Another Life (7 page)

I said it was fine with me. Henry got up and walked over to his couch, which was awash with manuscripts, boxes, and bulky, rubber-banded, tattered, and dog-eared piles of paper. It struck me that if this was his backlog, Henry Simon really
needed
an assistant. He rooted around in the pile, letting loose a cloud of dust, and chose one manuscript, seemingly at random. “I won’t tell you whether we’re publishing this or not,” he said. “Just read it, see what you think, and write me a report, all right? Take your time.”

I grasped the manuscript. Henry showed me to the door. As we shook hands he gave me a small, embarrassed smile. “It’s a shame you didn’t come to see me a day or two sooner.… There’s, ah, one
little
problem, I should tell you. There
is
another candidate, some fellow from New Jersey, to whom I more or less promised the job yesterday.”

My spirits sank. What did “more or less” mean, I asked? Henry thought about this. “I told him I wanted to sleep on it. He seemed very qualified but not at all experienced, just like you. If you don’t mind being in a two-horse race for the job, just read the book I’ve given you, bring me your report, and let me make up my mind. That’s the best I can do.”

Fair enough, I said, though in fact I was disappointed and walked home as fast as I could to read the book. Clearly, this was like an examination, and if there was one thing I was good at, it was examinations. I had always been able to cram for them successfully at the very last minute, in school, in the RAF, and at Oxford. I decided that the sooner I handed in my report, the better—speed had to count for something, even in a business as slow as book publishing—and got right down to it.

The manuscript was a study of the British press called
The Sugar
Pill
, by T. S. Matthews. Fortunately, it was short, hardly more than an extended essay. It distinctly failed to impress me. Matthews was apparently an American journalist of some distinction and clearly an Anglophile—one of those expatriate Americans who, in the long tradition of Henry James, found it more comfortable to live in England than at home and felt himself to be
plus anglais que les anglais
. The trouble was, I thought, that Matthews simply didn’t understand the subtle nuances of the English class system and therefore often missed the point of the newspaper stories he was criticizing. On a more practical level, I couldn’t see who would buy the book. English readers would resent being criticized by an American, and American readers were unfamiliar with the problems of Fleet Street and surely not very interested. I read the book quickly, wrote a blistering brief urging its rejection, and went back to Rockefeller Center to leave it for Mr. Simon.

The next morning I was summoned back. Henry was waiting for me, his high, noble forehead creased in a frown, a look of deep suspicion on his face, even of distaste, as if he smelled something offensive. “Did you
really
read the book?” he asked accusingly. “I expected it to take you a couple of days.”

I explained that I was a natural speed reader and volunteered to take a quiz on the book’s contents, but Henry waved the offer away impatiently. “Never mind that,” he said. “You say here that the book is inaccurate and unpublishable, right?” I nodded. “Would it make any difference to your assessment of it if I told you that Tom Matthews is the former editor of
Time
magazine and one of my closest friends? Or if I told you that I’ve already bought the book and that I’m publishing it next spring?”

I thought about this unwelcome news quickly, wondering how I had managed to fall into Henry’s trap so easily, and decided candor was the only way out. It made no difference to my opinion at all, I said—I would stick to my guns.

Henry put my report down with a sigh. “It’s funny,” he said. “The other fellow, the one from New Jersey, feels the same way about the book that you do. He didn’t phrase it quite as elegantly as you do, not having been educated in England, but his advice was to turn it down, too. It just shows that you’ve both got a lot to learn about publishing. Well, I suppose you’ll learn …”

“Does that mean I’ve got the job?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded glumly. “The other young man accepted an offer from
Doubleday first thing this morning.” Henry stood up, and we shook hands across his desk. “I’ll have Nancy get you a shopping bag and you can take some of those manuscripts over there on the sofa home to read, since you’re such a fast reader.”

Henry paused and handed me the jacket sketch we had looked at yesterday. His expression showed a certain cunning, as if he had found a way out of an unpleasant task. “While she’s doing that and filling out the forms for hiring you, you might take this down to the art department. Ask for the art director. A fellow called Frank Metz. Somebody will show you the way. Tell him you’re working for me—and that he’s wrong about the goddamn helmet.”

As I left his office, he called out, “If he throws something at you,
duck!
” and laughed.

CHAPTER 4

T
he first thing I found on my desk when I came to work officially on August 11, 1958, was a cast bronze plaque bearing the words: “Give the reader a break.”

These, it appeared, had been designed by Dick Simon and had been placed on every editor’s and assistant’s desk. It was, in his view, our job to make things as easy and clear for the reader as possible. Left unsaid was how to perform this miracle. It was Henry Simon’s method, I quickly observed, to painstakingly correct his authors’ punctuation, grammar, and spelling with a precisely sharpened pencil and to write queries in a minuscule hand in the margins. Perhaps the first, and most important, difficulty of our relationship was Henry’s discoveries, on day one, that I punctuated by feel and instinct rather than by rule, had a shaky command of grammar, and couldn’t spell worth a damn. (On the other hand, I turned out to be a natural at the kind of picky, know-it-all comment in the margin that drives authors crazy, such as “Surely the Treaty of Utrecht was earlier than this?” or “Are you certain Wellington was a Field-Marshal at this point of his life?”)

Right from the beginning, I felt that Henry was interested in only the kind of small details that somebody else could have fixed (though not me), while I was more concerned with the big picture—that is, whether the book
worked
or whether it needed massive cutting, could use a better title, or contained characters whose motives and actions made no sense. In short, it was as if our roles were reversed, perhaps not the best way to start out as an assistant.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings. I spelled and punctuated badly in three languages, and it had never made any difference to me or anybody else. At Oxford, the dons cared more about the originality of the student’s ideas and his grasp of the fundamentals of a subject than about spelling—indeed, in England, a certain aristocratic contempt for the rules of grammar and an idiosyncratic approach to spelling (the more daring, the better) were marks of culture.

