Another Life (36 page)

The truth was that Bob’s character disguised not only his ambition but a certain steely authoritarianism. He wanted to run things by himself, in his own way, but in spite of this need to dominate he always wanted to be loved. His was altogether the spirit of a benevolent monarch who both craves and needs his subjects’ love. It was at all times evident to him that he knew best and that his opinion was formed out of his love of S&S, of literature, of other people, and with no selfish motive in mind. All, in short, was for the best in the best of all possible worlds—or would be, if only Schwed would stop interfering and if Shimkin finally saw the light and let Bob run the company.

What Shimkin saw instead was that Bob had a shrewd eye for commercial
success, a kind of natural instinct for “good trash,” and that it was therefore worth humoring him, but he had no intention of putting Bob or his “fan club” in charge of S&S. Shimkin believed in doling out small raises and bonuses, spoon-feeding a bit at a time, always encouraging the employee to believe that what he or she wanted was just around the corner, and in this way he strung Bob on for longer than anyone could have imagined, mostly because Bob was perfectly sincere when he said that S&S was his home and his family. It had not yet occurred to anyone that he might be able to take those of his family he needed most to a new home—it had probably not even occurred to him. It was as if he could not even conceive of working anywhere else. S&S was where he had come of age, where the most important and productive years of his career had taken place, where he turned himself from a penniless student into the loved and admired arbiter of literary fashion.

Nor could any of those of us who were Bob’s friends imagine working elsewhere or without him. To an extraordinary degree, he inspired loyalty, affection, even love. Despite the fact that he did not enjoy the autonomy he coveted, he was unfailingly supportive of those he liked. He did not confine his support or his interest to the group around him, however. He involved himself in
any
S&S book that caught his attention or seemed to have some possibility of success, whoever the editor might be.

Bob’s hand reached far and wide through the S&S list. Although he was not much interested in history himself, he spotted such original books as Peter Tompkins’s
A Spy in Rome
and encouraged me in my effort to add more books on history to the list. Whether it was the rise of the Zulu nation, in Donald R. Morris’s
The Washing of the Spears
, or the mutinies in the French army in World War One, in Richard M. Watt’s
Dare Call It Treason
, Gottlieb was as undaunted by long, fact-filled books with lots of notes and pictures and a whopping great index as he was by first novels. Provided you could show him genuine enthusiasm (from both the editor and the author), Bob was always happy to let you take a risk and never complained if it failed. Without perhaps intending to become one, he was a great publisher—a rare feat for an editor, for most editors are only interested in their own books to the exclusion of everyone else’s. With some exceptions, the better the editor, the less likely he or she is to succeed as a publisher—indeed, one of the major problems in book publishing for years has been that the only way an editor could be promoted and rewarded beyond a certain limit is to make
him or her a publisher, a perfect example of the Peter Principle in operation, in which a person with a certain set of skills is promoted to a job in which a totally different and contradictory set of skills are required (and usually lacking). Most good editors fail as publishers because they find it hard to be objective about books, tend to take the author’s side in any dispute, and usually despise other editors. Bob was an exception. He made no secret of his contempt for certain editors, but he was generally objective about the books of even those editors he most disliked. Once, years later, when he had reached the status of a publishing god at Knopf, I bumped into him at the annual American Booksellers Association convention in Washington, where he was cruising the stands and coolly examining the competition. It had been a long time since we had seen each other, and I suddenly realized, seeing him there, carrying a shopping bag full of catalogs and freebie reading copies, how much I missed him—and owed him, too. He gave the S&S display a careful appraisal and sighed. “Yes, well,” he said dismissively, “but how are
you
, Miki?” (Bob was the only person in publishing who called me Miki, which, as he knew, was what my parents always called me.) Busy, I replied. I had been working hard on a book that seemed to me to have the makings of a best-seller. Bob nodded. “Do you love it?” he asked. I said I didn’t exactly
love
it, no, but I thought it might sell a lot of copies. Bob looked at me darkly and shook his head. “Shame on you,” he said, and vanished into the crowded aisle.

