Another Life (50 page)

She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): “Any holdups today?” For those nights when the husband
isn’t
in, Joan recommended putting on a face mask of mayonnaise or pureed vegetables or a mixture of unflavored gelatin beaten with witch hazel, baking soda,
and a raw egg. (At the last suggestion, Evelyn Gendel, the S&S editor who was going over the recipes for me, remarked, “She’s
got
to be kidding!”) But Joan took it all seriously, from brushing her hair one hundred strokes every night then pulling it hard (which she also did to her daughters until there were tears in their eyes) to teasing a husband out of his bad moods.

Gradually, it dawned on me that Joan’s how-to book was in fact a kind of autobiography, not of the life she had lived but of life as she would
like
to have lived. All her marriages had been happy, her childhood, despite its up and downs, had been a happy one. Her children were perfect, happy, well adjusted, and loved her; Alfred Steele had been a kind of corporate Prince Charming (though photographs showed a plump, stolid man with an impatient expression, apparently eager to get away from whatever photo-op Joan created to show them as a happy couple). In short, in Dr. Pangloss’s words, “In this best of all possible worlds, all is for the best.” No blemish, however small, was allowed to tarnish this shining picture of perfection.
My Way of Life
was the equivalent of the kind of historical photographs that were once so common in the Soviet Union, in which all the faces were retouched and everyone who had failed to follow the party line had been carefully painted out.

In some ways, it was as scary a book as I’ve ever read, and the scariest thing was that it worked. In the days before the
Cosmo
girl, Joan was defining that nebulous ideal of “total femininity,” the woman who knew how to be submissive to her husband, playful in bed, a terrific mother, and a busy, successful working woman. She could cook up a gourmet dinner for ten people at a moment’s notice (in case her hubby brought his board of directors home on a whim), clean spots off the white carpet with her own blend of ammonia and soap, pack the children off to bed happy and clean, study up on the subjects guaranteed to get the dinner party moving in case conversation faltered, clean up after dinner (nothing must ever be left to the next morning), slip into a fabulous negligee that caters to whatever his particular idea of “sexy” is, and get up the next morning to go to work and be a killer competitor. Joan Crawford had no patience at all with women who didn’t want to follow her example and, say, roll a Pepsi bottle around the floor under their instep to make their calves sexier for their husbands while reading the morning paper so as to have something to talk to him about when he comes home at night. Who but Joan Crawford would have instructed her readers to
“get their shoulders back where God meant them to be,” or to say “yes” to themselves over and over again in front of the mirror for a more youthful, positive expression?

Long before the book was complete, Joan’s mind had turned to promoting it. She even took me out to her favorite restaurant, “21,” to fill me in on her requirements for the tour, which were contained in a leather-bound loose-leaf binder in which each page was tucked neatly into a transparent plastic cover. This document was, Joan explained, to be “the Bible” for the people in the S&S publicity department who were organizing her tour. It was written in the third person, in an imperious tone of voice, with the more important points underlined. Miss Crawford, I read, must always have a black limousine (
not
a sedan). The chauffeur must wear
a black uniform
. He must not smoke in the car or talk to Miss Crawford. I read on. Miss Crawford must have a suite in each hotel along the way. The exact temperature of the suite was specified. The suite was to be provided with the same array of Pepsis and Stolichnaya vodka as she had at home, as well as the exact same placement of cigarette packets and matchbooks. There were to be flowers in each room, in pastel colors (
No white flowers!
). The refrigerator in the suite was to be stocked with fresh, unopened packets of Ry-Krisps and melba toast,
plain
cottage cheese, raw carrots and celery sliced lengthwise, on ice. There was to be an ironing board and a steam iron in the suite for the use of Miss Crawford’s faithful German maid (whom she always called, strangely enough,
“Mamacita”
), and
a full hour
must be provided before departure to ensure that Miss Crawford’s trunks and hatboxes were downstairs in time and packed into a
second
vehicle. The hotel manager or assistant manager must be in the lobby to greet Miss Crawford and take her straight to her suite, so she didn’t have to check in.

As the tour began, Joan Crawford of legend reappeared, effacing the image she had created for herself of the calmly efficient, reasonable career woman. She became, to the horror of everybody directly involved in her tour, a star again, in the full meaning of the word.

