Another Life (63 page)

I offered to come back another time, if he wasn’t feeling well. Tennessee waved away the suggestion. He was feeling well enough. There followed a long pause, interrupted from time to time by somebody whistling “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” off-key in the kitchen, or possibly the bedroom, it was hard to be sure of the geography of the apartment. One sensed that there was a world beyond this room, but like characters on a stage in a play, we were cut off from it.

Had I had breakfast? Tennessee wanted to know.

I nodded. I was almost ready for lunch, in fact.

Tennessee sighed. “Ah have not,” he said gravely, and picking up a glass he emptied the contents of several other glasses into it, swirled it carefully to mix it up, and took a gulp. I wondered what it contained. For all I knew he might have been mixing vodka, bourbon, and curaçao, or for all
he
knew, for that matter. He smiled. “That’s better,” he said. What were we going to talk about?

I pulled the manuscript of one of the short stories out of my briefcase, together with some notes that John Herman and I had made. Tennessee glanced at them with a combination of deep suspicion and alarm. He did not seem to be in any state to go over them.

The phone beside him rang. He picked it up and listened intently. “Uh-huh,” he said, “uh-huh, uh-huh, baby.” He listened some more. I could hear the voice on the other end—a thin, angry, electronic squeak. Tennessee closed his eyes, wincing. “I’m real sorry,” he said. “Uh-huh … No,
real
sorry, baby … I mean it.…” He listened some more, then drew a card from the pocket of his dressing gown. He held it up close to his eyes, but was unable to focus on it. He held it as far away as he could, at arm’s length, but still didn’t seem able to read it. He turned it upside down, then, in a pleading voice, reading it as desperately as a
man on television who had forgotten his glasses might look helplessly toward the TelePrompTer for the words of his speech, unable to make out a word on its screen, he said very slowly, “No, baby, I can’t talk about it now, I’m in the middle of a meeting with …” He frowned, and tried turning the card the other way around. “With mah editor …” A long, anguished pause as he searched for the name, then, finally, with an audible sigh of relief, he thought he had it and gave it the old college try: “With mah editor Michael Kop-ta …” He gave me a questioning look over the top of his crooked glasses, and I shook my head. He put down the receiver.

“Michael Korda,” I said.

He nodded. “I know, baby,” he said softly. “It was on the tip of mah tongue.”

He sent me a very nice letter a few days later, just to make sure my feelings hadn’t been hurt by his lapse of memory, but, as I assured him, I didn’t mind a bit. Tennessee was a sweet man, and now that I’m closer to the age he was then or past it, I’m having trouble remembering people’s names, too, even without a hangover. About the confusion in the two stories I had come to discuss with him, Tennessee later commented: “Maybe [they] got mixed up a bit in your office. Offices do that to Mss., viz ICM … Sorry they didn’t make your Fall list … Fondly, Tennessee.”

He sent me a draft of a new story, “Old Sweetheart of the Keys,” about two cousins who own a decrepit bar on Dry Bone Drive, one of whom sits rocking on the veranda. Toward the end of the story, Tennessee had added in his unsteady handwriting a warning from one of the cousins to the other: “You can’t rock faster than death.” It was an image that appeared in my mind, not long afterward, when I heard that he had died in that cluttered apartment in February 1983, from a lethal, and perhaps deliberate, overdose of pills and alcohol, during which he choked to death on the cap of a pill bottle he was trying to open with his teeth.

We never did publish
Fairy Tales
. Somewhere in the margin of one of his stories, he had typed: “I am being interviewed by Gayblevision and I think I am being quite indiscreet in some of ’y [my] disclosures, but then I think, ‘When have I ever been other 5wise%(and is not all art an indiscretion if it is true.’ ”

He had promised me one more story, “The Final Strategic Retreat of General Scronch,” and to this day I’m sorry it never arrived.

