Another Life (60 page)

*
Dominique Lapierre tested this by slipping a hundred-dollar bill into the copy of the manuscript he gave Lazar to read. Lazar returned the manuscript saying how great it was, the hundred-dollar bill still in place.

CHAPTER 25

G
ulf + Western’s purchase of S&S took place at just the moment when Dick Snyder had engineered his greatest triumph and brought about the publishing coup of a lifetime. It was to transform him overnight into a major publisher and a celebrity in his own right.

I had thought it odd when he called me at home from Washington late one night, speaking in a deep, conspiratorial whisper. Can anybody overhear our conversation? he wanted to know. Only the cats, I told him, but he was in no mood for banter. “This is serious stuff,” he growled. “Listen.”

I listened. For some time, Dick had been traveling to Washington. I attributed this in part to a desire on his part to get away from New York and home and in part to his burgeoning friendship with David Obst, a beaming, bearded young agent who then specialized—insofar as he had any direction at all—in Washington political books. As the Watergate scandal heated up, this category, once tepid, had become red-hot. The focal point of public interest was no longer New York, nor even Hollywood,
but Washington, and Obst, by a singular combination of sheer dumb luck, extravagant chutzpah, schoolboy charm, and shrewdness had managed to carve out for himself a special niche as the literary agent for political figures in trouble. It was said that what you needed to survive in Washington in the early seventies was a good criminal lawyer and a book contract, and Obst became the man you called the moment you were indicted.

Obst resembled a plump, Jewish Jimmy Stewart, if you can imagine such a thing, which is to say that his persona was that of a country bumpkin in the big city, but underneath that facade, he was fiercely ambitious. He suffered from neither fear nor shame. He would not have hesitated to walk right up to a widow at her husband’s funeral and sign her as a client if he thought she had a story to tell. What he was
not
was disciplined, organized, or a businessman, and in Snyder he found at once the ideal purchaser of his goods and a kind of surrogate older brother, tough, demanding, smart, but willing enough to let his hair down and have a good time once the deal was done.

It was love at first sight on both sides. Dick had been looking for somebody to mentor, as well as a territory of his own. He could leave me to do big-ticket fiction and the occasional piece of nonfiction. He found in Fred Hills somebody (at last) who knew how to do lucrative self-help books. He eventually hired Nan Talese for quality and Jim Silberman for solid midlist books, but he himself, with the help of Alice Mayhew, made Washington his turf and the Washington political book his specialty. (The fact that all these people came from Random House did not stem from any vendetta on Dick’s part after the defection of Gottlieb—it was simply that Dick believed in hiring the best people he could get, and Random House was full of them at that time.)

What he was calling me about in such secrecy was a book Obst had steered him to by two young reporters at
The Washington Post
. Knowing my lack of interest in politics, he did not bore me with the details. I had to believe, he said, that these two guys, whom he had just met, were onto the biggest story of the decade, maybe the biggest political story of the century. This would be a sensational book, one that might bring down the president, even change the country. I had never heard my friend sound so excited.

Did he want my opinion? I asked. If so, I would need to know a little more. No, he said, with a trace of impatience, he didn’t need my fucking opinion. Politics was something he knew more about than I did.
This was a terrific story, and that was that. The question he wanted to ask
me
was whether I thought he should buy the book on the spot, before some other publisher got wind of it.

Up until this point, Dick had left the buying of books to other people—not that he didn’t second-guess them or that he didn’t reserve to himself the final decision about money—since that was, after all, their job. He hadn’t ever stepped out of the careful structure by which books were reviewed and considered to make an offer for one himself. I divined that he wasn’t seeking my approval—the idea would not have occurred to him—but wanted to cover his ass just in case the whole thing blew up on him—he could at least say that he had discussed it with me. After all, I
was
editor in chief.

“Well, given that I haven’t a clue if it’s worth buying,” I said, “how much is Obst asking for?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“That’s no big deal, Dick,” I said.

“I
know
it’s not a big deal. Should I do it, though?”

