Another Life (79 page)

If Random House had moved decisively in an attempt to dominate the trade book business throughout the English-speaking world, S&S had set out to become the world’s largest publisher of educational books and material. The rest of publishing jogged behind, in a protracted spasm of smaller-scale mergers and acquisitions that were mirrored in the book-selling business: Chains forced the independent stores out of business by deep discounting, then proceeded to gobble each other up and open new stores throughout the country at a dizzying rate, mostly in the shopping malls that were coming to dominate the retail world. In short, a new world was forming in which sheer size was the key to survival—or so it was believed at the time.

Dick moved ever higher into the stratosphere of corporate management but was still determined to call the shots when it came to trade publishing, which soon gave S&S the reputation of being a hot seat for publishers. This hardly mattered to those of us who were close to Dick, however, since he was always happy to plunge back into acquiring books rather than companies and never stopped thinking of himself as the publisher of S&S even when he had given that job to somebody else—Joni Evans, briefly, Dan Green, and eventually Charles Hayward. Nobody lasted long or enjoyed the experience.

I
T WAS
Dick’s continuing interest in the S&S list that explains how we became involved with Jesse Jackson—that and the overbearing salesmanship of Irving Lazar. Lazar had called me one day to suggest that I should buy Jackson’s autobiography before somebody else grabbed it. “He’s hot, kiddo. Just do me a favor and give me a quick yes or a no, because I’ve got a lot of interest on this one,” he said urgently.

Further conversation made it clear that Lazar had nothing to show—“You can read all about Jackson in the newspapers, for chrissake, why the
fuck would you need an outline?” he said—and that it was very possible he hadn’t bothered to tell Jackson that he was selling his book.

All the same, the idea seemed like an attractive one to me. Jackson was a national figure, highly visible and controversial without being
too
controversial, like Louis Farrakhan, for instance. Jackson was a gadfly, sure, but he was an
establishment
gadfly, who knew exactly how to play the black card in the white world. Besides, he was, in his own way, a genuine hero, whose childhood in the South and whose years in the Movement as the protégé (whether self-proclaimed or not) of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., were of genuine interest. There was a story to be told in Jesse Jackson’s life, and only Jackson could tell it, if he was willing to. Finally, if there was one area in which S&S —and the book business in general—was weak, it was in the area of books by and about blacks. There seemed to me everything to be said for publishing Jackson, and I immediately called Dick to tell him so, only to find him less than enthusiastic. Jackson’s star, he felt, had faded; besides, he was a troublemaker. Random House had burned their fingers badly by publishing Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, and if you couldn’t sell Muhammad Ali to white book buyers, you sure couldn’t sell Jesse Jackson.

I could tell that Dick was not about to be budged by argument, so I called Lazar back to say no, but Lazar wasn’t about to take no for an answer—a sure sign that the other interested publishers didn’t exist. Dick was dead wrong, Lazar said, he just hadn’t been exposed to Jackson’s charisma. Five minutes with Jackson, and Dick would be singing a different tune, I could bet on that.

I wasn’t about to bet on it, but after a flurry of telephone calls I was able to tell Lazar that Dick and I would be happy to join the Reverend Jackson for the lunch at Lazar’s New York pied-à-terre at Sixty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue the next time Lazar came east. Dick thought it would be a waste of time, but he had a genuine affection for Lazar, who was just the kind of larger-than-life character Dick himself was intent on becoming, and some degree of curiosity about Jackson.

On the appointed day, we settled into Dick’s limo for the drive to Lazar’s apartment. I detected a certain amount of restlessness on Dick’s part. He liked to be well briefed before any meeting, but he knew only about Jackson what he had read in the papers. He wasn’t mollified when I told him that was all
anybody
knew about Jackson. What was he going to talk to Jackson about, Dick complained, although since I assumed that Jackson was going to be doing most of the talking—he was a preacher,
after all—I didn’t see that as a problem. Dick picked up a copy of
Time
from the pocket in the back of the driver’s seat and leafed through it. “There it is!” he said, stabbing a page with his finger. What he had found was a story about teenage pregnancy in the ghetto, in which children of thirteen, twelve, even eleven were having babies. Here was a subject with which to break the ice in talking to Jackson, he said.

