Another Life (56 page)

Small, rail-thin, sharp-featured, with an engaging smile, a full head of wiry gray hair—a kind of Anglo-Welsh “afro”—and bright, sparkling eyes, Godwin’s greatest asset was his charm. He was a brilliant talker, with an endless supply of lubricious anecdotes about everyone he knew, and the kind of infectious enthusiasm that other publishers envied. He had good taste, too: His authors in England had included Len Deighton, Edna O’Brien, Joan Didion, Eric Ambler, and Antonia Fraser, though he never managed to acquire that kind of stellar list for Jovanovich, perhaps because he was now competing directly against more powerful houses such as Random House and S&S.

He had a way with women, too. He managed to combine a lower-class defiance, then having been made fashionable by the success of movies such as
Alfie
, with a certain weary vulnerability, like a bantam gamecock that needs looking after, but despite the buzz that surrounded him, by 1974, a year or so after his arrival in New York, he seemed to have missed the boat and looked somehow diminished and sad. Perhaps the tide was running against him. Publishers were being acquired by corporations that didn’t know anything about the book business and
were more interested in the bottom line than in owning the hot new candidate for the Booker Prize or a 200,000-word work of history by a fashionable Oxford don. Jovanovich himself was already spending more of his time on educational publishing, which was less risky and far more profitable. He eventually bought SeaWorld and moved Harcourt Brace Jovanovich down to Orlando, closer to the seals and killer whales, which made far more money for the company than trade books.

Before that happened, Godwin was dead—he collapsed alone in his apartment from an asthma attack, a sad way to go for a man who loved company and disliked being alone. It was as if with his death the business on which he had scarcely made an impact suddenly changed. The age in which the editor was the center of things was over. The businessmen were taking over.

CHAPTER 24

F
or me, oddly enough, this brave new age was ushered in by Jovanovich. For some time now, Leon Shimkin had been making no secret of his desire to cash in his chips and sell S&S. Naturally, he did a kind of fan dance, alternately attracting buyers and denying his intention to sell—probably no more than a natural attempt to get some idea of what the company was worth. The truth was that while on the one hand Shimkin wanted to sell, on the other he wanted the buyer to let him continue to run things. There had been so many false warnings that most of us had lost interest in the subject altogether, so it was with some surprise that I received a phone call from Snyder, saying that we must speak immediately.

We met in a hotel bar over the weekend, and it swiftly transpired that the person who had caused this degree of alarm in Dick Snyder was Bill Jovanovich, who had offered to buy S&S away from Shimkin. Paul Gitlin, Harold Robbins’s agent, was also a board member and general counsel for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Learning of Jovanovich’s interest in acquiring S&S, Gitlin called Shimkin, and discussions between the two principals began almost at once. With Gitlin pushing hard, there was a serious possibility that the deal might happen, despite predictable ego problems between the two men.

In the meantime, however, Dick had met Jovanovich—had been summoned to the great man’s presence, actually—and learned almost immediately that trading Shimkin for Jovanovich would not be in his or my interests. Many of the things that people who didn’t like Dick complained about were true about Jovanovich in spades: his temper, his ego, his impatience, his determination not to be upstaged and to have the last word. Jovanovich, Dick assured me, wanted to run things in detail and to have the last word on everything; he liked to cut his executives down to size; he was proud to run a “lean” company (that is to say, he was against corporate perks for his senior executives); and when it came to managers and editors with “inflated” reputations (i.e., Dick and me), he was from Missouri (metaphorically speaking, since he was in fact some kind of Yugoslav). Most important of all, although Jovanovich claimed to know everything there was to know about trade-book publishing, he didn’t know his ass from his elbow—an amateur, in short, who would be telling us what to do.

Dick’s ear for trouble was flawless, and I had no doubt that everything he said was true. Jovanovich wanted to talk to me, too, Dick told me, and I should take his phone call and be as noncommittal as possible. In the meantime, this was a deal that had to be killed, the sooner the better. Would I mind if he told Shimkin that we would both resign if the deal went through?

