Another Life (80 page)

The only time I ever saw them together, I was struck by how greatly he and Bill Clinton resembled each other, but by that time Jackson had assumed an elder-statesman stance, Clinton having preempted The Rev’s role as the party leader and communicating with blacks for himself, much to Jackson’s discomfiture. It was impossible to think of them as black and white—they were merely two Southern boys, spoiled by their mamas, gifted students who had made good just the way they were supposed to, each of them married to a woman considerably stronger than himself, and each of them sharing the same ability to charm, the same attraction for the opposite sex, and the same sense of entitlement. The only difference was that Clinton was president and Jesse Jackson wasn’t, but Jackson had managed to carve out a role that transcended the presidency, with his own foreign policy, his own constituency, and his own blueprint for the future. Still, I could see in Jackson’s eyes that he wasn’t happy. If there was one thing about him that I learned during the many years of working on various versions of his book, it was that the Reverend Jackson liked to be the center of attention.

W
ELL
,
WHO
doesn’t? you might say. Indeed, in the eighties most of us fulfilled Andy Warhol’s prophecy by becoming the center of attention briefly, starting with Dick Snyder and Joni Evans. Joni’s career path
took the shape of a neon zigzag. Dick decided that despite the difficulties, he needed Joni Evans as publisher of S&S again, so Linden Press (much to my regret as a Linden author) was closed down. After that, however, their marriage began to falter, and Joni left to run Random House, replacing Howard Kaminsky, a diminutive dynamo of a man. Kaminsky went to Morrow, while Joni was moved crosstown to head a new Random House imprint, Turtle Bay Books (named after the area in which the imprint’s brownstone lay), which was soon closed down, leaving Joni jobless until she changed gears and reemerged as a William Morris agent.

From this one can deduce certain things, the first being that it’s probably not a good idea for a husband and a wife to work together in the same place, particularly if they have high-profile jobs. (Ironically, Joni and I had collaborated to edit Mary Cunningham’s book about herself and Bill Agee, the CEO of Bendix who had first mentored her, then had an affair with her, then married her, following which they both had to leave.) The second lesson is that almost no relationship can survive the kind of media scrutiny that was being given to book publishing. Perhaps most important of all, the old idea that job security was one of the benefits of publishing was, at last, definitely dead and buried.

T
HE ARGUMENT
for working in book publishing had always been that while the pay was low and the perks consisted of nothing more than free lunches and all the books you could read, in most places you had to work hard at it to get fired. By the 1980s, that was no longer true. At the higher levels of book publishing, the pay was actually pretty good, and in those houses that were owned by big corporations or media conglomerates or movie studios, the perks began to include (at any rate for a lucky few) stock options, bonus plans, special retirement funds, a leased car, free parking, discounts on anything the parent company manufactured—all the bells and whistles, in short, of corporate America. At the very highest level, the cornucopia was tilted even more steeply and disgorged such goodies as private dining rooms, the use of corporate jets, and company-paid apartments.

While these benefits were limited to a very small number of people at the largest houses, the consequences went all the way down through organizations. When companies were merged and acquired, people got
fired—indeed, that was one of the major reasons for merging and acquiring in the first place—and the need to make each year better than the one before in order to satisfy the corporate parent meant that more and more people got hired and fired as quick fixes. You didn’t find your editors in-house anymore, nor your executives. You hired a headhunter to raid other houses for editors, tried them out, and if they didn’t measure up quickly, you fired them and started all over again. Since, increasingly, the editors didn’t expect to be at a house for very long, they left the moment they had a better offer elsewhere. Star editors were wooed and fought over by major houses, though all too often they turned out to be past their peaks when they moved or to have grandiose illusions about becoming publishers.