Lazar let us in and made the introductions. The Reverend Jackson—his followers, as I was soon to learn, referred to him, without humor, as The Rev—was tall, with the build of an athlete beginning to run to fat, beautifully dressed, sported a gold Rolex wristwatch, and gave the impression of a man in a singularly bad mood. This, as it turned out, was entirely due to our presence. Jackson had been persuaded by Lazar, very much against his own instincts, that he should write a book. Now that he was actually here with us, however, he felt a strong resentment against having to put on a show for us—or, as one of his associates later put it, “to audition for whitey.”

Even Lazar’s considerable reservoir of charm failed to produce a cordial atmosphere, nor were matters helped when it was discovered that The Rev suffered from a whole complicated series of food allergies of which he had failed to inform his host, so that there was virtually nothing that he could eat of the elaborate lunch that Lazar had ordered. A tuna-salad sandwich was sent for, while the four of us sat around the dining-room table making uncomfortable small talk. It was apparent even to Dick and Lazar that there was no chance at all of asking Jackson any questions about his life or how much of it he was willing to have committed to print. On the subject of anything more personal than the weather, Jackson put up a stone wall.

Finally, Dick decided to break the ice. On the way over here, he said, he had been reading a newsmagazine and had come upon a fascinating article about teenage pregnancy. Jackson leaned forward, his face blank, an expression of impatience on his face. His eyes—remarkably small and close together for such a broad face—showed nothing, except for a certain sullen suspicion. Dick, not always the most sensitive of personalities, plunged on with his analysis of the magazine story, despite a warning glance from Lazar. Here were girls of twelve, even eleven, for chrissake, having babies! It was an outrage, a really frightening thing, didn’t the Reverend Jackson agree?

The Reverend Jackson nodded. He had not touched his tuna-salad sandwich, I noticed, as if he had decided he simply wasn’t going to
break bread with us, but he relaxed a little, now that he had a subject to discuss. He held up one neatly manicured hand to still the flow of Dick’s eloquence. “I know where you’re comin’ from,” he said, his voice low, deep, silky, soft, a voice born for the pulpit. “You are talkin’ about
babies
having
babies
.”

Dick’s eyes snapped open behind his tinted aviator glasses (the power symbol of Paramount at that time). That was it exactly, he said. Nobody could have put it better. Jackson had come up with just the right phrase, one that said it all.

I was pleased, but not surprised. If there was anything The Rev was good at (apart from getting money out of the pockets of guilty white folks), it was coming up with the right phrase. Words, after all, had always been the power of black Southern preachers, eloquence their stock-in-trade, the Bible the only book that mattered. The Rev was the inheritor of a long tradition. He might not be able to stop teenage pregnancy, but he could define it in a phrase better and more quickly than any
Time
editor.

Now that Dick had found his subject, he was not willing to let it go. Teenage pregnancy was a terrible problem, he went on, it blighted lives, both of the mothers and of their children. It was exactly the kind of subject on which Jackson should be speaking out, loud and clear. “The thing is,” he said, looking Jackson intently in the eye, “you ought to be doing something about it, because it’s a problem for your people.”

There followed a hush, broken only by a snort of alarm from Lazar, who had been contentedly eating his shrimp cocktail, his mind on other things. Lazar was not exactly race sensitive, but he had been around blacks in show business long enough to know that
your people
from the mouth of a white man was fighting words, almost as bad as the
n
-word, and in fact a euphemism for it.

Jackson’s nostrils flared, and his eyes became very hard indeed—hard enough that Dick became aware he had overstepped the line somehow. Jackson leaned close to him, a broad smile on his face, and speaking very slowly, as if to a child, he said, “Dick, here’s the way it is.
Your
people, they go to the good schools, colleges, they study hard, they come out they get the good jobs, lawyers, doctors, big business, all that stuff.” Jackson’s voice dropped even lower. “All my people got is—”Before he had finished the sentence, Dick had turned to me and said, “Buy the goddamn book.”

•  •  •

O
NCE WE
had reached an accord, the atmosphere lightened considerably. Jackson was jovial, though he still did not touch his sandwich, and Lazar was in good spirits, having made a deal. Occasionally, Jackson glanced at his watch—he had to catch the shuttle back to Washington, and a car was coming to pick him up. He stood up, towering high over Lazar, and we all shook hands. The Rev put a lot into his handshakes—they were warm, firm, and prolonged, and for emphasis he used both hands. “We are going to be
partners
,” he said, and it was possible to believe it. There was only one small thing on his mind, however, as we walked with him to the front door. “Where’s the—ah—toilet, my friend?” he asked Lazar, and a look of alarm spread across Lazar’s face.

