Another Life (54 page)

The only other document of note was a lengthy report on an International Congress of Intellectuals, held in Warsaw in 1948, in which
Graham Greene was listed as a delegate, along with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier, Bertolt Brecht, Lord Calder, Ted Hughes, Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Benedict. A note at the bottom of the document warns that John Rogge, a former assistant attorney general from the New Deal, “is bringing to the Congress an address from Henry Wallace.” Apparently the worst the FBI could produce about Graham was that he might have listened to an address from the former vice president.

This was about the extent of the FBI’s knowledge of Graham Greene. There were no glamorous spies, no records of telephone conversations, no record of his visit to Fidel Castro or his travels in Vietnam, no dark accusations of opium smoking or visiting prostitutes, no mention even of his having been a member of the SIS or a close friend of Kim Philby. Far from being a thorn in J. Edgar Hoover’s side or the target of constant FBI surveillance, Graham had apparently hardly ever attracted Hoover’s attention.

Graham brooded darkly on the possibility that the FBI file was a fake, that somewhere they had concealed the
real
file, with all the dirt, and from time to time he urged me on to further effort, but nothing came of further inquiries. The bomb had turned out to be a damp squib, and no book was to come of it.

Perhaps because of that, our relationship temporarily lost some of its warmth, and eventually, with a typically cutting comment, he went back to Viking, ostensibly because he was dissatisfied by the number of copies we had remaindered of
Getting to Know the General
, a book about the late Omar Torrijos that had been difficult, if not impossible, to sell.

We continued to correspond, and I continued to see him whenever I went to Europe—in some ways it was easier to think of him as a friend when I was no longer his editor, though I am not sure the reverse was true. I had thought of Graham as old when I was fifteen, but now he really
was
old, his eyes an icy blue, so pale that he seemed almost blind, his face puffy where he had once been gaunt, yet he continued to travel, to write, to involve himself in countless lost causes. In his last letter to me, he said he was well, “except for the incurable disease of age.”

He never did win the Nobel Prize.

CHAPTER 23

B
y 1972, I had written hundreds of thousands of words for magazines and newspapers without the idea of writing a book ever having crossed my mind. Despite having edited God knows how many hundreds of books—many of which, truth to tell, might better have gone unpublished—the book still seemed to me something of a sacred object, not to be undertaken in a light spirit. When I thought of writing a book, I thought of Graham Greene rather than many of “my” authors, who seemed to have stumbled into writing books more or less by accident and learned how to do it, to the extent they had learned at all, by trial and error. It might seem odd that after so much exposure to authors, I still held naive illusions about authorhood, but such is the fact.

After the New York
Herald Tribune
closed its doors in 1966, Clay Felker, then the editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, reconstituted
New York
as an independent enterprise and eventually made it a home for the practitioners of what was then called “the new journalism,” including Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, and “Adam Smith.” “The new journalism” was hard to define, but in practice it meant writing nonfiction as narrative, with a clear-cut story line, strong characters, and as much pizzazz as possible. In the “old” journalism, typified by the news pages of
The New York Times
, the writer was ideally invisible—he or she reported the facts as objectively as possible. In the “new” journalism, the writer bullied his way into the story, sometimes overwhelming the people he was writing about, and inevitably blurred what had once been the fairly rigid distinction between nonfiction and fiction—a distinction that had in any event been
eroding under the influence of books such as Meyer Levin’s
Compulsion
(which presented fact as fiction) and the nonfiction of Norman Mailer (in which fact and fiction were indistinguishable). In keeping with the zeitgeist, the new journalism was almost by definition overheated, full of sound effects, and occasionally shrill. The people who were good at it, such as Wolfe and Breslin, were journalistic exhibitionists, media stars whose specialty was making even the humdrum and the insignificant seem important and, above all, exciting. Even the restaurant reviews had to be written like narrative stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which probably explains why the celebrity chef appeared as a culture figure then, since a writer could hang a story on him, as opposed to simply reporting whether the food was edible and the service good or bad.

The staff writers at
New York
constituted a small, clubby set; very much on the defensive, they were not exactly welcoming to outsiders or newcomers, and it was not then a place for which I thought of writing. When my agent Lynn Nesbit urged it on me, I was torn between reluctance—I feared being out of my depth—and enthusiasm, for I was getting tired of writing for women’s magazines, with their restricting format and narrow range of interests.

Almost from the first, the pieces I did for
New York
were splashy successes, in the sense that they were controversial, lent themselves to being cover pieces, and stirred up a lot of talk. I attribute this far more to Felker’s shrewdness—no magazine editor ever had a better sense of what would sell copies and start a buzz than Felker in his heyday—than to any skill or insight of mine. Indeed, the first piece I wrote for Felker came about only because none of the women’s magazines (nor the
Times
) wanted it. Some months previously, my wife and I had been dining out at a restaurant where two rather drunken men seated near us began to make remarks about her fairly low-cut dress. I kept my temper for as long as I could, but when they continued, despite a complaint to the owner, I lost my temper completely, grabbed a heavy cut-glass ashtray, and flung it with a good deal of force at the larger of the two men, hitting him neatly on the forehead. Once the ensuing fracas was over, I was astonished to find that Casey was furious with me. I had been under the impression that I was defending her honor, and that she would be grateful for it. She, on the other hand, felt that she had been handling a potentially embarrassing situation gracefully and without a scene and that I had acted on her behalf without even asking for her opinion—that,
in fact, it was not
her
honor that I was defending at all but my own, as if she were chattel or a possession of mine.

As I thought about it later, I decided that she had a point. I had assaulted the man because he was making lewd remarks about my wife—it was my own amour propre that was at stake, not Casey’s. I was not sorry to have thrown the ashtray at a rude and noisy oaf, but on the other hand I could understand that Casey felt the situation had been taken out of her hands.

