Another Life (25 page)

London, of course, presented graver dangers. Given the common language, it was always possible that Max
might
buy a book, if only by accident. The heads of the major British houses were regarded as a particularly wily lot, by no means above pitching a book to an American visitor after offering him a stultifying meal in which three or four different wines had been served, followed by mighty snifters of brandy with the cigars. Many an American publisher had woken up with a hangover in his bedroom at the Connaught or Claridge’s to find that he had
bought a book that he couldn’t remember a thing about and which, in the cold, gray light of a London morning, seemed to have no relevance at all to American readers.

Senior editors who had acquired the right to make an annual London trip were expected to be more discriminating, of course, and to work harder, but it was still basically a perk and a much coveted one at that. In my case, of course, going to London from time to time was normal—I was born there, after all, my family was there, and I was a British subject—besides which Casey was a devoted Anglophile, so determined to absorb British culture that she taught herself to speak with a distinct English accent.

Since I had to be in England from time to time for personal reasons, it was only natural that I should arrange to see a few British publishers while I was there. Thus, I dipped my toe into the waters of London publishing without having been authorized to do so, much to the annoyance of those whose prerogative it was. I didn’t care—S&S wasn’t paying for my trips to London, my father was.

The first British publisher I called on was George Weidenfeld, who, like my father and my uncles, was a Central European Jew who had prospered in England and become, in some ways, more English than the English. I had met him many years ago in his Belgravia flat, when my Aunt Alexa took me to one of the parties for which Weidenfeld was already famous. For an Oxford undergraduate, Weidenfeld’s parties were something of an eye-opener—heady mixtures of writers, artists, important foreigners, celebrities, beautiful women, and even royalty, presided over by a host who combined charm, cunning, and chutzpah to a degree that I had rarely encountered outside my own family.

My first impression of Weidenfeld was that he was not exactly a prepossessing figure. He was short and rotund, with a blunt, hooked nose, a balding head circled by a narrow, tonsorial circle of graying black hair, plump jowls, and a double chin covered with dark-blue five-o’clock shadow. There was a fine sheen of sweat on his face. His hands were small, plump, blunt fingered, the nails short and carefully manicured. In one of them he held, with surprising delicacy, a half-smoked cigar, its aroma dominated by that of his cologne, sharp and powerfully sweet, like overripe fruit in the tropics.

His accent was curious—a thin, surface layer of fluent upper-class English over a foundation of other, more guttural languages. The effect was in some ways more foreign than if Weidenfeld spoke English badly,
like my father. The elegance of his appearance was marred slightly by the fact that he shaved carelessly, leaving several patches of stubble on his plump cheeks—clearly, his good fortune did not yet extend to a valet.

In fact, he was, even then, a man of many achievements. He had fled Vienna just ahead of the Nazis, then made his way to London, where, without money or connections, he soon founded a literary magazine,
Contact
, from which his publishing house, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, eventually emerged and prospered. In 1949, he was invited to be personal assistant to Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, and managed to hold on to that post while remaining a British subject and continuing to run
Contact
.

“I’m a great admirer of your father’s,” Weidenfeld said, the first time I met him. The mobile, expressive face moved close to mine, the voice dropping to a whisper. “
The Four Feathers
is one of my favorite films.”

“That was my Uncle Zoli’s film, actually. My father is Vincent, the art director.”

“I’m a great admirer of his, too,” Weidenfeld said blandly, his eyes already searching over my shoulder for bigger game. “You must come here again, please.”

When I saw him again after nearly nine years, George had invited me to breakfast at his house in Chelsea. The day before, he called to ask what I would like for breakfast. I said bacon and eggs would be fine. Anything I liked, George said expansively—eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes: a real English breakfast.

The next day, I turned up exactly on time and was greeted by a foreign manservant in a white jacket who looked astonished to see me. He reluctantly showed me into the living room, where the debris of a party was still in evidence. From somewhere nearby I could hear the sound of a shower, followed by a murmur of conversation. I heard the sound of toothbrushing and prolonged gargling. About half an hour later, George appeared, beaming with goodwill, as if I had not disturbed him in the middle of his toilette. We chatted about publishing until the manservant came back to say that breakfast was ready.

