Another Life (8 page)

But the age of the cottage industry was already coming to an end. The Wall Street wolf was already at the door, impressed by the growth of textbook and educational publishing and eager for a new industry to take public, while book publishers themselves were already trying to figure out how much they would be worth if they opened that door.

T
HE BUSINESS
I had entered was more complex and divided than I could possibly have understood at the time. To begin with, there were still two separate worlds of book publishing, though the barrier between them was beginning to break down. The older, family-owned publishing houses of New York City and Boston were still dominated by Gentiles, while most of the newer houses that had been founded in the twenties were dominated largely by Jews. This distinction matters so little now that it is hard to believe how much it mattered in the 1950s, let alone how much it had mattered before World War Two.

At that point in my life, it was not a distinction that mattered to me at all. In fact, the subject was never mentioned in my family, so much so that my mother to this day refuses to believe that my father was Jewish. The truth is that the three Korda brothers, when they arrived in England in 1932, were so exotic, with their thick Hungarian accents and their extravagant behavior, that it never occurred to anybody to ask if they were Jewish or not, and since they themselves did not feel particularly Jewish, they simply never alluded to the subject. Their children, therefore, grew up unaware that they were half Jewish. (One of them stubbornly denies the fact to this day and had his father buried conspicuously as a Protestant.)

Having been born in England of an English mother and baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church, I had no idea that I was half Jewish. Moreover, I had been educated in places where anti-Semitism was almost unknown. So far as I was concerned, Jews were people such as Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lord Rothschild, and the Warburg family, or Hollywood moguls such as David Selznick and Sam Spiegel, or artist friends of my father’s such as Marc Chagall and Jacob Epstein. It never occurred to me to feel anything other than admiration for them.

I was, however, not totally unaware of anti-Semitism in the United States, which was far more widespread and more socially acceptable in the 1940s and 1950s than people are able to imagine today. In the winter
of 1942, my father had flown over from England to see me and took me down to Palm Beach. He had booked a suite at a most luxurious hotel, and the manager himself showed us around. “You’ll be very comfortable here,” he told my father with a wink. “I need hardly say that you’ll be among your own. The hotel is restricted, naturally.”

My father glared at him from beneath fiercely bushy eyebrows. In his inimitable Hungarian accent, he asked, “Vat means
restricted?
”

The manager give him a knowing smile. “Well, Mr. Korda,” the manager whispered, “I’m not supposed to say this, but we don’t take people of the Jewish faith.”

I had seldom seen my father angrier or move faster. Within an hour, we were in Miami, but the incident had soured him on Florida. After only one night there, we went back to New York, despite the sun and fresh food, both of which my father craved after two years in wartime England.

In retrospect, that would have been a good time for him to have told me that he was Jewish, or for me to have intuited it, but unfortunately, neither happened. Still, my father never left me in any doubt that anti-Semitism was wrong, and I was therefore constantly surprised to find evidence that there was so much of it in America. When I went to school in New York City, I had friends on the East Side and on the West Side. I did not perceive that there was any difference, and it came as something of a shock to discover that my friends on the West Side lived there because they were Jewish and envied the fact that I lived across town, where most of the older and more luxurious buildings were still restricted.

B
OOK PUBLISHING
, in fact, had always been one of the most restricted of professions—“an occupation for gentlemen,” as publishers once liked to describe it. Culture and literature, it was felt, needed to be kept in the right hands—namely, those of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who knew the difference between what was shoddy and meretricious and what was genuinely important and uplifting and who did not engage in “sharp” business practices.

Until the 1920s, book publishing in America was dominated by old, “respectable” houses that, for the most part, didn’t hire Jews—certainly
not at an executive level—and published Jewish writers only with reluctance. In Boston, there were Houghton Mifflin, Little, Brown, the Atlantic Monthly Press; in New York, Harcourt, Brace, Harper and Brothers, Scribner’s, G. P. Putnam, Doubleday, and Macmillan. Many of these firms were still owned by descendants of the men who had founded them in the mid-nineteenth century. Going from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton into book publishing was a little bit like entering a rather stuffy and self-important club. It was hard to make a real killing, but you had job security and the satisfaction of being among well-educated gentlemen of your own persuasion, pursuing an old, even noble profession.