CHAPTER 26

O
NCE S&S
was firmly established as part of “the G+W family,” flying to the West Coast became more frequent. After all, Paramount, our “sister corporation,” was there, and if any synergy was ever to take place, there would have to be some exchange of ideas on a person-to-person basis. Dick, who could take advantage of the G+W corporate airplanes, was frequently in Los Angeles and was soon on a first-name basis with everyone who mattered at Paramount. I was less enthusiastic about going there, but eventually Dick somehow managed to plant in Bluhdorn’s feverish mind the notion that I was the key to the synergy he craved between S&S and Paramount.

Since synergy was the ostensible raison d’ětre for having bought us in the first place, Bluhdorn was determined to see it flourish, or at least to produce an example of it for the shareholders, and it was eventually decided that Barry Diller and I were to meet at regular intervals so that I could brief him on the books we had under contract, just in case one of them might sound to him like a possible movie.

For many reasons, these meetings never took place, the most important of them being that Diller didn’t want to hear the plots of a lot of novels that he wasn’t interested in. His interest was aroused only by the novels he
couldn’t
get access to—those he could find out about simply by listening to me he automatically wrote off as useless. When he was in New York, he found innumerable reasons why he was unable to see me; when I offered—unwillingly—to see him in L.A., he also found reasons why that was impossible. Months, even years, went by, punctuated by angry memos and telephone calls from Bluhdorn, demanding to know when a meeting was going to take place. Eventually, Bluhdorn simply set the date himself, sent me over an airline ticket by messenger, and told me to go or else.

A limo picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Paramount, where I was to meet Diller for lunch in his office. When I arrived there, however, he wasn’t there, though a lavish cold lunch had been spread out in his sunny, spacious office. He was in Palm Springs and would probably not arrive before three, his secretary informed me.
I had brought some manuscripts with me, so I helped myself to lunch and settled down to read. Eventually, reluctantly, Diller arrived, full of apologies, and sat down to listen, with the expression of a man who is about to undergo root-canal surgery.

I didn’t blame him. Nothing is more boring than listening to somebody tell the plot of a novel. I resist listening to this kind of thing myself at all costs, even to the point of rudeness. My heart went out to Diller, but I had a job to do.

I promised Diller I would make it as quick and painless as I could. There was just one small point, I told him—traditionally, whenever somebody from outside the movie industry offers a movie person an idea or a story, he or she will listen politely—or as politely as anyone can listen whose only desire is to get on with the next appointment—then say, the moment their interlocutor pauses for breath, “Let me explain to you why that won’t make a movie.”

It doesn’t matter what the story in question is—it could be
Gone with the Wind
or
Funny Girl
—it is in the nature of a fixed, knee-jerk response to anything coming from outside “the industry,” or to the east of the San Bernardino Mountains. I explained to Diller that I had no vested interest in any of the novels I was about to talk to him about, that I was here only because Bluhdorn had made me come. I would do my number, he would listen, then I would go, and we could both report that synergy had taken place. The only thing, I begged him, was not to explain to me why none of these books could be made into movies, first of all because I didn’t care, and second because, having grown up in the movie business, I didn’t believe a word of it. Many of the things that “couldn’t be made into a movie”
were
eventually made into movies, often with success. A large number of the things that were “naturals” as movies were made and turned out to be flops—there were no rules.

Diller nodded sagely and agreed. He leaned back and waved me to begin. I read off the first title on my list and quickly summarized the plot. Before I could finish, Diller had raised his hand to silence me. “Let me explain to you why that won’t make a movie,” he said.

I shook my head and tore up the list.

Diller raised an eyebrow, but he seemed pleased and relieved. “I’ll let Charlie know that we had a successful meeting,” he said pleasantly, rising to shake my hand. He saw me to the door, we both reported a major blow for synergy, and the meeting never took place again—indeed,
once it happened, Bluhdorn apparently took it off his checklist and never mentioned it again.