That, perhaps, was the reason why she wrote the book in the first place, it now occurs to me.

Not long after Joan departed for the hinterlands to sell her book, my wife and I were woken out of a deep sleep late at night by the telephone.

I lifted the receiver and heard the familiar voice of Joan Crawford but raised in decibels to the level of a Boeing 707 leaving the runway. It was, by a strange coincidence, exactly the same level of anger and
barely controlled hysteria that I was to hear many years later when I took a call from an unhappy Faye Dunaway, who actually
played
an angry Joan Crawford in
Mommie Dearest
and got the wire-hanger scene exactly right. “I’m in Cleveland,” Joan howled.
“And there are white flowers in my room!”

I’m not sure how I managed to get the situation straightened out. I think I called the night manager and had him replace Joan’s flowers with others. Somehow I got Joan calmed down enough so that she could at least hear my apology, but the truth was that I had been badly shaken. Joan’s voice was the very distillation of female rage.

Years later, I happened to mention Joan’s horror of white flowers to my Auntie Merle. She nodded, as if it made perfect sense. “In Hollywood, white flowers are for funerals,” she said crisply. “Joan knew that better than anyone.”

I told her of Joan’s late-night telephone call to me, and Merle laughed. “Rage was what she did best, that’s all, darling—her specialty, like Fred Astaire’s dancing or Jimmy Stewart’s shyness. You’re lucky to have heard it.”

And I suppose I am.

O
NE WRITER
who had
not
followed Gottlieb to Knopf was S. J. Perelman, the sharp-tongued star humorist of
The New Yorker
, whom I had first met when he was hired by Mike Todd to write the script for
Around the World in Eighty Days
, for which my father did a good part of the art direction. Like most humorists, Perelman was a misanthropic and embittered man at heart, suspicious, jealous, touchy, and quick to take offense. But he was just about the only writer I know whose manuscripts made me laugh out loud uncontrollably. In person, he was a curious blend of Savile Row and Moskowitz and Lupowitz, a stylishly dressed figure, just short of being a full-fledged dandy, with a rakish little military mustache and steel-rimmed glasses with tiny lenses that made his eyes look like those of the little bon vivant who used to be
Esquire
magazine’s trademark. The eyes were prominent, piercing, and showed no trace of good humor. The old Hollywood adage “Dress British, think Yiddish” might have been coined with Perelman in mind—might even have been coined
by
him, now that I think of it. He walked around New York in spiffy tweeds, a jaunty green hat, a loden cape, and handmade
brogues, as if he were deer stalking in the Scottish Highlands. His home life—not that he ever discussed it—was reputed to be tragic. His wife, Laura, the sister of Nathanael West, was an alcoholic; his son was hostile; like most of the long-term
New Yorker
writers, he nursed endless grievances and feuds against other members of that narrow and all too often uncharmed circle. In short, he was not a happy man. Perelman took his writing more seriously than his public did, and he yearned to have his work celebrated as literature. He was not consoled when the reviewers merely praised him to the skies for being funny, and therefore he bore a grudge against even the best and most generous of reviewers. He was not pleased by his sales, either. He wanted to be a major bestseller, on the scale of Harold Robbins, but while his sales were respectable, they remained comparatively small, partly because most of his books were collections and most of his fans had already read the pieces in
The New Yorker
. He had left Random House after many years, out of disgust for his low sales, and was beginning to feel the same way about S&S. Low sales were not the only bone he had to pick with Random House. Bennett Cerf fancied himself a humorist and a punster and was the author of numerous collections of jokes. He was a fervent Perelman fan, but on some deep level he was also a competitor, determined to prove that he was funnier than his own author. Perelman’s sense of humor did not extend to other people’s jokes—in any case, what he wanted to hear from Cerf was glowing reports of sales, not jokes—and the relationship between the two men was inevitably frayed.

