Another Life (17 page)

Like so many of the crises that occur between publishers and booksellers, this one proved to be a tempest in a teacup and soon died down—indeed, the swastika, which had hitherto been deemed unusable on book jackets soon became so popular, particularly on the covers of mass-market fiction, that the sight of the average mass-market display would have pleased Goebbels.

“It’s better to be lucky than smart,” a future president of S&S was to take as his motto, and it’s true enough, though it is probably better still to be lucky
and
smart. Certainly, it’s typical of the publishing industry
that a book that was long overdue and that might easily have been canceled for lateness—and that was rescued from obscurity only by luck and Bob Gottlieb’s shrewd, last-minute repackaging—should have brought S&S a huge profit, enviable publicity, and every possible award and honor. Everybody was delighted by this enormous and unexpected success, except, ironically, Shirer, who in order to avoid what were then very high taxes had insisted on putting a “limitation clause” in his contract, stipulating that he would not receive more than $25,000 a year in royalties. Infuriated that S&S was soon sitting on millions of dollars of his money without having to pay him any interest, he spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo it.

I
HAD
my own unhappy authors to deal with. The Durants, who had hitherto remained in Los Angeles, communicating by letter, were descending on New York, and Max was working overtime to ensure that they got star treatment from everybody at S&S. The party to greet the Durants was held at the Schusters’ New York apartment. The lone Chagall that constituted Max and Ray’s claim to be art collectors and connoisseurs hung above the fireplace, but for the most part the walls were covered by handsome bookcases, filled with stately S&S books, all of them arranged neatly in some order of Max’s devising. Among the many sources of frustration for S&S’s art director was the fact that the first thing Max did with a book was to take its dust jacket off and dispose of it. All the books in Max’s shelves showed only their bindings.

During the course of editing
The Age of Reason Begins
, volume seven of
The Story of Civilization
, I had corresponded a lot with the Durants and spoken to them often enough on the telephone to feel that I knew them, though they appeared to treat the telephone with suspicion. As a rule, neither of them took telephone calls alone. They spoke on separate extensions, Will’s voice ghostly, polite, and distant, Ariel’s louder and more aggressive. She often disagreed with her husband, and he often deferred to her. When he did not, she was in the habit of calling later, surreptitiously, as if afraid that he might overhear her, to instruct me to ignore his wishes. “Pay no attention to what Will told you,” she would whisper urgently. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Their persons matched their telephone voices. Although both of them were diminutive, Ariel was clearly the more dominating presence
and therefore seemed to loom larger than Will. Durant wore a well-worn, professorial blue suit. He had a good head of silver hair, a pink complexion, a neat little mustache, and a rather nervous expression, his eyes constantly darting toward Ariel as if in fear. He rather resembled a ferret. Mrs. Durant had the broad cheekbones of a Russian peasant woman, a fierce, prominent nose, dark, penetrating eyes, and large, mannish, ink-stained hands. She wore her gray hair in a kind of pageboy that looked as if she had done it herself at home with nail scissors, and her clothing seemed to have been made from woolens woven at home by a not particularly gifted weaver—they were basically shapeless and made up of many very heavy layers. Since it was warm in the apartment, I found it hard to imagine how she could bear to be so heavily dressed, but she never took a layer off. Both of them wore health-faddist “space shoes” that were molded to their feet, giving them ungainly duck-footed appearances.

Will’s handshake was warm but a little tentative. The Durants and I had clashed mildly from time to time during the editing of
The Age of Reason Begins
. Will saw history as the story of humanity’s constant struggle against ignorance and barbarism and preferred to write about art, philosophy, architecture, and poetry—i.e., “civilization”—than about warfare, battles, and diplomacy. I conceived it to be my duty to balance this and was constantly urging him to add more about the military and political side of history and correcting him on the subject of battles and armaments. He looked me up and down. “I was expecting somebody quite different,” he said. “More like the elder von Moltke.”