We sat down in a small but beautifully furnished dining room. The manservant, holding a pot of coffee, his face a picture of gloom, leaned over to whisper in George’s ear.

“It appears that there’s no bacon,” George said.

“Eggs will do just fine.”

“Ah, splendid.” The manservant leaned over to whisper again. George frowned. “There are no eggs, either,” he said.

It was now clear to me that George had forgotten all about our breakfast date. “Toast will do fine,” I told him, conscious of the fact that I was becoming increasingly hungry.

“I’m afraid there’s no bread in the house, for some reason,” George said. “I could send him up to the King’s Road to buy a loaf?”

I said not to bother, and we contented ourselves with coffee. Now that the crisis was over, George relaxed and offered me a job, which he was to do every time we met over the next twenty years or so. I said that I would rather be his friend than his employee, which pleased him, though he answered, “But my dear boy, you could be
both
!”

By the time I was back on the street and looking for a taxi, I had committed myself to buy one of George’s books—I was already wondering how I was going to explain it to S&S —and accepted an invitation to one of his parties, which was taking place in two days’ time.

I had altogether forgiven him for having forgotten that he had invited me.

“D
ID YOU
realize that it’s a
costume
party?” Casey asked me when the formal invitation arrived in the morning post.

I shook my head. George hadn’t mentioned that detail at all, but there it was in cold print—or, to be more accurate, in raised italic engraving:
“Costume de rigueur.”
My first thought was one of relief—we didn’t have costumes, so we couldn’t go—but I could tell from the expression on Casey’s face that she was determined to go. After a day of unrelenting improvisation, aided by a quick visit to Berman’s, the famous theatrical costumer near Covent Garden, we were able to turn up for George’s party as Gypsies, Casey in a revealing dress with many necklaces around her throat, and myself with a sash, the kind of shirt a Gypsy violinist might wear in a Central European restaurant, and a bandanna tied around my head, à la Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in
The Private Life of Don Juan
.

The whole world seemed to have congregated in George’s house. It was rumored that Princess Margaret was coming later on—it was not true, but it made everybody even happier to be there. It was obvious at
once that most people had gone to a lot more trouble than we had. I was mildly startled to see Victor Weybright, the publisher of New American Library, a man with a heroic paunch, appear as a red-stained Native American in a brief loincloth, deerskin moccasins, and a feathered headdress. There were the usual Pierrots, Mephistopheleses, and Napoleons, several slave girls and Cleopatras, even a few visiting American publishers, including Jim Silberman of Random House, who had ignored the instruction and turned up in business suits. To my surprise, Cornelius Ryan was there, dressed in a domino, presumably as a Venetian nobleman, holding a mask close to his face as he talked earnestly to a man dressed as a New Orleans riverboat gambler, complete with a waxed mustache and a velvet waistcoat. I went over to say hello. “Thank God,” Connie said. “Someone who looks as out of place as I am.” He introduced me to the riverboat gambler, who turned out to be a distinguished historian. Connie’s wife, Kathy, was there somewhere, he said, dressed as a Greek goddess. Which one? I asked. Connie grabbed a drink from a passing waiter and tossed it down. “Jesus Christ, boyo,” he said, “how the hell would I know? You’re the one with the education in classics.” I began to move away—Connie could be edgy and aggressive when he’d had a few drinks, and I didn’t want to be around if things got ugly—but before I could put any distance between us, an apparition bore down on us that silenced even Connie.

It was our host, dressed in Middle Eastern regalia, either as the vizier of some exotic Arabian court or possibly Ali Baba. He wore a black-and-gold floor-length robe, a high gold turban with a big fake diamond and an ostrich-feather plume, gold sandals with curled, pointed toes, and a sash, in which he carried a great curved sword. With his dark, predatory eyes, his curved nose, his plump, beringed hands, and his knowing smile, George looked as if he would have been right at home in the streets of old Baghdad. At any moment, he seemed likely to produce a flying carpet for sale.

Connie lit a cigarette—no easy task in a mask—and leaned close to George. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, George,” he said, his soft Irish voice blurred only slightly by drink.

