Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [115]
Shimkin was to be one of the first victims in the early stages of this game of corporate dominos. He could, no doubt, once he had rid himself of Max, have arranged to pass the company on eventually, by gradual stages, to his son, Michael, who had already demonstrated his interest in the business by opening a successful bookstore; or he could have chosen to preserve the company’s independence by other means; instead, no sooner had he secured 100 percent of it than he was trying to sell it—an odd reaction to the culmination of a forty-year-old ambition.
Beyond the fact that Cerf, Shimkin, the Knopfs, and any number of others wanted to cash in their chips, there was no real reason for the wave of mergers and sales that began to hit the publishing industry in the sixties and continued through the seventies and eighties at an accelerating pace. Once the process had started, it was impossible to stop. The bigger publishing houses became, the more they enjoyed “economies of scale”—the ability to buy paper in larger quantities at lower prices, for example, or to share the cost of the sales force and the accounting department between a number of different imprints. In theory, the larger a publishing house became, the more profitably it could be operated—hence the logic of Random House’s acquisitions of Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Ballantine, and, eventually, innumerable British publishing houses, or S&S’s eventual acquisitions of Prentice-Hall and Macmillan (which had already acquired Atheneum and Scribner’s). All this lay far in the future in the mid-sixties, but the seeds were already sown for the stronger houses, with more powerful financial backing, to swallow the smaller and weaker ones.
Shimkin could read the writing on the wall, but he was not in any position to take advantage of that ability. Schuster was still his partner, and the last thing Max wanted to do was expand S&S or acquire other houses. On the contrary, Max’s sole ambition was to hang on by his fingernails for as long as possible—or, perhaps, for as long as his health would permit him to do so. There were days when it must have seemed to Shimkin that Max’s health was better than his own—say what you like, at least Max wasn’t immobilized by episodes of depression.
Max’s deterioration, by contrast, was undramatic and by small degrees. Those who worked close to him noticed, for example, that the shaking that had always affected his hands was growing more severe, that he often left large patches of his face unshaved, presumably because he could no longer hold a razor steadily enough to reach them, that his gait was more and more unsteady, so that in motion he resembled a windup toy—one had the feeling that a gentle push would send him backward out of control until he fell over. These were the signs, I recognized, of Parkinson’s disease, from which my maternal grandfather, Octavius Musgrove, had suffered during his last years, and the one thing I knew about Parkinson’s was that it didn’t get better.
I have no doubt that Max knew it too, but he never mentioned his illness and took great pains to ensure, even more than before, that nobody saw him coming or going in the halls by arriving early and leaving late. Seated