I apologized for not wearing my monocle, and we both laughed. Mrs. Durant did not. Her handshake was fierce, and her expression bellicose enough to satisfy Field-Marshal von Moltke himself. “Isn’t it disgusting?” she said in a gravelly stage whisper, audible, I felt sure, to Ray Schuster, who was standing a few feet away, Max at her side looking as if he had wandered in by mistake. “My poor Will labors away, half blind, year after year, for a pittance, mere
pennies
, while
they
”—she tossed her head in the direction of the Schusters—“live like kings on his sweat.”

“There, there,” her husband said, patting her hand. She withdrew it sharply, not to be mollified. “If they think giving us a party will make up for it all,” Ariel continued, her voice rising steadily in volume, “they can
forget
it.”

Her voice was low and guttural and her expression that of Madame
Defarge and her
tricoteuses
friends demanding the guillotine for an aristocrat. “You should
see
him,” she said, “working until midnight,
past
midnight often, sitting in his chair with a pad on his lap, writing, writing, writing, while I look up the references for him.… And
they
go on world cruises in the meantime.… They suck his
blood
.”

I was about to point out that the Durants had earned formidable amounts of royalties over the years, which, to judge from the way Ariel dressed, they must be hiding in their mattress, but it seemed wiser to humor her. Neither Durant drank, nor did they touch the hors d’oeuvres, Will because he was a vegetarian and Ariel because she would rather have put molten lead in her mouth than the Schusters’ miniature Swedish meatballs and tiny wieners on toothpicks.

We chatted about history for a while—Ariel’s view of it was darker and more Manichean than her husband’s, which possibly explains the tone of pessimism that crept into the later volumes of the series as she took on a more active writing role and won her place as coauthor—until Ray Schuster, apparently determined to play out her role as hostess, offered to take us on a tour of the apartment.

Ariel submitted to this unwillingly, her expression one of furious resentment, which reached its peak when we paused to view the Schusters’ Chagall. “Bought with our sweat and blood,” she hissed loudly, at which point Ray wisely decided not to continue the tour. (God knows what Ariel would have said at the sight of Ray’s dressing room or her closets.) Shortly, word came back that Mrs. Schuster wasn’t feeling well and that I should take the Durants out to dinner, together with whatever S&S personnel I might think it appropriate to invite, and the cocktail party ground to a merciful end.

Perhaps because I had taken them to dinner, the Durants came to the conclusion that I was on their side. They found me frivolous, insufficiently attentive to details, and reactionary in my view of history and made no secret of it, but all of this they could and did forgive so long as they could grumble about the Schusters to me and count on me to get Shimkin to release their royalty checks a few days early. Had I known that this relationship was destined to continue for another decade, I might have tried to correct their opinion of me, but I let it go and thus became stuck with my role.

Occasionally, over the years, they came to New York, but the cocktail party in their honor was never repeated. Ray absolutely forbade it.

*
Booksellers had threatened not to carry the first crossword-puzzle book with which Simon and Schuster had launched their company, on the grounds that because it had a pencil attached to it on a string it was a novelty item, not a book, something Max had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

CHAPTER 9

T
he real news in book publishing wasn’t about books. In fact it passed most of us by, probably because we were looking in the wrong direction.

In October 1959, a revolution of sorts had occurred when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public at $11.25 a share (it rose to $14 the next day and was soon selling for $45), setting off a boom in publishing stocks that quickly drew other companies, including S&S, into the stock market. It is probably coincidental (though ironic) that the moment when book publishing became the darling of Wall Street, ushering in a long period of mergers and acquisitions which is not yet over nearly forty years later, began with the death of Dick Simon.

Dick Simon,
The New York Times
noted with a rare touch of irony in its obituary of him, had persuaded a
Reader’s Digest
writer to turn an article of his into a book called
Sudden Death and How to Avoid It
, sold over 260,000 copies of it, and was now dead himself at the age of sixty-one. The age of the entrepreneurial publisher, whose drive and personal taste was enough to make a publishing house grow and thrive, was over.