“What time is your plane?” he asked sharply.

Jackson glanced at his watch. “I have about forty-five minutes to make the shuttle.”

Lazar opened the door and endeavored to push Jackson out into the hall. “Traffic is terrible,” he said. “You don’t have time. Wait until you get to the airport, that’s my advice.”

Jackson thought about this for a moment. “I only a need a minute,” he said.

Lazar shook his head. “You don’t know what the goddamn traffic is like, this time of day. You go when you get there.”

Jackson stood his ground, glaring down at his agent. “Irving,” he said slowly, “I want to go to the damn bathroom, now! Where
is
it?”

Lazar gave way reluctantly and pointed toward the bathroom. Jackson went off, did what he had to do, returned in a moment, shook hands again, and was gone.

We were about to take our own leave of Lazar, but he asked us to wait—he had something urgent to do. He, too, went to the bathroom, but as the minutes ticked by I realized that he wasn’t there for a call of nature. I could hear the sibilant hiss of an aerosol container, so I walked down the corridor until I could just see through the half-opened door.

Lazar’s bathroom was mirrored, floor to ceiling, and had a marble floor. Lazar, grimly determined, was on his knees by the toilet with a towel and an aerosol container of lemon-scented Lysol, vigorously spritzing every surface in sight.

•  •  •

O
F COURSE
, Lazar’s germ phobia was well known—likely he would have been just as alarmed if Dick or I had used his bathroom. In any event, I think Jackson would probably have been more amused than annoyed had he caught Lazar at it. Over the years that followed, in which The Rev tried out ghost after ghost (including, improbably, Ben Stein, a Jewish conservative), I had ample opportunity to observe that Jackson was tolerant to a fault. He was willing to give anybody a chance if he thought it might be in his interest to do so, and moral judgments on others did not come easily to him, despite the fact that he was an ordained minister.

His book never got written—I finally came to the conclusion that it was not so much the choice of writers that gave him pause as some deep inner doubt about the whole idea of putting his life down on paper. Jackson was a gifted teller of anecdotes, most of them having to do with his own life, and no doubt had embellished them over the years. He had used stories about his life to make points in sermons, in political speeches, and in conversations, but the idea of sitting down with somebody who was actually going to weigh his stories against the known facts was perhaps something he did not relish.

It was impossible to be around Jackson for any time and not like the man. My assistant Nancy Nicholas and I spent many, many hours together waiting for The Rev, who liked to set meetings at the last minute, usually late at night on weekends, and who was invariably hours late. We never held it against Jackson, and the pleasure of seeing him, when he finally arrived, was always genuine.

Short of Ronald Reagan, nobody staged arrivals better than Jackson—the long wait, often in hotel lobbies, or his suite, the arrival of messengers bearing news of his whereabouts and revised ETA, finally the bustle as the Reverend Jackson’s advance staff swept in, the more important ones bearing cellular telephones, others his briefcase, raincoat, even his minister’s robes, splendid in purple and black, in a transparent plastic garment bag, then, at last, Jackson himself, always on the run, surrounded by a few favored journalists and a couple of stout bodyguards.

His hotel suites contained all the chaos of a presidential campaign; indeed, Jesse Jackson’s life was like a permanent presidential campaign—the
rows of cellular phones charging on the floor, the serving tables piled high with food and soft drinks, buckets full of melting ice, the television sets all switched to the news, with the sound off, and at least a dozen people packed into the living room, while Jackson himself huddled behind a closed door in the bedroom with a visitor or took a nap. The atmosphere was always one of crisis, even when—
especially
when—nothing was happening. When he was in good form, Jackson’s eloquence was formidable. He once came to S&S to talk to the CEOs of a couple of dozen major corporations about defense spending and what it was doing to the black community, whose needs were being sacrificed to the military-industrial machine. His audience, which began as hostile, was so mesmerized that it stayed an hour longer than intended and emerged—for the moment at any rate—converted to Jackson’s view. When he was tired, however, or when things weren’t going his way, he could be mulish, impatient, and monosyllabic, though never discourteous—his Southern upbringing prevented that.