Job security had always had two faces—on one side, the loyalty of the company toward the employee and the promise that he or she would be kept there for the long haul, and on the other side, the employee’s loyalty toward the company and his or her willingness to be patient and trust that long service would bring its own rewards. With companies being merged, bought, and sold, however, that kind of patience and trust was increasingly meaningless—the people who owned you had probably never heard of you, had no idea what you did, and couldn’t have cared less anyway. This was all the more difficult in the case of editors because it is hard to measure what they do in any simple way: The next book of the author whose novel has just failed may be a huge bestseller; an editor switching jobs might inherit a list and thereby get credit for a surprise best-seller he or she had nothing to do with. In any event, the gestation of books (and of editors, for that matter) is a long one, requiring considerable patience and optimism, and the process of editing is not one that lends itself to dramatic color photographs in the parent company’s annual report. The story goes that when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper and Row (which he was later to merge not very successfully with Collins, his U.K. book publishing acquisition), he walked down “editors’ row” and, seeing a lot of people bent over the desks reading, asked what the hell they thought they were doing and when they were going to get to work. (The story is told about several people, but it fits Murdoch better than most.) All of this meant that while the salaries were climbing a little, job security plummeted.

So did prestige. Even as late as the 1970s, a publishing house was basically an organization built around its editors, and the connection between ownership and the editors was strong, personal, and direct. The
rest of the company consisted of service departments that were in most ways subordinated to the needs of the editors. To the extent that there was any glamour to publishing, it was provided by the editors.

With the appearance of big, merged publishing houses, the picture changed. The glamour, such as it was, was at the top, where houses were bought, sold, and merged, new imprints created, and multimillion-dollar deals made. Slowly but surely, the editors were relegated to the status of pieceworkers. If they provided a steady flow of profitable books, they were rewarded—very often with bonuses instead of salary increases, since a bonus can be withheld the next year whereas a salary increase is forever—if they did not, they were fired, and new ones brought in. Both the power and the prestige of their position were stripped from them, as the decisions they once made unilaterally were assigned to others, and as layers of management were created to supervise and quantify the editors’ work. The editors were no longer at the
center
of the company in a large publishing house, but on the periphery, at once part of a large and growing bureaucracy and the focus of its attention.

From the point of view of management, the editors are just about the hardest part of the publishing process to deal with, except of course for the authors themselves. It is hardly surprising that most publishing houses are now run by people who would just as soon climb Everest without oxygen as edit a book (or, in some cases,
read
one). If you want to know what’s happening in the other departments of a company, you can get numbers, printouts, bar graphs, charts, the kind of thing that appeals to business-minded persons and is thought to make sense, but the editors deal not in numbers, which hardly ever prove anything when it comes to books, but in ideas, hunches, style, most treacherous of all,
words
.

Most of the really big mistakes in book publishing come from ignoring the importance of words in favor of numbers or personalities. Of course, it’s easier to buy books by numbers, which explains why so many bad books by novelists at the tail ends of their careers still get bought for millions of dollars. It’s a lot easier (and quicker) to make decisions by digging up the previous sales figures, calculating the royalty earnings, adding on foreign sales, and so on than to actually
read
the book. Most of the big writers who regularly grace the best-seller list are bought and sold without anybody going to the trouble of reading the manuscript—indeed, such deals are usually made
without
a manuscript,
purely on track record and numbers. A lot of publishers are far more comfortable dealing with a P&L than a manuscript anyway—the numbers can be crunched, studied, fine-tuned, but they’re
real
, as opposed to the author’s words, which, even if available, merely produce more words, in the form of subjective reports from the editors.

As for celebrities, they too represent a way of buying a book for a lot of money without having to read anything. By definition, the celebrity isn’t going to write the book—he or she is merely selling his celebrity. Here again, fame can be quantified: The number of people who have seen a star’s movies can be counted, the sales of a singer’s record albums are available, their worth as assets carefully assessed, which is a great comfort to people who would rather deal in numbers than in words, or have lunch with movie stars and politicians instead of writers.