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought—I had always trusted Dick and saw no reason not to now, though I had a certain queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought that I might have to leave a place where I had worked for nearly twenty years—so we shook hands solemnly, and Dick went off to do what he had to do. I received, as promised, a gruff call from Jovanovich, promising me that nothing would change, and a far gruffer one from Gitlin, who had guessed that something was going on. Jovanovich, he promised me, was a man of culture who would respect my opinions. At some point in the conversation Gitlin became aware, if he was not already, that I was not enthusiastic about the deal. What could I possibly have against Jovanovich, he asked? He was terrific with editors (I recalled that he had not been terrific to Tony Godwin) and looked forward to working with me. Dick, Gitlin went on, might have a few problems with Jovanovich, since they were both stubborn men, but I would have none, and if by chance one should arise, I only had to come to Gitlin and it would be taken care of.

But that was something I had been resisting for years, much as I
liked Gitlin. Once Gitlin did you a favor, you were his for life, so far as he was concerned. I told him that I was flattered by Jovanovich’s confidence in me, but Dick and I were a team: We went together, and if he wasn’t happy about the deal, neither was I. I was making a big mistake, Gitlin said darkly. Shimkin had already made up his mind: S&S was going to Harcourt, and Jovanovich wouldn’t forget anybody who had come out against him.

I didn’t care. I had complete confidence in Dick’s ability to kill the deal, and it was not misplaced. He made it evident to Jovanovich that he risked buying a publishing company without its major executives and evident to Shimkin that Jovanovich was unlikely to listen to a word he had to say. The deal fell through, and the only significant consequence of it was that Dick now decided that the sooner he found for Shimkin a deal we could all live with, the better for all concerned. Until now, Dick had been trying to prevent Shimkin from selling; now, he was determined to get Shimkin to sell as soon as possible to someone who took the same view of the future as Dick did.

It was against this background that, on a business trip to Los Angeles, Snyder met Robert Evans, the boy-wonder producer of
The Godfather
. He mentioned to Evans that S&S might be for sale, and Evans told his boss, Charles G. Bluhdorn, the conglomerateur owner of the Gulf + Western Corporation, whose purchase of Paramount Pictures had made him a power in Hollywood.

By reputation, Bluhdorn was the most ruthless conglomerateur of them all, the so-called “Mad Austrian.” His violent temper, his many eccentricities (not all of them endearing), and his amazing volatility had made him a celebrity among a class of people rarely seen outside boardrooms. But while his fellow conglomerateurs preferred to remain invisible, Bluhdorn sought the limelight and apparently never shut up.

T
HE FASCINATION
that certain artifacts of the sixties and seventies once had is hard to explain: white go-go boots, for example, or platform shoes for men, or Petula Clark singing “Downtown”—these things bring back not so much nostalgia as a certain wonder that they ever held our attention. The “conglomerate” is just as much a part of that increasingly remote past as bell-bottom trousers and Nehru jackets. Indeed, it is hard to conjure up a time when the word itself seemed to suggest to
most people something new and threatening, a business corporation the only purpose of which was to maintain a dizzying rate of growth and which did so by the constant acquisition of other companies.

Not only did the companies acquired usually have little or nothing in common with the core business of the acquirer, very often the acquirer had in fact no core business to begin with—it existed merely for the purpose of growth, like certain parasitic amoebas. People feared that the companies they worked for would be acquired by a conglomerate—more often than not in an “unfriendly” takeover that resembled, to those who were acquired, the rape of the Sabine women—which would then proceed to fire employees wholesale, without regard to the years they had spent with the company or the importance of their work. Conglomerates were seen by most people outside Wall Street as bad things, manifestations of greed and long-distance management by strangers who didn’t know a thing about your business. The word most often associated with them was
ruthless
.

What Gulf + Western knew of S&S they learned through Dick, and the first thing they understood was that Dick was their kind of guy, a tough, shrewd, practical man who could get things done and who thought big. What Gulf + Western was about, after all, was growth, expansion, a ballooning list of assets against which they could borrow more money to buy more assets, brand names that were—or appeared to be—gilt-edged, which made it even easier to borrow still more money and dazzle Wall Street. The only thing that was bad was standing still, since people might then begin to ask whether the company was really making any money at all.

For the first time since the Jovanovich deal had surfaced, Dick was relaxed, happy, smiling, though one saw him seldom, since he was in the middle of the bargaining. He poured me a drink one night in his office, and as we clicked glasses he said, “The good times are coming, trust me.”

