Another Life (67 page)

Egged on by Mayer—an active partner if ever there was one—we drew up an enormously ambitious plan for publishing the book, not just because we wanted to earn our money back but because it had been a high-profile purchase. The fact that Adams had moved to S&S for his eagerly awaited second book was major news, and not just in publishing circles. We would look, not to put too fine a point on it, like
putzes
if it didn’t succeed. A big American tour was planned for Adams, specially bound reading copies, stamped with a gold-foil emblem of Shardik’s head, were prepared (that had not yet become a staple of book PR), and every effort was made to whip up the enthusiasm of the S&S sales force.

•  •  •

I
N THOSE
days, sales conferences were still relatively modest events, and the sales reps were mostly middle-aged men, schooled in a certain weary cynicism about “the product” they were called upon to sell. They had heard it all before, and their eyes showed it—novels that were supposed to be number-one best-sellers that went down the drain, books that were hailed by the editor as if they were the Second Coming incarnate that were ignored or reviled by the critics; in short, theirs was not a happy lot.

In those days, the editor presented his or her own books, and there was therefore a premium on being a “good presenter.” Bob Gottlieb’s presentations had been justly famous—he was capable of making even the dreariest and least promising of first novels sound like potential best-sellers and Nobel Prize winners. While the sales reps knew better than to believe more than 50 percent of what he said, they admired his performances and were willing to follow his lead. The truth was that they were always more than willing to be seduced. Besides, Bob was right just often enough to have gained some credit in their eyes. He had been right about
Catch-22
, he had been right about Charles Portis’s
True Grit
, right about Robert Crichton’s
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
, right about Chaim Potok, Jessica Mitford, and James Leo Herlihy, so they could forgive the number of times he had been wrong. Track record counted with the reps, and they had an infallible nose for bullshit.

I had inherited Bob’s mantle as the star performer at sales conference. I had learned from him to rise to my feet to present a book that was particularly important, to speak extemporaneously (very important, since most editors spoke from notes and droned on interminably, boring the sales reps to death with details they didn’t need to know or the plots of novels), to convey as much enthusiasm and sincerity as possible, even at the risk of being thought corny, and to elicit the maximum audience participation. That is not to say that the reps actually believed me any more than they had Bob—the only person they truly believed was Dick, because he told them the hard, basic facts of life, such as that anybody who failed to get so many copies of this or that book into their accounts would be fired, or that their bonus depended on getting out twice as many copies of a book as they thought possible.

For my part, I sympathized with them and liked them. I had been out “on the road” briefly myself, as a very junior editor, when I was taken from store to store and jobber to jobber throughout Georgia by J. Felton Covington, Jr., one of our most senior sales reps, a Southern
gentleman of the old school, whose laid-back manner, slow drawl, and deep courtesy were so appreciated by booksellers of his region that he was able to place some of Bob Gottlieb’s most difficult first novels in stores that normally only carried Bibles. Cov’s patience, his ability to sit for hours swapping stories with some small-town bookseller in order to get him or her to take half a dozen more copies of some book that Dick wanted pushed, or, not infrequently, some book that Cov himself fervently believed in, for like most sales reps, Cov was a big reader—there was not much else to do in the evenings, when you were on the road—his genuine interest in the lives of his customers, right down to the names and health of their dogs and cats, his inexhaustible good humor and bottomless stomach for coffee—no matter how many cups he had been offered and drunk during the course of a day, he always accepted another at the next or the last bookstore as if he hadn’t had a cup since breakfast—all this was the part of the book business that editors and the people at the top tended to overlook, or simply accept as normal.

Dick knew better. He drove the reps mercilessly, but he understood how important their job was, and on the whole was more at ease with them than with the editors, most of whom expected all their books to be taken at face value. Most editors lacked the reps’ fine, bracing cynicism and their hearty masculine hedonism. In those days, reps tended to be men’s men who ate well, drank a lot (after hours), played poker, enjoyed a game of golf, and were happy enough to relax by the pool at break times, trading publishing gossip and watching the girls go by.