I
T WAS
not to be expected, in the normal order of things, that two men as different as Bob Gottlieb and Dick Snyder would get along well under one roof, but in fact they developed a certain distant, wary respect for each other. Dick had a clear-cut picture of the future—he would run S&S and Bob would be one of his major assets—but it almost goes without saying that Bob did not share this vision. In Bob’s view of the future,
he
would be running S&S, leaving the things that didn’t interest him to Schulte, Snyder, or both. He recognized Snyder’s extraordinary combination of energy and sheer competence—these were traits he shared himself—but he thought of him mostly as “Leon’s man,” somebody to be kept at arm’s length from the faithful friends and the decisions that mattered about books. In later years, when Dick had become something of a publishing god in his own right (an angry one,
many people said), he would affect a kind of gruff comradeship with Bob, as if they had been close at S&S, and Bob, with a certain noblesse oblige, allowed him to do so without, however, joining in. Dick, revealingly, always referred to Gottlieb as “Bobby” and was the only person to do so. A Snyder-Gottlieb alliance would have been a formidable combination of publishing talents, and Dick knew it, but there was never a prayer of it happening. For all his dedication to his “loved ones,” Bob was an autocrat at heart, albeit one with a genuinely sincere belief that he was a
benevolent
autocrat; it was not in his nature to share power with anyone. Bob had no difficulty in recognizing a wolf when he saw one, and much as he admired Dick’s sharp intelligence he was not about to put himself in the service of another person’s ambition. Nor was he eager to see Schwed, a relatively benign figure, replaced as publisher by somebody with real teeth and his own agenda, as was clearly Dick’s ambition.

All of this, of course, was passing beneath the surface, largely because Bob was the kind of person who could never have admitted, even to himself, that he was capable of playing office politics. It was impossible to imagine that Bob would ever leave or that anything would ever change, but, in fact, we were on the brink of changes so big and dramatic in our small world that they were literally unthinkable.

CHAPTER 17

I
n the meantime, my own life was about to change. I was about to become, of all things, a writer, just as Sidney Kingsley had predicted. I got there by a curious twist of fate.

Years before, when I was still living in London, I became friends with Milton H. Greene, the glamorous photographer of high-fashion and show-business celebrities who had himself leaped into international celebrity of the most sensational kind when he made a deal with Marilyn Monroe to become her business partner and her producer.

Milton was a small, darkly handsome man, with an open, boyish smile of considerable charm that contrasted oddly with his brooding eyes. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time, his celebrated partnership with Marilyn was at once the zenith of his career and the beginning
of his downfall. It resulted in one of Marilyn’s worst pictures—
The Prince and the Showgirl
—and one of her best,
Bus Stop
, but in the end Milton was no more capable of controlling Marilyn (or saving her from herself) than Twentieth Century–Fox had been.

It was typical of Milton’s charm that he had seduced Marilyn Monroe in one instant, right on her own doorstep. He had been sent out by
Look
magazine to photograph her, and when she opened her door and saw Milton, he looked so young that she said, “Why, you’re just a boy!” Milton looked her up and down slowly and carefully, taking in all of that lush figure, and said, in his quiet, gentle voice, “And you’re just a girl.”

Milton not only charmed her, he somehow managed to
soothe
her—no easy task, given her high level of anxiety, her pill taking, and her mind-numbing hysteria. He persuaded her that he could help her break away from the tyranny of the studio—with which she had had a love-hate relationship since she was in her teens—choose her own roles, make her own movies, and become a serious actress in New York. The ink was not even dry on the contracts that linked them before Milton realized that he had bitten off more than he could chew, but by that time it was too late.

In these unhappy circumstances, Milton spent a good deal of time sitting in the small mews house he had rented just off Grosvenor Square during the shooting of
The Prince and the Showgirl
, around the corner from the elegant apartment building where my Aunt Alexa was living. Milton and Alexa met and became friendly, and since I was often at Alexa’s, it was inevitable that I met him.