Lynn Nesbit passed my account of the ashtray incident on to Felker, who instantly saw that it spoke to many of the questions that were beginning to trouble women about their relationships with men. Himself an unapologetic male chauvinist at the time, Felker nevertheless had an eagle eye for the kind of popular psychology that appealed to women readers, and he knew just what to do with the goods when he had them. My story appeared with a striking cover and was soon at the center of a fierce debate. For some time I had been writing, in
Glamour
, about the ways in which women were badly treated—or perceived themselves to be—in the workplace, using for examples the everyday evidence before my own eyes at S&S. S&S was not worse than anyplace else, but there was no shortage of horror stories about male chauvinism. Some men, then, felt that in the war between the sexes I had betrayed my gender.

With the piece in hand, Lynn Nesbit managed to persuade Nan Talese, then an editor at Random House, that she should commission me to do a book on the subject. With considerable misgivings, but won over by Lynn’s enthusiasm and Nan’s quiet confidence in her own judgment, I agreed. I did not ask anybody at S&S what they thought about my signing a book contract with Random House—the whole idea seemed to me so unreal that I didn’t take it seriously. Editors sometimes wrote books, I knew—Hiram Haydn, then at Atheneum, had written a novel, and it was not unknown for an editor to write a book about a subject that interested him or her, stamp collecting, or photography, for instance. Mostly, however, when editors wanted to become writers, they resigned, as Justin Kaplan had done when he decided to write a biography of Mark Twain. The general feeling was that an editor should be one thing or another and not “play both sides of the street,” as it were, but I couldn’t see what harm it would do, and in any case, despite Nan’s optimism, I took it for granted that the book, like most books, wouldn’t go anywhere.

Of course, that was underrating both the subject and my own
nascent ability to attract media attention, which had so far been hidden under a bushel from everyone, myself included. No sooner was
Male Chauvinism
published than I was swept into a whole new world, about which my only knowledge was vicarious, gleaned from people such as Jackie Susann and Connie Ryan—instead of organizing a book tour, I was doing one. The subject of male chauvinism was hot enough to get me on
Today
, Merv Griffin’s show, Irv Kupcinet’s show in Chicago, and even
The Tonight Show
(then starring Johnny Carson), not to speak of radio talk shows that I hadn’t even
heard
of. To my surprise, I did not suffer from stage fright—I was not my mother’s son for nothing, it appeared. Fame, it turned out, was transitory—twenty-four hours after doing
Tonight
, total strangers in the street recognized me on sight; forty-eight hours after doing it nobody gave a damn or could remember my name—but it was heady while it lasted.

I had stumbled across the idea of writing about power, thus fulfilling Carlos Castaneda’s prediction, because S&S was as fertile a ground for observation of the uses (and misuses) of power as it was for watching male chauvinism at work. The phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” could well have described S&S at this period, and it was no great leap to depict this in a book for the general reader. The book I had in mind was similar to one by the English humorist C. Northcote Parkinson, whose most famous book,
Parkinson’s Law
, was a tongue-in-cheek business manual, full of clever observations but not intended to be taken with an entirely straight face.

Nan Talese, who loved this idea, had no sooner bought it for Random House than, in a crosstown shuffle that was to become familiar, she moved to S&S and handed me over to Jim Silberman (who would later follow her to S&S himself).

Silberman liked the idea of a book about power, too, but his intention was for it to be taken seriously, as a guide to getting ahead, in the American tradition of self-help books. Had he told me this outright, I would probably have refused to do it or claimed that I didn’t know how. Very fortunately, he did not approach the problem frontally but merely led me by indirection (and by very clever editing and packaging) away from the fairly broad humor of Parkinson toward something that might be taken seriously by an ambitious junior executive. I thus found myself launched on the road again, this time in the role of an expert on power. Silberman had calculated shrewdly that the time was right for the subject.
The self-help career-advice book, a staple of American publishing since the days of Benjamin Franklin, had reached a kind of temporary peak with big best-sellers such as
Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No
and
Winning Through Intimidation
. The old tried-and-true message that had made Dale Carnegie famous (and Leon Shimkin rich) with
How to Win Friends and Influence People
had given way to more threatening and aggressive formulas.

Power!
had seemed pretty funny to me when I wrote it, but it didn’t seem to me to have the makings of a best-seller. That, however, was exactly what it became. Reviewed everywhere (often with outrage),
Power!
leaped onto the
New York Times
best-seller list just as Silberman had predicted. It was as if a blast-furnace door had suddenly opened, blinding me with the brightness within.
Male Chauvinism
had been a heady experience, but
Power!
was on an altogether different scale, a brief taste of what media celebrity is like, a ride on the uphill curve of a roller coaster.
Time
and
Newsweek
consecrated long articles to the book, media pundits wrote serious think pieces about what the book’s success portended for our society, I was lampooned and parodied by countless humorists, bitterly attacked by Richard Reeves in
The New York Times Book Review
—my first experience of being savaged as a person, as opposed to merely having my work savaged—and caricatured by cartoonists all over the country, even in
The New Yorker
(fame indeed!). I appeared on every possible talk show—in one hilarious encounter, Johnny Carson tried to move his desk into the “power position” as we tried to psyche each other out. I had—rather cavalierly—chosen blue as the “power color,” mostly because I have always been partial to blue when it comes to suits, shirts, and ties. If there was going to be a power color, I decided, why not blue? Soon after the book was published, people started having their offices painted blue and ordering blue carpets and upholstery, even at S&S and Random House, where one might have supposed people would know better than to take my word for it.