Another Life (73 page)

T
HE EXPERIENCE
of actually
becoming
a best-selling novelist after having published so many was, of course, hallucinatory. Being one of the few people in publishing who actually knew what it was like to be a successful writer and who had been out on tour time after time promoting my books gave me a curiously mixed perspective. There is an Italian saying that the translator is a kind of traitor (“
Traduttore, traditore
”), and something like that applies to editors who moonlight as writers, particularly if they are successful. Throughout the publishing industry, the editor is widely viewed as suspect to begin with by those in management, and an editor who is also an author is doubly suspect. Whatever the difficulties, humiliations, and anxieties of the author’s life—and there are a good many, not all of them the publisher’s responsibility, to be sure—I have experienced them in one form or another. I have been bumped from major television shows at the last moment (I began one promotion tour on the evening Operation Desert Storm began, with the entire country glued to CNN), set up (I did an interview with Johnny Carson without knowing that Merle Oberon had died while I was in the greenroom; Carson mentioned it at the end of the interview, by which time I had been talking about her for five minutes), left stranded (with food writer Gael Greene and her mother in the empty cafeteria of a radio station miles outside Detroit in a blizzard), missed connections, even been flown from Boston to Toronto at the last minute for an interview only to discover that I didn’t have any proof of citizenship on me and couldn’t get back into the United States. I have actually sung a number with the Chipmunks on an early-morning television show while promoting a book and made chapatis during a demonstration of Indian cooking, so that I spent the rest of the day promoting my book wearing a suit covered with flour. I have been ill on tour, abandoned by my escort, taken to bookstores where they not only don’t have my book in stock but have never heard of it, given lectures and readings to audiences of less than half a dozen who have drifted in merely to get out of the rain, and been mugged of my overcoat and scarf in below-zero weather on my way to a show. At the beginning, I loved every minute of it.

The great days of author tours ended with the escalation of airfares. Until then, provided the author was not determined to live like a Saudi prince, it paid to keep him or her traveling for as long as possible—the more cities, within reason, the better. Back in the 1970s and the 1980s, there were still plenty of important regional shows, many of them nationally syndicated. You went to Boston to do
Sonya
, to Dayton, Ohio (and later Chicago) to do
Donahue
, to Los Angeles for Carson and Merv Griffin, and so on. In time, the major shows tended to move to New York or Los Angeles (with the exception of
Oprah
, which remains in Chicago), while travel costs rose until it was no longer feasible to send the author from city to city flogging his or her book. In the meantime, the invention of the “satellite tour,” in which the author sits in New York or Los Angeles and does show after show across the country without leaving the room has changed the author tour considerably. Still, the fact remains that the biggest revolution in the book business has been brought about by the curious symbiosis that established itself between television’s need for free talent and the need of book publishers to reach the public.

Television rescued the book business from the marketing trough into which it was descending. Already by the end of the sixties, the decision about whether to buy certain kinds of books—self-help titles, diet books, exercise books, and so on—was being made on the basis of the author’s appearance, telegenic appeal, and ability to get his or her points across convincingly on-screen, and authors in these categories were soon to find that a videocassette of their performance on television weighed more heavily with the publisher than an outline of their ideas. Charm, smile, appearance, energy, the ability to sell while looking natural and to sum up a whole book in a sentence or two became all-important in publishing certain categories of books, favoring those authors who were natural salespeople.

Those authors already in the public eye—whether actors or politicians—are usually astute at promoting their books, since it’s just an extension of what they normally do every day. Nobody is better at it than Joan Collins, unless it is her sister, the novelist Jackie Collins, both of whom I once edited at the same time—an idea foisted on me by Dick Snyder, who had apparently never heard the phrase
sibling rivalry
. Among politicians, nobody was better at pitching his book on television than Richard Nixon.