I thought for a moment. So far as I was concerned, Dick could buy anything he liked; besides, he was right—he
did
know more about politics than anybody else at S&S except Alice Mayhew, and his gut instinct about books, despite the fact that he did not always bother to read them, was impressive. “Listen,” I said, “when I called you about Carlos Castaneda, you said the only thing that matters in this business is having the guts to back your own hunch when it really matters. So back your own hunch. I don’t see how you can go wrong, frankly. And if you do, what the hell, it’s only one book, right? Say Obst got you drunk.”

Dick laughed. “I’m getting Obst drunk, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’m going to screw world rights out of him.” It was the last time I ever caught that note of hesitation in Snyder’s voice, at least when it came to political books, because what he brought back from Washington was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
, which did indeed change America and played a major role in bringing down Nixon. More important, it transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of the media.

In the newspapers, in the weekly magazines, and on the television networks, journalists had always considered the book to be a kind of lumbering dinosaur, slow and irrelevant. Books contained history, not news. With surefire instinct, Dick made
All the President’s Men
(and later
The Final Days
) not only newsworthy but
news
. This was publishing
what the French call
les actualités
, news as it happens. The book was “embargoed” until publication day, there were no advance galleys for reviewers, the papers had to send people to stand in line at stores on publication day. In the meantime, every magazine and newspaper fought over the serial rights, the movie rights were bought, and nobody talked about anything else. Dick’s bet paid off as never before in the history of publishing. It changed a lot of other things as well: for a time, our offices were bugged by who knows which government agencies; we became perhaps the first book publisher where certain offices had to be regularly swept for bugs; Woodward and Bernstein became major celebrities (even before they were portrayed so glamorously by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman that a whole generation of young Americans decided to go to journalism school); the newspaper business, which had been declared dead by television journalists, received a new lease on life; and Snyder’s judgment about books, never tentative to begin with, became an article of faith at S&S.

As the decade wore on, S&S became
the
Watergate publisher: John Dean, Maureen Dean, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell all became S&S authors, David Obst was launched—briefly—into superstar orbit as an agent, and money poured in—very fortunately, since G+W was not the kind of company that would have wanted a “showcase” publishing house that broke even, however proud Bluhdorn might be of owning it. Indeed, it was Dick’s peculiar genius that he at once understood that if growth was what Bluhdorn lived and breathed, growth is what he would get, and that the fastest way to grow was not to publish more books, but to buy up other publishing companies—in short, to make S&S a miniature version of G+W, by following the same methods. Watergate fueled a lot of this optimism about book publishing at the higher corporate levels of G+W—nobody paused to ask what we would do when the scandal finally ebbed. It quickly became the pattern to rely on some outside miracle to balance the books at the end of the year, an unfortunate pattern that was still followed twenty-five years later when the death of Princess Diana made many a publisher’s numbers look good, including those of S&S.

Watergate made more careers than it unmade, though not everybody did well in the long run. Woodward went on to become a perennial best-seller and star journalist, Dick and Alice Mayhew rose in their separate (but linked) trajectories, but Bernstein eventually plummeted, and David Obst, who had begun the whole thing, ended up an S&S employee,
representing the company in Los Angeles, and eventually sank for many years into obscurity, outstripped in fame by his wife, who became a much talked-about movie producer. It was a melancholy ending to a spectacular if short-lived career. The position of “West Coast editor” was in any case, at S&S as at most companies, a kind of elephant graveyard, a sinecure without power or responsibility for those whom the management hesitated to fire for one reason or another. Dick had done his very best for Obst—he was conscious of the debt he owed him and of their friendship—but the job itself was a dead end. (Later on, when Dick was picked by the press as one of “the toughest bosses in the country,” this and many other acts of generosity were ignored, in favor of constructing an image of meanness that was never a reality.)