Against all the odds, Milton and I became friends, despite the difference in age. Milton, it transpired, loved to play chess, and since this was one of my skills—my father had taught me to play on a tiny, folding, pocket-size board during a train trip across the United States when I was eleven—I took to coming over at odd hours, in case Milton was free. Mostly, he was. Neither Laurence Olivier, who was costarring and directing, nor Marilyn wanted him on the set, and as producer there was not much for him to do but sit at home while other people spent his money. Occasionally, Marilyn wandered through the house, dazed and distracted, with a shopping list of complaints for Milton.

Soon after I had become a more or less permanent guest at Milton’s house, his wife, Amy, arrived from their home in Connecticut. Amy Greene was a diminutive, exquisite woman, something like a high-fashion model in miniature, whose energy surrounded her like a bright
aura. Unlike Milton, who could sit for hours without saying a word, perfectly content, Amy was as bright and restless and chatty as a parrot, forever in motion and determined never to be bored—the complete opposite, in some ways, of her husband. The last thing Amy wanted to see was Milton and me sitting around the house playing chess, but she wasted no time in finding out everything there was to know about me, and we soon became close friends.

Eventually,
The Prince and the Showgirl
was completed, for better or for worse, and the Greenes sailed for home. I lost sight of them until I myself went back to America, at which point I became a regular visitor to Milton’s penthouse studio on Lexington Avenue and to their house in Wilton, Connecticut, on weekends.

By then, Milton’s attempt to transform himself into a movie producer had failed. He had to go back to taking photographs because his experience at producing movies with Marilyn had plunged him into debt, but his heart was never in it. He was always looking for a way back into movie production or to Broadway. “I’m putting something together,” he murmured mysteriously if asked what he was doing.

In the meantime, he did magazine work, while Amy, much to Milton’s surprise, took a job as an assistant to the beauty editor of
Glamour
magazine. There, she quickly proved to be surprisingly ambitious and successful and soon became something of a gadfly at the magazine.

A great many unsuspected talents had worked at
Glamour
at one time or another, including Andy Warhol, who drew shoes and handbags for the magazine before his artistic career took off; Cybill Shepherd, who got her start as a cover girl; and Gloria Steinem.
Glamour
’s offices were full of people whose aspirations went beyond evaluating lipstick colors, so I should not have been surprised when Amy asked me to write a piece for the magazine. In 1962,
Glamour
was going through one of those crises typical of fashion magazines, in which the management begins to question the content of the magazine and wants it made more “relevant” to its readers. While
Glamour
’s readers wanted to know how to dress well and look pretty and were quite happy with the magazine as it was, the editors were forced to start looking for writers who could make contemporary trends and issues “relevant.” Thus it was that Amy asked me if I could write a piece on rock and roll.

I said that I thought I could. Pop music was hovering out there, hard to avoid, but without yet having much impact on traditional culture. People who read books or edited magazines were aware of music that
was then usually lumped together as rock and roll but regarded it as a noisy teenage fad, connected inextricably with mobs of screaming girls, greasy ducktail haircuts, and a generally surly and rebellious adolescent attitude. Everybody had heard of Elvis, of course, but he was usually dismissed as another of those weird Southern phenomena, like “snake-chunking,” gospel revivals, and speaking in tongues. Bob Gottlieb, with his instinct for popular culture, was the only person I knew who actually
listened
to rock and roll, and he even owned some of Elvis’s albums. From him, I had developed an interest in pop music myself, though I made no claim to be an expert—still, I enjoyed the music (had, in fact, ever since being introduced to Eartha Kitt and Bill Haley and the Comets while I was at Oxford) and at least knew more about it than
Glamour
’s editors, who thought it was trashy and preferred Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. I agreed to write the piece—five thousand words—and sat down at my portable Hermes typewriter (a purchase made in the days when I still saw my future as that of a foreign correspondent in a trench coat, writing my dispatches at a café table) to do it.