I
T WOULD
not have occurred to any of us in the 1970s that we would one day look back on it as a golden age, at least in terms of the publishing business. Admittedly, the period in which the majority of publishing houses were still privately owned had gone, and with it the close, day-to-day relationship that had once existed between ownership and the editorial staff. Except for a few cases—Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for example, or (hanging on by the fingernails) Viking—ownership was now more remote, in some cases so remote as to be invisible. S&S was an exception only in the sense that Bluhdorn occasionally took a personal interest in our affairs, partly because he liked books and partly because Dick Snyder had won his respect.

Still, even Bluhdorn was as remote as Zeus for most of the people who worked at S&S. One could not imagine him dropping by people’s offices to share a joke with them, like Bennett Cerf at Random House, nor could one walk into his office to read him a couple of pages from a hot new manuscript, as people had often done with Dick Simon.

Management
in the recent past had been a meaningless term in most publishing houses. At S&S management consisted of hardly much more than the treasurer, Sy Turk, and his secretary, whose job under Shimkin had been to urge caution when ordering office supplies. At Random House, Viking, Knopf, and almost every other major publishing house, the situation had been roughly the same. Management was basically housekeeping. “The chain of command,” to use another term then unfamiliar in publishing, went straight from the owner(s) to the publisher (sometimes they were the same person) to the editors. The “business people” were on the sidelines, looking on in horror or, like Chicken Little, predicting disaster, but they were seldom brought into the meetings that really mattered. Their advice, if sought at all, tended to be sought after the fact, the usual question being some version of “This is what we’ve decided to do, now how do we pay for it?”

With publishing becoming a big business and the major houses increasingly owned by outsiders, the concept of management took on a whole new meaning and importance. The managers of RCA, which
owned Random House, and Gulf + Western, though very different companies, both wanted their publishing asset run like a business, and at most levels were really at ease only when talking to businessmen like themselves. Dick realized this early on and began transforming himself from a successful publisher to a businessman/manager, though he never lost his publishing skills or altogether gave up his hold on the publishing process. Everywhere, though, however it was accomplished, management, hitherto despised, took on a new importance, with the effect that layers of management began to surround the editors and the publisher, who soon found themselves subordinated in the new pecking order. Instead of being at the top, those who actually published and edited the books found themselves gradually relegated to the bottom, reporting to managers who soon constituted a whole separate and more powerful element within the house. Rather than to books, these people were dedicated largely to proving to the owner that the publishing house was being run like a serious business and in compliance with the parent company’s demands, rules, and expectations.

Forecasts—always nebulous in a business where a single unexpected best-seller can turn a poor year into a good one and where sheer dumb luck operates almost as mysteriously as it does in the movie business—became enshrined as “business plans,” which were soon engraved in stone. Targets were set and had to be met, numbers had to be produced in huge quantity and ever-growing complexity to justify any decision. This soon required a large number of bureaucrats.

The one thing that had set book publishing apart from most American businesses was that the great majority of the people who worked at a publishing house were actively engaged in acquiring, editing, and producing the final product. There was no thick layer of management and bureaucracy, as there was in such supposedly “modern” businesses as car manufacturing or television, which is why a couple of really big best-sellers was all it took to produce a terrific year. The number of people involved in the process was small, and they were comparatively low paid, hence overhead was low and a sudden increase in profit instantly noticeable. Conversely, a bad year, one in which there were no surprise best-sellers, could be ridden out, often without letting anybody go, since the company was staffed leanly to begin with. Book publishing
looked
inefficient to the outside observer, but it in fact had all the advantages of a guerrilla army over a standing one: It could live off the land,
change direction quickly, and needed no expensive and cumbersome general staff to guide it.

Now, however, without the actual business of buying and selling books having changed in any appreciable way,
^*
publishing houses began to take on all the appurtenances of conventional big business. In short order, there were more people managing than there were actually publishing books, many of them basically managing the editors, who became, as it were, the smallest—or perhaps more accurately, the least powerful—cogs in the machine and certainly the most carefully scrutinized.