The one exception to this rule was the house of Boni and Liveright, founded in 1917 and dominated by the mercurial figure of Horace Liveright, who had almost immediately driven out the peaceful Boni. Not only was Liveright the first Jew to break into book publishing in any significant way, he also single-handedly brought about a revolution in the way books were published. He broke every tradition by publishing daring, even shocking books, and he set out to make books into
news
, becoming the first publisher to plan out an active publicity campaign for each title. Liveright was an enthusiast, with a huge appetite for anything that was new or controversial. Above all, he wanted to have a good time publishing books, and, by and large, he did.

Liveright himself eventually died impoverished and disgraced, but his example inspired others who had come under his spell. Dick Simon had been a salesman at Boni and Liveright, Bennett Cerf not only worked at Boni and Liveright, but bought the Modern Library, the crown jewel of Liveright’s ramshackle empire. Even Alfred A. Knopf, though he deeply distrusted Liveright, was inspired by Liveright’s example to found his own publishing house.

Thus, in the late twenties and thirties, there emerged houses that were owned by Jews who were willing to take risks, knew how to promote and market books, and, however seriously they might take themselves, thought that publishing ought to be
fun
. That is not to say that they weren’t serious businessmen, nor that the profit motive wasn’t important to them, but they brought a more flamboyant and adventurous approach to publishing than any of the older WASP firms had ever considered. What is more, they prospered. World War Two not only increased the number of readers—as every soldier knows, a lot of service
life is spent waiting, and books filled in the time—it brought Jews and Gentiles together in large numbers for the first time, the common experience of war erasing many of the differences that had separated them.

When the war was finally over, book publishing had changed dramatically. Random House, Simon and Schuster, Viking Press (founded by Harold Guinzburg, in 1925), and Alfred A. Knopf were now mainstream houses, more interesting places to work than the old-line firms, and rapidly approaching them in size and influence. By the 1950s, there were Jews working in positions of power in the old-line houses and Gentiles working in the firms owned by Jews—the line separating them had not exactly vanished, but it had been blurred. Still, a Jewish CEO at, say, Harper, was as unlikely as a Gentile one at S&S or Random House.

To all these distinctions I was entirely blind. I was, as well, completely ignorant of Jewish holidays and of Yiddish, which was enjoying a kind of renaissance in publishing circles—at least as a language of insult—partly as a means of reaffirming one’s Jewishness, partly because it had certain tough-guy connotations. Even non-Jews were using words such as
putz, schwartze, yenta
, et cetera, albeit with a certain self-consciousness and unreliable pronunciation. Yiddish was suddenly “in,” to the surprise, not to say shock, of an older generation that had always looked down on Yiddish speakers.

People like Henry Simon, Dick Simon, and Max Schuster never used Yiddish words, even in anger. That was perhaps something their parents or grandparents had done, but to those who came from German-Jewish families that had long since been assimilated, the use of Yiddish was unspeakably vulgar. It was the kind of thing that Russian Jews were looked down upon for doing—back in those days, the distinction between the older, more assimilated German Jews and the less assimilated Russian Jews was almost as sharp a divide as the one between Jew and Gentile. It did not pass without notice that Leon Shimkin was of Russian-Jewish origin and that Max Schuster and the Simons were not.

I had, in taking a job at S&S, unintentionally chosen sides. There was still at Random House and at S&S very much a feeling of us against them, an underlying assumption that the older WASP publishing houses were, to use the title of Jerome Weidman’s best-selling novel appropriately, “The Enemy Camp.” Very shortly, however, the newer firms were to overtake and eventually subsume many of their old-line competitors, and within a decade the division between Jews and Gentiles in
book publishing had simply vanished, as if it had never been there. But in 1958, eroded as it might have been, it was still something people thought about, even talked about from time to time, and it mattered.

I
T TOOK
me a while before I could steel myself to mention to Henry Simon Herb Alexander’s message about Harold Robbins.

