Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [132]
Though writing itself was a pleasure, seeing my own name at the top of what I had written was the ultimate thrill. I loved opening a new magazine and finding my name in it, even though some of the magazines I found myself writing for were very odd and “special” indeed—I seem to remember doing a piece on fetish clothing (God knows for whom) that brought me into what was then the fairly unknown bondage and S&M underworld of custom leather shops around Christopher Street, and another (possibly for The New York Times) on people who kept their own horses in New York City, which eventually led to my becoming one of them for over a decade. I had, it seemed, the dangerous habit of becoming part of my pieces. A piece on people who swam and surfed right through the winter led me to buy a wet suit, diving goggles, and gloves, and I can vividly recall swimming out to sea from the deserted beach at Robert Moses State Park on a cold and windy Thanksgiving Day—an experience that one day was instrumental in securing the English novelist R. F. Delderfield for S&S. Looking back on it, I seem to have been willing to try anything, including all-night dinners with Gypsies camping out for the winter in the Coney Island amusement park, and swimming in a pool full of dolphins with a woman who was part of a U.S. Navy experiment in communicating with them (an experiment that was later the subject of a best-selling novel by the French author Robert Merle, which I published, which was later made into a movie by Mike Nichols). I went fishing with Paul Newman and target shooting after dinner at an Italian club in the Village with its own pistol range. At one point, I even went to the top of the Verrazano Bridge to watch Mohawk steelworkers perform miracles of balance as they completed the span and learned, in case I had ever doubted the fact, that there are harder professions than editing books. I was, to put it mildly, game for anything, which is a good thing for a magazine writer to be.
I must have written tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of words, without ever once thinking that I might some day write a book. Writing books was something my authors did, not me. So long as I was merely writing for magazines, I did not have the feeling that I was competing with the people I edited or embarking on a new profession. I told myself that I wrote for magazines as a kind of hobby, except of course that I got paid for it; writing books would be a whole different story. Besides, if you’re used to writing five-thousand-word pieces, a book seems like a monumental task. There was nothing I admired more than the Sitzfleisch required to write a book of 100,000 words or more. I shared Bob Gottlieb’s combination of sympathy and awe for people who could do this. It seemed to require more courage than I had, so I put any desire to do it firmly out of my mind.
CHAPTER 18
As the sixties passed by, lost to most of us in hard work, S&S was increasingly divided by the question of succession, most of which hung on the question of what exactly Bob Gottlieb wanted. Even those who thought of themselves as Bob’s friends, like myself, were in the dark. He continued to edit his books, extended his hold over much of the company, and seemed willing to accept the status quo, even though he wasn’t exactly happy about it. Essentially, S&S seemed to consist at the time of two separate entities: the old, traditional S&S, run by Schwed, and the new, more contemporary