Perhaps sensing right from the beginning that I was more eager to find out everything I could about Simon and Schuster than to spend the day penciling in commas or changing semicolons to colons, Henry had found for me a small, windowless cubicle with a desk that faced a blank wall, so that my back was turned to the hallway. Here I sat reading through the endless piles of manuscripts that had been submitted to him and occasionally editing the manuscripts of those of his authors whom he did not feel obliged to edit himself. It was not so very different from my work at CBS, except that I was no longer a freelancer. Modest my job might be, but I was an employee at last! It did not escape my attention, however, that Henry was anxious to keep me separated from the other members of the editorial department, or that his relationship with them was touchy and marked by mutual suspicion.

A
S IT
happened, I had stumbled into my job at a particularly interesting time for S&S and for the book-publishing industry. S&S was a hotbed of thwarted ambitions and intrigue, much of it swirling around Henry Simon. To me, it appeared that Henry was a powerful executive, with his corner office and his list of important authors, but the truth was that he was surrounded by enemies and hanging on by his fingernails. S&S had gone through several years of upheavals, all of which could be traced back to Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster’s decision to sell their company to Marshall Field III in 1944. After Field’s untimely death, they managed to persuade his widow to sell it back to them. She agreed, on the condition that they admit Leon Shimkin as a full partner.

This was the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent. Shimkin had been close to Field and also owned Pocket Books, which gave him a certain leverage. Without Shimkin’s support, his connection to the Fields, and his access to capital, Simon and Schuster would have been unable to buy back their company;
with
it, they were beholden to a man who had little
in common with the scholarly Schuster or the ebullient, risk-loving Simon.

It was not a partnership made in heaven. While Max Schuster retreated to his office to plan further volumes of philosophy and of Will Durant’s
The Story of Civilization
, Dick Simon chafed at having to deal with the cautious and often nay-saying Shimkin. Simon was a handsome, chain-smoking, hard-drinking man with an eye for a pretty woman and a sense of fun and wit that made him a vast number of friends, most of them brilliantly talented. He played tennis with a terrifying will to win, turned his interest in photography into a multimillion-dollar business, had a passion for music that made him such friends as George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and helped establish one of his daughters as an opera singer and another as a pop superstar. His energy level was such that even after he had been diagnosed with heart disease and ordered to slow down by his doctor, a friend saw him running back to his house as fast as he could after a brisk tennis game. “What’s your hurry, Dick?” he asked. Panting heavily, Dick shouted an explanation over his shoulder. “My doctor told me to take an afternoon nap,” he gasped, “and I’m late for it.”

He liked to be surrounded with men like himself, congenial spirits who knew how to sell books (without necessarily having any inclination to read them), and gradually built up a group of loyalists who came to be known as “Dick’s men,” among them his editor in chief, Jack A. Goodman; Albert R. Leventhal, his sales chief; and Richard L. Grossman, his assistant. Like him, they were men who worked hard and played hard, stayed late at the office, and hired as their assistants and secretaries attractive young women who didn’t want to go home at five-thirty. Like him, they tended to view Shimkin as the enemy, if for no other reason than he was so unlike them. This group did
not
include Dick Simon’s brother, Henry, who was “too serious” for them, neither congenial nor cut in their swashbuckling, reckless mode—in addition to which he had the misfortune of having married, in his former secretary, a woman with a notoriously sharp tongue.

Yet at the core, something was missing in Dick Simon. He was simply unable to recover the intensity of enthusiasm, the exuberant love of life, and the sure touch for best-sellers that had distinguished his career before he sold out to Marshall Field. Although he was only in his mid-fifties, he was already running on dry; his health was breaking down—the cigarettes, the booze, the stress were taking their toll. A failing heart
and severe episodes of depression made it necessary for him to retire in 1957, at the early age of fifty-eight.
^*

Simon and Schuster was therefore a house divided. Marketing and promotion were controlled by Dick Simon’s loyalists, the editorial department was more or less controlled by Max Schuster, with the help of Henry Simon and Peter Schwed, the former rights director (the two were like cheese and chalk), while the financial side was firmly in the hands of Leon Shimkin, who like the Prince of Darkness ruled from the floor below, at Pocket Books, and never came upstairs.

Perhaps more important, Simon and Schuster, so often the leader and innovator, was a precursor of the troubles that were soon to face the rest of the book-publishing industry, most of which had to do with the fact that the era of private ownership was drawing to an end.

B
OOK PUBLISHERS
in those days liked to refer to themselves with a certain pride as “a cottage industry,” by which they meant that most publishing houses were privately owned, many by the men who had founded them, others by a single family.

They also meant that it was a business that didn’t require much in the way of capital. New publishing houses were easy to found, even in the 1950s—all you needed was an office somewhere, a telephone, somebody with a sharp eye for a book that would sell, and a rudimentary sense of marketing. One big best-seller and you were on your way. After all, S&S had been launched when Max Schuster, editor of an automotive trade magazine, and Dick Simon, a piano salesman, pooled their $8,000 savings and published the world’s first book of crossword puzzles. (Henry Simon’s first job in publishing was buying the pencils that were attached to each book by a string.) This Horatio Alger formula was perhaps the core myth that drew people into the business. After all, Atheneum, Ticknor and Fields, and Clarkson N. Potter were all founded in 1959—proof, it seemed to some, that a book-publishing company could be started with not much more capital than it would take to buy a new car.