All the same, being a sales rep was just about the toughest job in book publishing—the hours were punishing, the demands imposed on them were often unreasonable, and they were routinely bullied, prodded, and threatened at the end of every sales meeting, after days of having had to sit for hours on end in stuffy conference rooms, glassy-eyed with boredom, feigning interest as best they could. It was little wonder that they cut loose after dinner in the hospitality suite. The truth was that the reps truly loved books—cynical they might be, but in the end the people who
really
believed in the list in any publishing house were the reps themselves, not the editors. There wasn’t one of them who couldn’t have made more money selling almost anything else, but season after season they went out with their sample cases full of galley proofs and catalogs, convinced that this was the best list ever and determined to convince the even more skeptical booksellers and book buyers of the same.

•  •  •

I
N ANY
event, the reps had to be convinced that
Shardik
was going to work. At Dick’s suggestion, I sent each of them a bound galley with a personal letter, asking them to read the book before the sales conference and giving them my considered opinion that what we had here was a work of genius and a huge best-seller.

The presentation itself was considered by Dick to be so crucial that he sent me to bed early the night before, shooing me out of the hospitality suite by 10
P
.
M
. “Tomorrow is the big one,” he said, like a football coach. “Don’t blow it! Take my advice—get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I want to see you knock their socks off!”

Somewhat resentful at being sent to bed early like a child (just as things in the hospitality suite were getting interesting—somebody had pushed the poker players into the bedroom and set up a tape player in the living room for dancing), I brooded on what I would tell the troops. There was no question about it, this would have to be the presentation of a lifetime.

The agenda had been arranged so that there were lesser books before my big moment, which was to come just before the coffee break, so the reps would leave the room on a high—this was the kind of thing that Dick was a past master at orchestrating, down to the smallest details. I rose to my feet, the jacket of
Shardik
flashed on the screen, complete with the twenty-four-karat-gold bear mask, and I launched into my spiel. I talked to them about
Watership Down
, reminded them of its huge success, tried to convey the richness and subtlety of the plot, acted out key scenes, key characters, and rose to a crescendo of optimism and enthusiasm. I was moved myself, and I could see that I had my audience in the palm of my hand, that they would go straight from here to put out the biggest number of advance orders that S&S had ever had for a work of fiction. For once, I could see, there was no doubt in their faces. They were with me 100 percent.

Shortly before the morning session, I had been in the men’s room and overheard one of the reps saying to another that Hugh Collins, our Chicago rep, had read
Shardik
and loved it. Collins was perhaps the most prickly and curmudgeonly of the older reps, a hard-drinking Irishman with a hair-trigger temper who was not afraid of arguing even with Snyder. Collins was a difficult man to impress, so the fact that he
was a fan of the book would mean a lot to the rest of the reps. As I reached the end of my presentation, I saw Collins in the first row, among all the heavy hitters of the S&S sales force, and caught his eye. He looked cheerful enough, so I took the plunge. Sweating, exhausted by the sheer force of my own enthusiasm, basking in the admiration of everybody on the dais, I finally finished my presentation, and in the complete silence that followed—the phrase “you could have heard a pin drop” came to mind—I pointed at Collins and said, “But you don’t have to believe me. I know somebody else here who has read the book, and he’ll tell you what he thinks.” I paused for effect. “Hugh,” I said, “you’ve read
Shardik
. What did
you
think of the book?”

There was another long pause, during which just the slightest trace of doubt crossed my mind, now that it was too late. Everybody was looking at Collins, and I could see on his face a curious mixture of expressions. Enthusiasm was not among them, I thought. Finally he spoke. Somebody had passed him a microphone, so his voice boomed out, filling the room. He waved one hand from side to side. “
Comme ci, comme ça
,” he said, with the look of a man who has just bitten into a lemon.