F
AILING ANYTHING
better in the way of celebrity, murders will do, provided the case is sufficiently splashy. I myself published Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book about Joseph Kallinger, the humble shoemaker of Philadelphia who went on a killing spree with one of his own sons. For many years, I received a Christmas card from Kallinger, who was in the state institution for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania, where he was unwisely placed in the shoe-repair shop at first, thus giving him access to the same sharp, curved shoemaker’s knife with which he had carved up a number of people during his heyday as a serial killer, with results that would have been predictable to anybody but a psychiatrist. Still, it wasn’t Kallinger or any of the other murderers whose books I published who brought me the most attention but somebody who, in the end, got off: Claus von Bülow.

To be more exact, it was von Bülow’s then mistress, Andrea Reynolds, a Hungarian beauty with a background that read like the plot of an Ouida novel, who came to the attention of Joni Evans and me. Reynolds (who was eventually to soar to respectability as Lady Plunkett) was then at the height of her notoriety, having fled from life as a wealthy housewife to the defense of von Bülow, whom she scarcely knew, convinced of his innocence. She quickly became the Passionaria of von Bülow’s legal tribulations, as well as his mistress. Since few other people, so far as one could tell, believed that von Bülow was innocent of
having attempted to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, this caused something of a sensation. It was no doubt in part Andrea’s sheer determination to prove the rest of the world (not to speak of a Rhode Island jury) wrong that helped get von Bülow through the second trial, in which his conviction was overruled.

The notion that Andrea was going to write a tell-all insider’s account of what really happened in one of the most sensational criminal cases of the 1980s would be enough to attract any publisher, and it was considered a remarkable coup that Joni Evans and I managed to get to her before anybody else—indeed, my involvement was based partly upon the belief that as a Hungarian and the author of
Charmed Lives
I would be irresistible to Andrea Reynolds, while as an Oxford-educated Englishman von Bülow and I would have much in common. As luck would have it, I had recently been awarded the George Washington medal by the Hungarian-American Society for being the most distinguished Hungarian-American of the year. As a result, I knew plenty of people who were acquainted with Reynolds, most of whom, when asked about her, raised their eyebrows and shrugged expressively. Hungarians have a certain admiration for those of their countrywomen who achieve fame for their beauty or their abilities as seducers of men, which explains the national pride in the careers of the Gabor sisters and their mother, so I was thus not surprised, when Joni and I finally met Andrea Reynolds, to find that she was a vivacious, shrewd, and voluptuous woman, with that peculiarly Hungarian combination of beauty and a razor-sharp tongue that is perhaps only truly appreciated by Hungarian men and explains, perhaps, much of the melancholy with which they approach marriage.

At any rate, Andrea entertained us at lunch with gossip about the trial and convinced us that the book would be full of headline-making news. Snyder, perhaps because he was trying to keep Joni happy, authorized us to buy the book, for which he ended up paying a lot more money than we had anticipated, with a lot of it up front, since Andrea turned out—not very surprisingly, in retrospect—to be a sharp bargainer who recognized two eager marks when she saw them and employed a first-rate power lawyer.

Shortly afterward, Joni and I went to see Andrea and Claus in their Fifth Avenue apartment—or rather Sunny von Bülow’s apartment, for her presence was everywhere, like that of a ghost, though she herself
was still in a coma, as she remains to this day, across town in a luxurious hospital room, surrounded by some of her favorite pieces of furniture, with a manicurist and a hairdresser who visit her every week. The apartment was huge, taking up a whole floor, so that the elevator let one out into a hallway with only one door. It had high ceilings and big windows overlooking Central Park, but despite that there was something dark and gloomy about it—maybe a result of its sheer size and formality, the carved wood paneling, the antique tapestries, the dark, unidentifiable Old Master–style paintings, the heavy drapes, or perhaps even the servants, who were silent, grave, and strangely glum. The dining room was enormous, but something about it suggested that it had been many years since it had been used, a feeling one had about most of the big rooms that we were led through.