Henry sniffed disdainfully. “Robbins
belongs
downstairs,” he said.

What exactly was the problem? I asked.

With a certain reluctance, Henry explained that Harold Robbins was a popular novelist who had been published for years by the distinguished house of Knopf. At one time, it had seemed that Robbins might be a serious writer. Robbins’s second book,
A Stone for Danny Fisher
(his first was
Never Love a Stranger
), was one of those tough novels about poor Jews that occasionally succeeded and even became classics. Since then, though his sales rose, Robbins’s writing had gone downhill with the speed of an avalanche, becoming more and more sexy—so much so as to make Alfred and Blanche Knopf nervous. His latest, of which Henry had only read the first part, was a long novel about the movie business that contained, quite frankly, a good deal of outright pornography. The Knopfs would almost certainly have turned the book down in horror after reading the first hundred or so pages, but they were never given the opportunity, since Robbins’s new agent, a lawyer named Paul Gitlin, had made demands that neither they, nor anybody else in their right mind, could possibly meet.

Subsequently, Leon Shimkin’s attention had been drawn to Harold Robbins—Henry’s expression made it clear that this was no surprise to him—and Shimkin was neither horrified nor unwilling to come up with a generous, and in many ways unprecedented, offer. His original intention had been to publish the hardcover edition of the book at S&S and then do the mass-market edition at Pocket Books. With that in mind, he had asked Henry to read the pages.

Henry, to do him justice, thought the pages made pretty good reading, if you liked that kind of trash, and would probably make a lot of money. But he also thought they posed some tricky moral problems, so he gave them to Max Schuster, who took them home and returned the next day badly shaken and in a state of high indignation. This was emphatically
not
the kind of book that he wanted his name on, he told
Henry. Schuster had shown a few pages to his wife, Ray, and she had been deeply shocked. Was this, she had asked Max, the kind of
dreck
—Mrs. Schuster, I gathered, was not above the use of Yiddish where it hurt—that he wanted to publish at S&S? What would their friends think? What would people say? What was Henry thinking of? If Leon Shimkin wanted to grovel in the dirt, let him do it at Pocket Books, where nobody would be surprised.

Shimkin was not about to give up on the prospect of publishing Harold Robbins, whatever Max and Ray Schuster might think, and came up with the then-novel idea that Pocket Books would create a separate company, Trident Press, just to publish Robbins in hardcover. Robbins would then receive 100 percent of the paperback royalties instead of sharing them with his hardcover publisher in the usual way. This was unheard of, as well as an enormous amount of money spread over several as yet unwritten books. Thus was the “hard/soft” multi-book contract born, ensuring that the face of book publishing was about to be changed in a very dramatic way. It was soon to be a case of
après nous le déluge
, as agents sought to emulate Robbins’s coup and New American Library, Bantam, and Dell woke up to the notion that they didn’t really need to play second fiddle to the hardcover publishers or bid themselves silly over the rights to “major” fiction from them.

Although neither Henry Simon nor Max Schuster were aware of it at the time, they had deprived S&S of a major source of income—for Harold Robbins’s novel was to become
The Carpetbaggers
and was to be followed by several more enormous best-sellers—while the decision to let Pocket Books publish the novel in hardcover was to haunt every hardcover publisher, as the paperback houses one after another went into the hardcover business. Shimkin had doubled the number of competitors in a relatively small pond, with the inevitable result that the big ones would be obliged to eat the smaller ones until there were only a few giants left, warily eyeing each other.

None of this was clear at the time, least of all to me, though everybody except Henry had already guessed that Shimkin would use Trident Press as his Trojan horse in his war for complete ownership of S&S. Unfortunately for Shimkin, Trident Press boomeranged in the end. In order to give Trident some measure of respectability, Shimkin decided that it would also have to publish books by other authors. Even Harold Robbins could see that a publishing house with only one author lacked cachet—he wanted to be surrounded by other writers, albeit less successful
than himself. Trident therefore went out and bought a lot of manuscripts in a hurry to give the imprint plausibility, and—no surprise—lost almost as much money on these acquisitions as was made from publishing Robbins.