Never a man to let the difficulties of something overwhelm him, Snyder saw no reason why S&S should not become Nixon’s publisher,
despite the fact that it had been books about Watergate that had put Snyder’s S&S on the map as a major publishing force.
All the President’s Men
and
The Final Days
had not only done much to turn Dick into a celebrity but had begun the enormously fruitful friendship between himself and Alice Mayhew, the editor of both books, that would produce almost two decades of brilliant and hugely successful nonfiction publishing and make S&S a key player in acquiring serious and important journalists and historians. The fact that these books, for the most part, had a certain liberal bias, at least so far as Nixon and the war in Vietnam were concerned, did not prevent Dick from responding enthusiastically when I told him that I had heard Nixon was thinking of changing publishers. What was more surprising, it turned out, was that Nixon himself didn’t have any reservations about being published by a company that had made something of a specialty of publishing books that were critical of him and that had played a part in bringing him down—I had assumed we would be the last house on his list.

That, of course, was to underrate the spirit of realism that governed Nixon’s decisions, as I was shortly to discover.

CHAPTER 31

I
like to think that I’m inured to famous people, having grown up in a family full of them. Still, no one is completely immune to a certain kind of celebrity—not even celebrities themselves. The only time I ever saw de Gaulle close up, I had to keep pinching myself to be convinced that it really
was
the general. I felt the kind of awe that one is supposed to experience at one’s first sight of the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. All the same, he was just as I had expected him to be—immense, remote, austere.

Nixon was different. First of all, he had always fascinated me—as he did almost everybody—in a strange and inexplicable way. Far from being remote, like de Gaulle, whose memoirs I had published, Nixon was a familiar presence for so long that he seemed like a member of the family. Way back in the fifties, I remember, dinner parties were ruined by arguments when the subject of Nixon came up. Then, too, his triumphs and tragedies, his repeated rise and fall, his reputation for odd
behavior, the contrast between his noble rhetoric and the public moments of mean-spiritedness, and, above all, his apparent view of himself as a kind of latter-day Prometheus, and the echo of failed greatness surrounding his political life always made him the most authentically Shakespearean of American presidents.

“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” he told the press bitterly after his defeat in the California gubernatorial election of 1962, but he was wrong: We
always
had Richard Nixon to kick around—even in exile and apparent disgrace (it was never perceived that way by Nixon), he remained part of our national consciousness, controversial even in forced retirement from the political scene.

I first met Nixon in the early 1980s at a luncheon at his town house in New York. The reason for my invitation was that I was Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s editor—encouraged by Irving Lazar, she had written a book on famous people she had known who had “made a difference”—and she felt that it would be appropriate to introduce me to her parents. Lazar had sent me off to meet Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, in Washington, where they had an apartment at the Watergate, by some strange coincidence. Julie and I had bonded immediately. It was one of those August days when the heat in Washington is unbearable, and the air-conditioning in the Watergate was strained, so that sitting in the Eisenhowers’ sunny living room was like being in a sauna with one’s clothes on. When David appeared, he was wearing a three-piece suit made of some kind of heavy tweed, rather like a Brillo pad, and sweat was pouring down his face. Fearing that he might collapse from heat prostration, I took the liberty of suggesting that he might want to take off his jacket and vest, or perhaps even change into a lighter suit. But that, Julie explained, was impossible. David’s grandfather, President Eisenhower, had left David all his clothes in his will, and David felt obliged to wear them, once they had been altered to fit him. Apparently, Ike had not owned any summer-weight suits, or perhaps they simply hadn’t reached David yet, but in the meantime he saw it as his duty to wear his grandfather’s clothes. Naturally, it would be something along the lines of lèse-majesté for him to remove the presidential jacket and vest and sit in his shirtsleeves, so he gamely continued to sweat in the sweltering heat, out of respect for Ike.

Nixon, who would surely have approved of his son-in-law’s behavior, was at the time in what amounted to exile in New York and beginning to build up his reputation as an elder statesman, foreign-policy
guru, and political wise man in the long aftermath of his resignation. People reported sighting him from time to time at this restaurant or that. He was by no means in hiding, but there was still something mysterious and faintly unconvincing about his pose as an ordinary New Yorker, and not just because the bottom floor of the Nixons’ house was full of Secret Service agents and their bulky communications equipment.

