Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [100]
Phyllis was passionately loyal to her authors in a way that would have seemed excessive and in poor taste to men such as Paul Reynolds and Harold Matson—she took everything personally and looked, above all, for the kind of real enthusiasm and personal devotion in an editor that she felt herself. Her favorite editor, not surprisingly, was Bob Gottlieb, but perhaps because of my movie background she occasionally sent me a manuscript, and gradually we became pals. Through her—and because Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People was being made into a play—I met Kay Brown, the famous theatrical agent, and through her Robert Lantz, who specialized in the theater and the movies but sometimes handled books and who had known my uncles and my father in Berlin before the Nazis.
There were plenty of younger agents to get to know too, among them Candida Donadio, whose authors included most of what was then the Jewish nouvelle vague: Joseph Heller, Wallace Markfield, and Bruce Jay Friedman, a close friend of Bob’s. There was also Lynn Nesbit, somewhat easier to approach, then working for the urbane and dapper Sterling Lord. Nesbit combined not only brains and beauty but also taste and energy and was already building a list of remarkable writers. She lived in a garden duplex downtown, and the party she gave there for her friend and English counterpart Deborah Rogers was the first publishing party I had ever been to that wasn’t dull and stiff (except for those in which one waited breathlessly for Ray Schuster to say something awful). In fact, Lynn gave me hope—she was elegant, witty, and to all appearances self-assured—that publishing didn’t have to be a dowdy business. When I finally worked up the nerve to take her to lunch at the Italian Pavilion, then the mecca of the younger publishing set (the meccas of the older publishing set were “21” and the Café Louis XIV), she was absolutely certain that I was going to publish a lot of her authors and become her client myself.
“What makes you think I want to write books?” I asked.
“I can tell,” she said, with characteristic impatience. “The sooner you start, the better.”
ACCORDING TO the hallowed tradition of book publishing, it was necessary to have lunch with all these people, and many more, as often as possible. For editors, in fact, having lunch is regarded as a positive, income-generating, aggressive act, and a certain suspicion is extended toward those few who can be found eating a sandwich at their desk more than once or twice a week. Publishers have been known to roam through the editorial department at lunchtime to catch editors who are “not doing their job” in the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich from the nearest deli. A large expense account is very often perceived as proof of ambition and hard work. Publishing might, in fact, be the only business in the world in which it is possible to be criticized for expenses that are too modest.
There were some exceptions, of course. Bob Gottlieb later became famous for not going out to lunch. Agents who wanted to see him had to come to his office for a sandwich. Everybody else in the world of book publishing, at least at what we in the British armed forces called “the sharp end of the stick,” could be found from twelve-thirty to two-thirty at some midtown restaurant with a napkin in his or her lap.
Nobody has ever done a poll to see whether the agents—the putative beneficiaries of this largesse—really want to be taken out to lunch every day of the workweek. It is simply one of the basic assumptions of book publishing that he or she who lunches with the most agents gets the most books. In the fifties, and even the early sixties, such lunches used to be preceded by a couple of cocktails and often dragged on well past three o’clock, leaving both parties with bad headaches and tendencies to nap during the rest of the afternoon. In those days, editors did indeed give their all for their company—cirrhosis of the liver and cardiovascular failure only too often