Unfortunately for Perelman, Max Schuster prided himself—improbably—on his ability as a humorist and a punster. A sample Schusterism was that when he was asked about whether he exercised, he replied, “At S&S we start every day by exercising our options.” Max labored under the misapprehension that Perelman lived to hear other people’s jokes, and he actually kept a file of fresh ones on his desk just in case Perelman should turn up. At some point, Schuster had taken to greeting Perelman by saying, in a loud stage whisper, “The jig is up!” whenever he sighted him, until Perelman complained that Schuster was deliberately persecuting him. Wherever he went, there Max was, waiting to rush up to him. In Paris at the Hôtel Georges V, in Venice on Saint Mark’s Place, in New York in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel, there was Max, lying in wait, as if he were playing blindman’s buff, to rush out and say, “The jig is up!” at the first sight of Perelman. “He’s following me around,” Perelman complained wildly, eyes full of indignation
and anger behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “Who needs that kind of craziness from a publisher!”

Perhaps the only benefit from this misunderstanding between author and publisher was that Perelman was unusually reluctant to appear on the premises of S&S, for fear that Max would be waiting to leap out at him and utter the dreaded line. Eventually, Bob had managed to calm Perelman, keeping him away from Max and treating him with great courtesy as the touchy man of letters he was, instead of the comedian he was not, and it fell to me to continue the job.

I had always thought that Perelman was a genius and once took
The Most of S. J. Perelman
on a week’s vacation in Montana and read nothing else—in fact, I laughed so hard every night at pieces that I had read a dozen times before that my wife threw a pillow at me.

All the same, nothing I could do seemed to increase poor Perelman’s sales, and eventually he left to live in London, where his boulevardier presence was more appreciated and where there was a certain respect for him as a literary exile, though he complained bitterly of the rye bread without seeds. There, he improbably formed a liaison with a much younger woman (his wife, Laura, had eventually succumbed) and set about the task of writing his autobiography,
The Hindsight Saga
. Alas, funny as Perelman could be at the expense of other people, he was unable to be funny about himself, or even frank, and the book was never completed, perhaps mercifully. Further embittered by this, he eventually quarreled with me and announced his departure from S&S by publishing a piece about me in
The New Yorker
called “Under the Shrinking Royalty the Village Smithy Stands,” in which my fondness for horses and riding was caricatured brilliantly. I was none too gently lampooned as Mitchell Krakauer, editor in chief of “Diamond & Oyster,” wearing riding breeches to work and hammering out horseshoes in a leather apron before my very own forge in my Rockefeller Center office. Seldom has an author expressed his unhappiness with his publisher more clearly.

The oval anteroom of Diamond & Oyster, my publishers, had been refurbished since my last visit with a large bas-relief plaque of their logo, a diamond-studded oyster bearing the motto
“Noli unquam oblivisci, Carole: pecuniam sapientiam esse”
(“Never Forget, Charlie: Money Is Wisdom”), and under it a blond, oval-shaped receptionist strikingly reminiscent of Shelley Winters. As thirty-five minutes ticked away without any
word from Mitchell Krakauer, the editor I was calling on, I began to develop paranoid symptoms. Heretofore there hadn’t been any hassle about seeing him; what was amiss now? Had some stripling in patched denim fresh out of Antioch whispered into his ear that I was
vieux jeu
, old hat,
nye kulturny?
Or had Krakauer learned in some devious way that Shelley Winters was in a 1941 play of mine, “The Night Before Christmas,” and deliberately planted her double here to taunt me as a slippered pantaloon? I felt myself inflate like a blowfish at the veiled insult. Surely nobody could be so base, and yet in this carnivorous age of four-hundred-thousand-dollar sales and instant remainders worship of the bitch goddess Success overrode a decent respect for the aged. I got to my feet, cheeks flaming.

“Try Mr. Krakauer’s line again, Miss. I can’t understand why they don’t answer.”

D
ESPITE THIS
portrait of myself, I was still trying to give the S&S list the commercial fiction that was rapidly becoming the lifeblood of publishing, as huge mass-market paperback sales provided a welcome new source of profits. Bob had been a master of gilding popular fiction with a literary veneer—thus making everybody involved feel good about it—but he had also recognized that to succeed a publisher needed to seek out fiction within the categories (or genres, as he preferred to call them) that mass-market publishers thought the public wanted. The genre that did best for them, apart from the big contemporary tearjerker like
The Love Machine
, was the romantic family saga (usually set in the spacious nineteenth century), with a strong, sympathetic woman as the heroine.