That is not to say that life couldn’t be difficult at S&S. Dick was determined to build up a strong editorial team, by which he meant a team of what he liked to call heavy hitters. The truth was that he was only really comfortable with those editors whom he had long ago learned to trust. New ones were hailed briefly as “stars,” given freshly redecorated offices and inflated titles, then subjected to what must have seemed to many of them a system of institutionalized hazing that few survived. Nan Talese, though often miserably unhappy, survived, partly out of saintly patience, partly because she was capable of looking Dick directly in the eye if sufficiently provoked. Stubborn defiance from women he understood, and he usually backed off at the last moment. Richard Kluger, now a distinguished nonfiction writer, was brought in from the world of journalism under the impression that he was to have carte blanche to publish his own list of serious nonfiction books, only to find himself relentlessly criticized by Dick, who discovered that Kluger couldn’t—or didn’t want to—fight back. Kluger eventually resigned on the grounds that the job was making him blind. Patricia Soliman was hired away with much fanfare from Coward-McCann, where she had had a very successful career as a publisher and editor of popular fiction. She was allowed to create for herself an office environment in which everything was painted pink and mauve, given the meaningless title of “associate publisher” (which was Dick’s way of encouraging editors to think of themselves as part of management without giving them any power), then terrorized to the point where she could hardly perform. Some unhappy recruits, such as Erwin Glikes and Larry Ashmead, went on to spectacularly successful careers after their experiences at S&S (at Basic Books and HarperCollins, respectively) but looked back
at their time there, in the words of Ashmead, as “the unhappiest years of my life.”

None of them was unhappier than Henry Robbins, whom Dick wooed away from his job at the distinguished literary house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robbins was a man who took himself and literature seriously (he was inclined to confuse them) and had brought a steady stream of literary writers to Farrar, Straus, most of whom were devoted to him. It was Dick’s hope that Robbins would not only bring with him a good many of his writers but give S&S the literary reputation that had mostly so far eluded it.

Unfortunately for Robbins, Dick’s commitment to the cause of literary fiction was not only skin-deep but profoundly ambivalent. He wanted the kudos of publishing literary fiction but disliked the fact that most of it loses money. Besides, almost from day one Robbins seemed to him pugnacious, arrogant, opinionated, and self-righteous. It might have missed his attention, however, that Robbins, a classic type A personality, had an even shorter fuse than he did.

At first, Dick rather enjoyed the occasional spat with Robbins, under the impression that, like himself, Robbins enjoyed a good fight for its own sake, but gradually it dawned on him that Robbins
meant
it, that there was no way he would back off, shake hands, have a good laugh, and get back to work. On the contrary: He conceived of his role as that of the defender of literary values against the philistines, with Dick playing the role of philistine in chief. Every novel that Robbins brought to the editorial board was a sacred cause—not only did he not hear any criticism of it from other readers, but he did not even
tolerate
questions, however well-meant or harmless. He did not compromise. Reasoning with him, as Churchill complained about de Gaulle, was like trying to reason with Joan of Arc.

Things finally came to a head when Dick issued an invitation to Barry Diller to have lunch with the S&S editorial board. This was partly yet another attempt at “synergy” and partly to show Diller that we were professionals, not naive, wide-eyed literary enthusiasts. Dick lectured us seriously before Diller’s appearance and warned us to be on our best behavior, like a headmaster getting his students ready for a visit by an important school benefactor. It is a pity that he did not notice the smoldering anger in Robbins’s eyes on being told that a movie mogul was coming to lunch to hear us discussing books.

Diller, when he turned up, was as un-mogul-like as it is possible for a studio head to be—elegant, sardonically witty, charming, deferential, he went out of his way to fit in. Robbins, however, was a frightening spectacle. His face was contorted with anger, his eyes blazing, his hands clutching the silverware so hard that his knuckles were white. I tried to kick Dick under the table, but he was oblivious to any warning. The soup was being served as Diller, in a gentle voice, explained what Paramount could do to help us, and what we might be able to do for Paramount. Alas, no sooner was the soup plate placed before Robbins than he seized it and, in a burst of temper, flung it across the room toward Diller—luckily missing him. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to some goddamn movie person tell us how to publish books!” he yelled, then stood up and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.