Another Life (5 page)

It had never made much sense to have a whole department just to read books and scripts; the only reason CBS still had one was that it was too small and powerless to draw much attention from the cost cutters in the top brass. There was perhaps also some vestigial guilt feeling among the older television producers that the networks
ought
to consider original material, much as book publishers used to feel an obligation to read “the slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, rather than mailing them back unopened, as is now usually the case. Then, too, in television as in the book business, senior executives were always promising to look at somebody’s novel or TV script, which then got sent down to the story department for a reading.

The script readers were a mixed bunch, mostly young writers for whom this was the equivalent of waiting on tables for aspiring thespians. They were paid twenty-five dollars apiece for each report, so it wasn’t exactly a good way to get rich—still, neither was waiting on tables, and I’d already tried that.

The good part about the job was that I discovered I had a natural talent for putting the gist of a book or a script into a couple of paragraphs—no report could be longer than one page, which presumably represented the maximum attention span of a television producer. The bad part about it was that nobody who mattered at CBS paid the slightest attention to any of the reports.

The other bad part was that we weren’t really CBS employees at all. It was piecework, like an old-fashioned garment sweatshop. Work was handed out to us in a big, empty room at the CBS studio on West Fifty-seventh Street by means of a kind of daily shape-up. You never knew whether or not you were going to get a book or a script to read, so there was no way to guess how much money you were going to make a week. Some weeks I got lucky and was assigned five or six books; other weeks
I got only one or two. Of course, there was no health coverage or employee benefits, and I worked at home.

Nevertheless, being paid to read seemed like money for jam. It had simply never occurred to me that anybody would pay money, however little, for something that was as natural as breathing to me. The only problem was that I wasn’t being paid enough to live on and didn’t have any structure on which to build a life for myself.

Freelancers are generally not a clubby lot, but I had made one friend, Leslie Davison, and we sometimes met for coffee or a sandwich after we had picked up our work for the day. Her brother, Peter, she told me, was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston, a fact that did not deeply impress me, since I knew nothing about book publishing. Books appeared somehow, but the process by which they did so was a mystery to me.

The only writer I knew well was Graham Greene, and his relationship with his publisher seemed distant, to put it mildly. Once he had finished writing a book, his secretary typed it, sent it off to Max Reinhardt, the beaming and affable chairman and managing director of the Bodley Head, in London, and that was that. Apart from Reinhardt, the only book publisher I knew was George Weidenfeld. Just as the British film industry seemed to be run by Hungarian Jews, the British book-publishing business seemed to be run by German Jews.

Leslie Davison made it her task to persuade me that I should be working in book publishing. She had no wish to work for a publisher herself, but she thought I was ideally suited to be in the same business as her brother. I was not so much resistant as baffled—in all the fantasies I had had about my future, the one business I had never considered was book publishing. Still, I had to admit that there was something in what she said. I was a fast reader in three languages who liked books, after all.

Of course, I was too innocent at the time to realize the fatuousness of this reasoning. The fact that one likes good food does not carry with it any promise that one would make a good chef or be a competent restaurateur. A taste for wearing good suits does not make one a tailor. As it happens, many of the most successful people in book publishing hardly like books at all and very seldom read one, but I did not know this at the time.

There were, at the time, a lot of new and unfamiliar pressures on me. I was anxious to prove to my father that I could exist on my own in
New York (or anywhere else) and even more anxious to get out of the no-man’s-land of freelance work into something more secure. Moreover, I was now living with Casey, whom I had started to date when I was working for Sidney and who seemed likely to lose her job fairly soon, since Sidney had a feudal sense of property about her and apparently felt that he should have been consulted. When we decided, shortly afterward, to marry, he took even greater offense, and no wedding gifts were forthcoming from him or Madge.