New York was Nelson Rockefeller territory, a place full of Democrats and liberal Republicans who, if they agreed on nothing else, shared a dislike of Nixon. In a city where great wealth, family and social connections, and glamour were what mattered, Nixon was not wealthy, socially connected, or glamorous, nor, with his famous need to control events, did he seem altogether at ease in the chaotic, uncontrollable big city, any more than Mrs. Nixon did. They remained small-town Californians who had ended up in New York only because they had been obliged to leave Washington. New York was their Saint Helena. Nixon’s tan, Mrs. Nixon’s stiff hairdo, the finger bowls on the table all seemed somehow un–New Yorkish, as did the decoration of the house, which was startlingly Oriental.

A taste for the Oriental in home decor is very Californian—after all, California is on the Pacific rim—but the Nixons seemed to have been carried away by it. Most of the art, the furniture, and the rugs were Chinese, or of Chinese inspiration; so, for that matter, were the servants and the food. I fantasized briefly that Nixon might have been a real-life Manchurian candidate—which would certainly have explained his conversion from a founding member of the anticommunist China Lobby to architect of rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. Were the servants, I wondered, in fact his controllers? Had his presidency been a carefully orchestrated Chinese plot?

Nixon had been delayed downstairs by some business, so that Mrs. Nixon, Julie, and I were seated when he arrived in the dining room. I stood while Julie introduced us. I fear that I stared at him rudely. My initial thought was that he was much taller than I had expected. For some reason, Nixon had always seemed to me
small
, but he was a good six feet tall, with the shoulders and bulk of an athlete and the brief, firm handshake of the professional politician. Cutting a formal, presidential figure even in his own home, he wore a beautifully cut dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a sober tie. At close quarters—and the dining room was so small that they were
very
close quarters—he was a formidable presence, made more so for me by the simple fact that it
was
Nixon.

Most striking of all was his voice: a deep, rumbling basso profundo, rather like an avalanche in the distance, pitched an octave or two below even Henry Kissinger’s. Nixon’s voice was far warmer, deeper, and more human than it sounded on television. Television had done him no favors—in the end, this was perhaps his major political tragedy. His complexion, which seemed sallow on the screen, was in fact healthy and deeply tanned, and the scowl and the famous five-o’clock shadow were hardly noticeable. There is a theory that great men have large heads and prominent features—think of de Gaulle and his nose, LBJ and his ears, FDR and his jaw—and by this standard, if no other, Nixon had reached greatness. His head was enormous, his jowls and ski-jump nose were just as cartoonists had always portrayed them, his eyes were dark and penetrating. “Welcome,” he said, rather formally. “Nice to see you.”

I mumbled something appropriate and sat down. To my astonishment, Nixon went to the other end of the table, took Mrs. Nixon’s hand, and said, “Nice to see you,” in exactly the same tone of voice, then sat down, unfolded his napkin, and addressed himself to his soup.

I thought about this a lot at the time. I didn’t doubt that Nixon and Mrs. Nixon were close, but he seemed to have some difficulty revealing the fact in front of a stranger. On the other hand, I thought I saw a look of pain in Mrs. Nixon’s eyes, which made me wonder if Nixon had really noticed that she was there. I remembered John Ehrlichman telling me that he had once suggested to Nixon, early in the 1968 presidential campaign, that it would be nice if the Nixons could hold hands as they walked down the steps of the campaign plane upon arriving somewhere. Nixon, he reported, fixed him with a darkly fishy stare and said flatly, “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

Years passed, and I did not see Nixon again. I continued to publish Julie and to see her from time to time. Then, by one of those bizarre twists of fate so common in book publishing, I became his editor. Even in our author-editor relationship, Nixon remained an elusive, enigmatic presence. One did not telephone him—one telephoned a member of his staff, who passed the question on to the president (as he was always called) then called back with an answer. It was made clear that under no circumstances was there to be direct communication: a holdover, no doubt, from the White House days, when nobody was allowed to see the president with news that he did not want to hear—or, at any rate, that H. R. Haldeman and Ehrlichman didn’t want him to hear. (Later on, when I published Ronald Reagan, I was surprised by the contrast. Reagan
not only
liked
getting telephone calls but called himself, at odd hours, and I often had to wait while he and my wife discussed their horses or exchanged information about pig breeding, an interest they shared. They exchanged photographs of each other on horseback, and Reagan sent her an autographed photograph of himself with a prize pig at the Iowa State Fair.)