In a very short time, the deal was done, and S&S changed hands, becoming a part of what was known as “The Gulf + Western Family,” to the horror of older executives, many authors, and most of the outside world. It was bad enough that Bennett Cerf had sold Random House to RCA, but now Simon and Schuster had been bought by the most rapacious and ruthless of conglomerateurs. Shimkin could hardly have gotten a worse press among those who cared for culture and literature if he had owned the
Mona Lisa
and sold it for kindling. Bluhdorn was
seen as the Vandal at the gates, no doubt eager to fire literary editors, put a stop to the purchase of first novels, and restrict the S&S list to vulgar best-sellers such as Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins. Since I was the editor of both Wallace and Robbins, I did not think I had anything to fear, but at some point Dick told me not to worry anyway. “Trust me,” he said, “nothing will change. We’ll just make more money and get stock options, that’s all.”

As a matter of fact, nothing
did
change at first. We did not quit our home in Rockefeller Center for G+W’s tower at Columbus Circle, nor were we told to stop buying first novels. Life went on much as before, except for Shimkin, who was swiftly replaced by Dick. The generous perks of a big conglomerate with a movie studio showered down on some of us, everything from our choice of leased cars to telephone credit cards, Simmons mattresses at discount, free health-club memberships, sales conferences in the Dominican Republic, first-class air travel, and unlimited movie screenings. More important, we had, for the first time, a sense of security. Bluhdorn
liked
books, much more than he liked mattresses, zinc, steam valves, or automobile bumpers.

Some time went by before I met Bluhdorn, partly because Dick was eager to protect what he regarded as my delicate sensibilities and partly because Bluhdorn’s ramshackle corporate empire was run like a feudal kingdom. The CEOs of each of G+W’s many components were like medieval barons, with unlimited power in their own fiefs. When Bluhdorn needed to talk to (or scream at) one of them, he sent for them; he did not need to meet their underlings. However, perhaps because of my family name—Bluhdorn was fascinated by the movie business—I was eventually invited to a pre-Christmas dinner in the G+W building.

As we milled about for cocktails, I got my first real glimpse of the diversity of G+W. I met executives from the movie business, the industrial-valve business, the truck-leasing business, the mattress business, the desk-lamp business, the zinc business—there appeared to be no end (or logic) to the businesses Bluhdorn had acquired, and of course there
was
none. G+W eventually contained divisions devoted to manufacturing, communications, foods, consumer products, agriculture, mining, and financial services, and included, among many other assets, New Jersey Zinc, Paramount Pictures, Desilu Productions, Merson Musical Products, Consolidated Cigar Corporation, Quebec Iron and Titanium Corporation, Madison Square Garden, Furniture City, Tool Industries, Bonney Forge and Foundry, Mal Tool and Jet Engineering, Collyer Insulated
Wire Company, Simon and Schuster, Simmons Mattress, and a substantial portion of the Dominican Republic. Bluhdorn’s real secret was understanding the simple fact that if you owned a business, bankers would lend you money to buy another one. So long as you kept buying companies, you could go on borrowing more money, like a giant Ponzi scheme. The trick was to keep moving; the one thing you couldn’t afford to do was to stop and consolidate, even had that been possible, since the vital flow of money from the banks would then stop.

Shortly before dinner, Dick managed to steer Bluhdorn through the crowd in my direction. I was confronted by an energetic man in his early fifties, with a wild look in his eyes and the red complexion of someone whose blood pressure is off the scale and who doesn’t pay any attention to diet and exercise. Bluhdorn’s teeth seemed either too big or too many, like those of a shark. Huge and glistening white, they filled his mouth like bathroom tiles. I tried to shake his hand, but he gave me a bear hug, squeezing me so tightly that I thought his intention might be to break my ribs. “Dick tells me you’re a goddamn genius,” he said—he spoke quickly, with a faint, guttural Germanic accent, behind which there lurked the hint of some other language, Yiddish perhaps. I modestly deflected the compliment. “No, no,” Bluhdorn cried, “if he says it, it’s
true
, goddamn it to hell! I love geniuses! You’re my boy!”