At this time of my life, I was still haunted by my experience in Hungary, which was becoming harder to deal with the more it receded into the past. Apparently, the Hungarian Revolution had seeped down to my unconscious, along some hidden, Freudian pathway, emerging at night in my dreams. I slept restlessly—my head full of violent scenes and hidden dangers, not vague or fantastic ones but horribly realistic and familiar—with a sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. Often I kept a loaded pistol under my pillow, as if I expected the AVO (the Hungarian secret police) or the Soviet military police to kick in the door at any moment. It was not a good frame of mind in which to begin a relationship, nor for job hunting, but I felt that regular employment at something I enjoyed might help get rid of the nightmares.

I began to make a few tentative calls.

CHAPTER 3

B
ook publishing, it turned out, was not by any means easy to enter. The first difficulty was that it appeared to be rather like one of those English institutions—certain clubs and regiments, the Life Guards, the Grid or the Bullingdon at Oxford, Lloyd’s of London—that you couldn’t join unless you not only knew the right people but also understood all the unwritten rules. The second difficulty was that starting salaries were appallingly low. It seemed likely that I would actually be earning
less
money as a full-time editorial assistant than I was making freelancing for CBS, which hardly seemed possible.

Nor did book publishers seem like a particularly friendly lot. After responding to an advertisement in the help-wanted section of
The New York Times
, I was interviewed by the publisher of Henry Holt, an impressively
suited and aggressive executive type who read my résumé with deep mistrust. “It says here you went to Oxford,” he said.

I nodded.

“Can you prove that?”

The question startled me. I suppose Oxford does hand out diplomas of some kind, but I had certainly never bothered to collect mine, nor had anybody else I knew. It had never occurred to me that anybody would lie about things like that—or, perhaps more important, that anybody would suspect me of doing so. Besides, in England, one’s accent, one’s tailoring, one’s haircut, not to speak of a thousand other small and subtle class distinctions, make it almost impossible to fake things like that successfully.

With some embarrassment, I conceded that I couldn’t prove it. Could I prove the other stuff? he asked accusingly, thrusting a firm chin in my direction. School in Switzerland? Service in the RAF? I shook my head, feeling like an impostor. At any moment, I thought, he is going to ask me if I can prove that I’m Michael Korda. He stared at me darkly. “It says here you can speak French and Russian. That true?”

I said it was, a little defensively.

He looked at me with deep suspicion, and for a moment I wondered if speaking Russian might have made me seem like a subversive or a fellow traveler to him. Those were the days of the John Birch Society, the height of the cold war, with Ike and Nixon in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin, perhaps not the ideal time to claim a knowledge of Russian. Even the English seemed subversive to many right-wing Republicans, on the grounds that we didn’t take the cold war seriously enough.

My interviewer picked up his telephone and whispered into it. Was he calling for the police, I wondered, or for security guards to eject me from the building? We sat tensely for a moment, then the door opened and an attractive young woman entered. “Say something to her in Russian,” he said to me, with a smile of satisfaction. We spoke in Russian for a minute or so. She nodded at her boss.

A look of gloom settled on my interviewer’s face. He had clearly expected to catch me out in a lie. He waved her away, gave me a thin smile, and made a steeple with his fingers. “You can’t be too careful these days,” he said. He stood up, to show the interview was over. “You’ll hear from us,” he said.

I did not think that was likely, which proved to be correct. After
quite a few similarly depressing and unsuccessful interviews, I decided that something must be wrong with my résumé, though I couldn’t think of anything I could change. Would it be better
not
to admit to knowing foreign languages? Was it a mistake to say that I loved reading? Did the combination of Le Rosey and Magdalen College, Oxford, sound too frivolous or snobbish? Did my curriculum vitae lack the common touch? The few people who were willing to give me an explanation for turning me down said that I was overqualified to be an assistant editor, but one or two said that I was too inexperienced. They did not suggest how I was to gain experience, however.

Just as I was about to give up on the whole idea, I was saved by an old friend of my father’s, Morris Helprin (father of novelist Mark Helprin, who would eventually be my assistant). He had run the London Films office in New York during and after the war, and I had called him in case he had any suggestions. He had a friend, Herbert Alexander, who was a vice president at Pocket Books. Paperback publishing might not be what I was looking for, of course, but it might be a way to get my foot in the door, if I wasn’t too fussy to go into a business where sales meant more than literature. I denied any fussiness or snobbish love of literature, and Morris, the kindest of men, soon called me back to say that I had an interview with Alexander.