George waved his cigar like a magic wand, as if granting permission.

“Tell me,” Connie went on, “how it is that a man like you is always surrounded by beautiful women?” Connie gave George a good look, from turbaned head to slippered foot. “I mean, let’s be frank, boyo,
you’re fat, you’re bald, you don’t exactly have a handsome puss. What is it they see in you?”

This was a question that many people had asked themselves over the years. George had even managed to actually marry several very wealthy women, without whom it is doubtful that neither Weidenfeld and Nicolson, with its otherwise slim resources, nor George’s own lifestyle, which was princely, could have been kept afloat.

Charm, of course, was one answer. Attention was another. With George, listening was a fine art. And George not only listened—in four or five languages—he
remembered
, and as a result he was a repository of gossip about everybody who mattered, so that he could always keep a woman amused.

George seemed to be running through his abilities in his mind, but then he gave a seraphic smile and beckoned Ryan closer to him. “My dear Connie,” he said pleasantly, “it’s very simple.” He spoke clearly and slowly, as one might to a child. “You see,” he said, “in certain circles I am known”—he paused dramatically—“as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”

It was the one thing I hadn’t considered.

Whether it was true or not, George had trumped Connie, who gave a forced laugh and crept off to get drunker as the evening wore on. I looked at George. He gave me a knowing wink, then stepped back into the crowd of friends and hangers-on, as splendid as Harun al-Rashid, leaving behind him a fragrant trail of cigar smoke and cologne.

You couldn’t help admiring a man like that, even if he
had
just sold you 25,000 copies of a book you didn’t want.

W
HEN
I told this story to someone at lunch the next day, she nodded gravely, as if to confirm that this was a well-known fact in British publishing circles. The London publishing world was (and still is) far smaller than ours, and people in it much more closely knit, “clubby” in a way that ours is not. That perhaps explains a certain bawdiness that is largely lacking in New York publishing circles, as well as numerous eccentricities of personal behavior, so beloved to the English mind.

It was impossible not to envy the British publishers. They seemed to be having a far better time than their American counterparts, and while they undoubtedly made less money, they often had more interesting or
controversial lists, in those innocent days before the American houses bought up so much of the British book-publishing industry.

It was easy enough to understand why senior American publishers clung to their prerogative of making the London trip. In the various power struggles that had taken place at S&S since the death of Jack Goodman, this gradually became the jealously guarded privilege of Peter Schwed, who had risen from manager of the rights department to publisher, though in fact he was a busy and prolific editor, specializing at first in sports books.

Schwed, a wisecracking man, with a wide knowledge of sports and a good head for numbers, had more or less elbowed aside the somewhat more literary and less aggressive Henry Simon, not without some residue of bad feelings on both sides. Henry was a Columbia graduate and a scholar turned editor, while Schwed was a Princeton man (and vocally proud of the fact) who had worked at the Provident Loan Society (basically a genteel pawnbroker) before becoming a decorated artillery officer in World War Two and then joining S&S. Henry was gray-faced, melancholy, tall, rail-thin, and stooped, while Schwed was deeply tanned, assertive, short, stocky, a fiercely competitive athlete whose passion was tennis. Henry Simon was on his third marriage, while Schwed was outspoken about the happiness of his marriage. They were opposites in every possible way.

Schwed made his annual trip to London a kind of public event, in the nature of a royal progress, with an elaborate hour-by-hour, day-today itinerary, distributed in advance to everyone of note in the company. So far as it went, this was OK—one could ignore it or not. More difficult to ignore was the Dictabelt full of notes he mailed every day, which was typed up by his faithful secretary and circulated. These transcripts ran to many pages, from blow-by-blow accounts of Schwed’s tennis games to the menus of his dinners with authors and publishing luminaries. Since, in those days, British agents invariably used an American counterpart to sell their books in the United States, those of us who had remained at home were obliged to call the American agent for every book or book outline that Schwed mentioned. We then had to read and report on whatever it was with scrupulous attention because Schwed, who had a statistical kind of mind and reveled in lists and numbers, kept elaborate records, as he was determined to show Schuster and Shimkin that his trips were worth what they cost.