on the cusp of overwhelming publishers with what seemed at first like an easy way of buying books, since the book itself was in most cases the least important part of the equation. What the publisher paid for was the celebrity—the central, glittering attraction who got the big money. The next most important thing was the amount of money targeted for promotion and advertising. The person who got the least money, inevitably, was the writer—in most cases nobody except the editor ever expected to have to actually
read
the book. No better way to lose large amounts of money quickly in book publishing has ever been invented—you could publish hundreds, perhaps thousands of unsuccessful first novels, after all, for less than it costs to produce one celebrity autobiography—or pursued more zealously. It’s not that publishers are stupid, nor even that they don’t learn by experience—it’s that people who don’t much like reading books are always more interested in buying something that
doesn’t
have to be read than in something like a novel that
does
(hence the ease with which agents sell books from a two-page outline instead of a whole manuscript).

The celebrity autobiography was well suited to the growing symbiosis between books and television. The critical question was no longer whether the book itself would be any good, but how many weeks the celebrity would tour for it and how many talk shows could be counted on to book him or her. It took a long time before it finally dawned on most publishers that the quality of the book did indeed matter and that not every celebrity was guaranteed to sell books. Even in the late nineties, publishers still made the same costly mistake of supposing that because, say, Whoopi Goldberg was a big star, people would necessarily buy her book. (Of course, in the beginning, the big amounts were in hundreds of thousands of dollars, not in millions, as they later were.) Some celebrities sold books; some didn’t. It was a crapshoot, for high stakes, and the only person who never lost money doing it was Irving Lazar, who took home his commission of 10 percent and never looked back.

CHAPTER 21

O
f course, there are
celebrities
and CELEBRITIES. In our age, the biggest celebrities are movie stars, but even among movie stars there is a pecking order. I started off at the top, when in 1970 an agent called me to ask if I would be interested in publishing a book by Joan Crawford. If I was, she would like to meet me. We agreed upon a date for a drink at Crawford’s apartment.

Of course I was not just interested—I was
fascinated
. It’s not, mind you, that I was a fan of Joan Crawford’s.
“Nourri dans le sérail, j’en connais les détours”
—having been brought up in the movie business, I’m inoculated against making a cult of any movie star, though if I
was
going to make a cult of any star, it would be Vivien Leigh or Catherine Deneuve, rather than Joan Crawford. Still, except for Lillian Gish, hardly anybody covered such a vast stretch of movie history, and very few people have been bigger stars for as many years. Besides, I had always been interested in Joan Crawford ever since my Auntie Merle told me, over her dinner table at the Malibu Colony, a story about Crawford. Having just announced her retirement, Crawford was coming out of a restaurant in Hollywood when a young girl ran up to her as she was getting into her limousine on Sunset Boulevard. “Oh, Miss Crawford,” she cried out, holding out her autograph book, “you’re my favorite star! Could I please have your autograph?”

Joan Crawford looked at her, her big eyes focused on the young girl’s like those of a falcon about to swoop on its prey, and with an icy smile, in her deep, silky voice, she said: “Go away, little girl. I don’t
need
you anymore.”

As it turned out, Joan Crawford needed all the fans she could get, once she staged the first of her many comebacks, and by the time I met her she was no longer turning away fans in the street. She had made a kind of camp comeback in movies such as
The Best of Everything
, in which she played a corporate-executive equivalent of Mel Brooks’s Nurse Diesel, then retired from the screen again but returned to achieve full-camp stardom in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
In search of the kind of financial and emotional stability that had always eluded her,
she had some years before married Alfred Steele, the swaggering CEO of Pepsi-Cola. For a time she gave a compelling and successful performance as a corporate wife and Pepsi spokeswoman, but this was cut short by Steele’s death. The directors of Pepsi, whom she had supposed to be loyal to her late husband and fans of hers, turned out, to her surprise, to hate her guts and hardly even waited until Steele’s body was cold before stripping her of her corporate perks and contesting the provisions Steele had made for her. Their behavior was to embitter Joan Crawford’s last years, and her decision to do a book was an attempt to strike back by proving that she was still a star. It was not just a case of television appearances helping the sale of a book: The whole
purpose
of the book was to rack up television appearances so that every time the directors of Pepsi and their frumpy wives turned on the TV set, they would see Joan Crawford on the screen, telling
her
side of the story.

Joan Crawford had fallen on bad times since her days as the Queen of Pepsi-Cola. She was living in one of those featureless, postwar, modern apartment buildings made of white brick, like giant lavatories, in the East Sixties of Manhattan, near Bloomingdale’s, with a bland lobby, low ceilings, and paper-thin walls bereft of moldings. She and Steele had spent most of their marriage living in the presidential suites of hotels, as he preached the Pepsi-Cola gospel around the world to anyone who would listen, from heads of state to the pope, so on Steele’s sudden death she had been obliged to find a place to live in a hurry. Steele and Joan Crawford had made a dynamic team, which perhaps explains their success in the Soviet Union, where Pepsi-Cola became the first major American corporation to build its own plants, and where Steele also persuaded the Russians to let Pepsi-Cola become the exclusive distributor of Stolichnaya vodka in the United States.

Crawford’s apartment was reached via a cramped elevator and a narrow, dark corridor, lit by recessed fluorescent lamps, that had rows of identical painted metal doors on each side. There was nothing to distinguish Joan Crawford’s apartment from the other dozen or so on her floor. It had the same blank peephole, a little plastic plate bearing the apartment number, and a bell. A maid opened the door and ushered me into the living room. It wasn’t at all what I would have expected of Joan Crawford. The walls were standard New York City landlord–issue white, there where white plastic venetian blinds on the windows instead of drapes and curtains, and the furniture seemed to have been salvaged from somebody’s pool, that of the Beverly Hills Hotel, perhaps—lots
of white-painted wrought iron with green plastic-covered cushions and white wicker. The tables were glass topped and so shiny that one hesitated to touch them for fear of leaving fingerprints. The familiar pink ashtrays with turquoise script actually
did
come from the Beverly Hills Hotel. I could imagine that Joan Crawford might have taken the ashtrays home with her, but I didn’t see how she could have taken the
furniture
.