“By the way,” Morris added, as he was about to hang up, a note of warning in his voice. “Herb is a real down-to-earth guy.”

I said that I would bear that in mind, wondering just exactly what Morris meant.

“His bark is worse than his bite, just remember that. Don’t let him bully you, that’s all.”

Oh God! I said to myself and put down the telephone receiver with a sense of dread.

S
O FAR
book publishing had seemed to me a pretty staid business, so I was not prepared to find Herbert M. Alexander, vice president of Pocket Books, lying back in a barber’s chair while being shaved. Beside him, an attractive young woman in a smock was buffing his nails. At his feet, an elderly black man was on his knees, shining Alexander’s shoes.

The shoes, like Alexander himself, were outsize, resembling shiny black rowboats turned upside down on the beach. He was apparently a
big man, with the build of a wrestler, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a full belly. He had a big head, too, crowned with a crew cut, and wore tinted aviator goggles. He looked, in fact, just like the Americans in Gilles’s famous cartoons in the London
Daily Express
, an Englishman’s idea of what an American ought to be, right down to the button-down shirt, the narrow bow tie, and the massive class ring of God only knew what school or college. He had a big man’s voice, too, low and rumbling, though rendered somewhat indistinct by the fact that he was speaking through a thick layer of shaving cream.

He waved me over to sit down next to him and reached out to shake my hand hard. “Call me Herb, kid,” he growled brusquely, and immediately launched into convoluted narrative having to do, I dimly perceived, with the genesis of the mass-market paperback industry, in which Pocket Books had played a decisive role. Unfamiliar names rumbled by—Leon Shimkin, Jimmy Jacobson, Ian Ballantine, “Doc” Lewis, Robert De Graff—as Herb talked on and on about paperback publishing as if I were familiar with every moment of its history and everyone of consequence in it. As if to justify Morris Helprin’s warning about his bark, Herb’s theme seemed to be that I thought I was too good for the mass-market business. He did not say how he had reached that opinion, since he had not given me an opportunity to open my mouth.

For a big, tough-looking man, his speech was precise and even slightly academic in tone, like that of a college lecturer, though laced with the occasional profanity, presumably to show that he was a down-to-earth man at heart and not some bleeding-heart intellectual like me. From time to time he veered off into startling non sequiturs, weaving strange theories about the effect of history or economics or politics on book publishing. When he was off on a tangent, he sounded, in truth, a lot like one of those harmless cranks who believe that the Welsh are the lost tribe of Israel, or that the earth is flat, or that all world history is controlled by a secret cabal of Masons; at other times he sounded fairly sane. He had a fondness for baseball and football metaphors, which, since I didn’t play or follow either game, were entirely meaningless to me.

Through the torrent of his words I discerned, however dimly, the outlines of a story: In the beginning, all books had been published in hardcover form, at a relatively high price, until, in the mid-thirties, Robert De Graff conceived of selling paperback reprints in a small or
“pocket” size for a quarter, thereby bringing culture to the many instead of only the few. De Graff got nowhere with his idea, since every book publisher pooh-poohed it. Besides, it was a well-known fact that bookstores wouldn’t stock cheap paperback books, hardcover publishers wouldn’t sell the right to reprint their titles at any price, and anyway there was no unfilled demand for books out there in the marketplace. Books were a luxury item, and book buyers represented a small, educated market that wasn’t particularly price conscious.

Similar arguments had been made against book clubs, Herb pointed out, until Harry Scherman had founded the Book-of-the-Month Club and proved them wrong, but at least the book clubs still sold the ur-product, albeit in a slightly schlockier form sometimes. In any event, Leon Shimkin—a former part-time bookkeeper at Simon and Schuster who had risen to wealth and power as the protégé of the late Marshall Field III—somehow managed to wrest De Graff’s idea away from him, founded Pocket Books, and proceeded to prove that there was indeed a huge, untapped market for books at a quarter.