Dick was, in fact, a victim of the same forces that had persuaded Cerf and Klopfer to turn Random House public, a combination of success and undercapitalization that had led Schuster, Simon, and Shimkin to sell S&S to Marshall Field III in 1946. By 1957, when Max and Leon bought the company back, Dick was too ill and too depressed to join them. He had become a rich man, at the price of his own health, sanity, and vitality. Cerf eulogized Dick in the
Saturday Review
: “He talked vaguely of starting another publishing house of his own,” Cerf wrote, “but his heart wasn’t in it … and he retreated into a cheerless world of his own. He spent his last days huddled in a heavy topcoat in an overheated room, pulling down the shades on the windows and locking the doors. He had hit upon this method of shutting out death.”

There was going to be a lot of this sort of sadness going around shortly in the publishing world, though thankfully not always of the tragic sort that engulfed poor Dick Simon. Shortly afterward, the Los
Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation bought New American Library; Macmillan bought Crowell-Collier; Western Publishing, Harcourt, Brace, and Holt, Rinehart, and Winston went public; Times Books and Bernard Geis Associates were founded; and, most significant of all, Random House acquired Alfred A. Knopf for about three million dollars in Random House stock.

The Random House/Alfred A. Knopf merger astonished everyone in book publishing. H. L. Mencken had called Knopf “the perfect publisher,” and while that might have been going too far, there is no doubt that the Knopfs’ pursuit of perfection and elegant taste made their house very special. Alfred Knopf had never bothered to disguise the mild contempt in which he held other, lesser publishers, including Cerf and Klopfer, which made it all the more surprising that he and Blanche sold their firm. One reason was that their son Alfred Knopf, Jr. (“Pat”), had felt obliged to leave in 1959 to cofound a new publishing house of his own, Atheneum, at which point his father, who had never paid much attention to his heir, began to brood darkly over the fact that he now had none. Knopf was reported to have been deeply grieved by his son’s departure, although he seemed to most outsiders to have done everything possible to bring it about.
^*

The Random House acquisition of Knopf made it clear that from now on the real money in books was going to be made not by writing or publishing but by buying and selling the publishing companies themselves. Although Cerf remarked that he “had every intention of continuing to publish books that lose money,” Knopf, in his Olympian way, caught the spirit of the merger better when he remarked “that the level of American publishing [was] already so low that the journey to Wall Street will make no difference.” Hardly was the ink dry on that deal than Random House also acquired Pantheon, which had been founded in 1942 by Helen and Kurt Wolff and was the most “European” of New York houses, with an enviable reputation for literary quality.

Less than four years later, Random House itself was acquired by RCA, partly in the belief that there was some kind of synergy between radio and television broadcasting and the book-publishing business, setting a pattern for the future acquisition of S&S by Gulf and Western (which owned Paramount) and of G. P. Putnam by Universal-MCA. Of
course, it was not show business that was driving these acquisitions at first—no movie studio has ever been foolish enough to buy a publishing house merely to get a crack at novels that they could see anyway and for the most part wouldn’t want. Instead, there was a starry-eyed belief in the future of educational publishing as a growth industry (the syllogism was “more children—more schoolbooks”), mixed with a hefty dose of good, old-fashioned greed.

It was clear that the book-publishing business was about to undergo a process of radical change at just the moment when unprecedented paperback sales such as those of
The Caretakers
and deals such as the one for
The Carpetbaggers
were raising the stakes dramatically for authors as well. Irving Wallace’s departure from Knopf over
The Chapman Report
was, in fact, a sign of the times. He came to S&S and Pocket Books in a deal that raised eyebrows throughout the publishing business. If the publishers thought they were going to get rich courtesy of Wall Street without the authors demanding their share, they were much mistaken.

B
OOK PUBLISHING
before the early 1960s was a remarkably stable industry. People often worked at the same company for years, often for a lifetime, while most authors tended to remain loyal to the house that published them. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were published by Scribner’s for decades, while their editor, the fabled Maxwell Perkins, spent his whole career at Scribner’s. Nobody in the book-publishing business in the 1940s or 1950s could have predicted that authors and editors would soon be switching from house to house with such rapidity that
Publishers Weekly
would find it hard to keep up with them, while the companies themselves changed hands almost as quickly.