That did it for
Shardik
. In the laughter that followed Hugh Collins’s comment—it turned out that whoever had said that he liked the book was thinking of somebody else—the book’s chances wilted. Unfortunately, the rest of the world voted with Hugh Collins.
The New York Times Book Review
, in a front-page review, even speculated that Adams might in fact have written the book before
Watership Down
. “How else,” the reviewer asked, “can one explain the amateurish quality which pervades so much of this book by a writer who has previously displayed such masterful gifts?” Most reviewers advised Adams to stick with rabbits, and
Time
made it clear to parents that
Shardik
was no children’s story.

Even Adams’s publicity tour did little to ameliorate the debacle. The truth was that his readers deeply resented the fact that he wasn’t writing about the rabbits of
Watership Down
and were not much interested in anything else he had to say or write. In the end, Hugh Collins’s remark was just about on the money.

Of course nothing lasts forever. In publishing there is always a new list, new books to enthuse about, more unforeseen failures and successes. Rather like farming, each new season cancels out the previous one and restores hope. By the time the disaster of
Shardik
was over (Mayer’s hopes had been washed away, too—the public didn’t want the
book in paperback, either), we were on to new things, this time centered on a very different figure than Richard Adams, whose popularity never recovered from his novel about the great bear and who retired to his tax haven to become a rather fussy English man of letters of a rather conventional kind, as if the fairy godmother whose kiss had given him the genius to write
Watership Down
had kissed him off after one book, then relegated him to the ranks of ordinary writers.

CHAPTER 29

A
t about the same time as I was coming a-cropper with Richard Adams, I stumbled upon a different kind of literature, which would eventually bring me many friendships with people who were not part of the book world.

There was a time when nothing much was known about the Mafia, and few books were written about it, but all that changed dramatically when Mario Puzo turned it, overnight, into an enduring American myth. Books were soon as much a part of Mafia life as pistols.

Long before I acquired a reputation for publishing books by “wiseguys,” I
knew
wiseguys. My son, Christopher, and I used to ride at Clove Lake Stables, on Staten Island, once or twice a week. On Thursday nights, the stable put on a floodlit “musical ride” for young riding students, in which up to twenty of them, mounted, performed intricate maneuvers in the ring, to the accompaniment of rousing martial-band music from loudspeakers. A lot of the kids were regulars, including one little girl, about Chris’s age, who was always brought to the musical ride by her father, a tall, bulky, well-dressed man, who was driven in a big, black, shiny Cadillac.

One cool, dusty autumn evening, I was leaning against the side of my black VW Beetle, when a large man in a belted raincoat and hat à la George Raft came over to me and whispered hoarsely, “Mr. F. wants a word wid yez.” He did not seem to be offering me a choice. He waved his thumb in the direction of the little girl’s father, who was leaning against the side of his Cadillac and wearing a camel-hair overcoat with the belt knotted loosely around his waist, a silk scarf, and a homburg.

Mr. F. and I shook hands, and he offered me a cigarette. His voice
was conspiratorial, even where no conspiracy was involved, and as gravelly as a trout stream. He had admired the way I brought my son out here to ride. No doubt I had noticed, he did the same for his daughter.

I nodded, wondering where this was going. Did I think that the fellow in the derby was a good instructor? Very much so, I said, happy to vouch for Paul Nigro. Mr. F. nodded. He thought so too. This Nigro fellow had told him that she would ride a lot better if she had her own pony—what did I think of that? I said I thought Nigro was probably right.

Mr. F. leaned closer, sharing his expensive aftershave with me. I should understand, he said, that he didn’t know a goddamn thing about horses. He liked a good day at the track, you couldn’t beat it, go with some good fellows, get some fresh air, win a few bucks.… He knew a lot of people in that world, but they weren’t any help when it came to buying a kid’s pony. Since I rode myself, did I have any idea where he might start?