Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [139]
She smiled, a little condescendingly I thought. I had the impression, perhaps mistaken, that Candida enjoyed watching me squirm. Snyder, always the optimist, had sent me on this mission with the warning to be tough. I was to take no prisoners, he advised, and not to retreat an inch—military metaphors had worked their way somehow into his mind, now that “the crunch” was on. But Candida showed no signs of surrendering. She heard me out, patiently enough, pausing from time to time to wave to people she knew as they came in or out, then shook her head decisively. She had no doubt that we would do well, even without Bob, but she could not think of S&S as a place for her clients anymore. They needed a sympathetic publisher, somebody who understood what they were doing. Peter Schwed liked sports books and writers like P. G. Wodehouse. Nothing wrong with that, but he couldn’t replace Bob Gottlieb. I was probably a perfectly good editor, but not for the type of book her clients wrote, and Snyder, while he already had a reputation for energy and sales acumen, didn’t appear to be somebody for whom literature was a first concern. She wished us nothing but good, but her clients had to go where they would feel comfortable, and that was that.
She wasn’t giving us a chance, I said.
Candida fixed her dark eyes on me implacably. It wasn’t her job to give us a chance. There were plenty of books and authors out there. When one came along that was right for us, she would send it over. In the meantime, the best thing we could do was to expedite the release of her clients from their contracts.
And if we didn’t? She shook her head. I had to understand. All writers were like children, but her writers were her children. She felt about them as if she were their mother. If we forced the issue, she would fight tooth and nail to defend them.
We were only trying to protect our contracts, I explained. Once those who owed us a book had delivered it, they could go, but not until then. She—and they—owed us no less.
They don’t owe you anything, she said. You can’t stop it. And if you tried, there isn’t an agent in New York who will send S&S a manuscript. She gave me a benevolent smile, with the air of a woman who has just delivered a piece of good advice to somebody too dumb to take it, gathered up her belongings, and left.
The next day, I waylaid Dick in the hall—he was in the process of moving upstairs from his digs at Pocket Books and slightly overwhelmed by what seemed to be a stroke of luck: He was where he had wanted to be for a long time, with a watching brief over S&S on behalf of Shimkin and a position that would give him as much power as he could amass for himself. I told him about my meeting with Candida. He nodded glumly. He had been going out to meet with agents, too, for the first time, and had been disappointed to find that most of them weren’t even willing to listen to our side of the story.
He took me off to his new office, which was still only partially furnished. It was not particularly large or impressive, in view of what was to come, but was equipped with a small refrigerator and a neat bar. It took no gift of prophecy to guess that this was where anybody who mattered at S&S was going to be after five o’clock, now that Bob was gone, especially since Schwed, always the family man, usually left by five or five-thirty and would therefore not even notice that Snyder was mobilizing his forces for a takeover. There was a comfortable sofa and a clear desk. Dick was perhaps at that time the only executive at S&S who didn’t have a typewriter near at hand, it being still the fashion in those days for publishing executives to prove that they were basically editors at heart and eager to bang out a few pages of well-chosen words with their own fingers