Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [140]
“Fuck ’em,” he said.
He sat down and put his feet up on his desk—a trademark posture, I was beginning to learn—and briefly admired the shine on his shoes. Among the changes that followed his ascent to the twenty-eighth floor was the arrival every morning of an elderly black man with a shoeshine box. Never one to hog his perks, Dick had signaled the availability of the shoeshine man to the more senior S&S editors, but I was the only one to take advantage of his daily presence, the rest having some qualms about being seen with him crouching on his knees before them on the floor at a time when the civil-rights struggle was at its height.
Dick took off his glasses for a moment and stared out the door of his office, as if taking in the reality of what he had been left to deal with. He had been given the opportunity of a lifetime, he believed (and so it turned out to be), only to find himself second in command on what seemed to be a sinking ship—sunk, in his view, by its captain. Still, though he was unsentimentally clear-eyed, he thought he could make it work and was determined to use whatever assets he found. If he didn’t have Bob, he would make me his editorial partner; if he had lost Schulte, he would take over marketing himself; if Nina Bourne had gone he would find a replacement who could at least mimic her style. Unlike Shimkin, who ran the company like a man driving a car with his eyes closed, Dick looked ahead. On a clear day he could see, if nothing else, where he wanted to go and sometimes even a hint of how to get there.
“Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and focusing on me, “what’s done is done. We’re not going to get any help from agents like Candida. Why should we? She doesn’t respect weakness. Nobody does. If we’d put up a fight …” He shrugged. “The hell with that.” His voice turned brisk. “We need to make a big splash, something to show that we’re still in business, that we can still outpublish anybody, something that will be noticed.” He put his arms behind his head and tilted his chair back as far as it would go. “Did you know,” he asked, “that Bobby was thinking about bringing Jacqueline Susann here?”
I had heard rumors of this, but it was one of the very few subjects on which Bob had been closemouthed. Susann, who had vaulted to fame as the author of a successful book about her dog, Every Night Josephine!, and a subsequent number-one best-selling novel, Valley of the Dolls, was eager to leave her present publisher and come to S&S for what was then an unprecedented amount of money. This was not Bob’s usual turf, and in the aftermath of his departure, there were those conspiracy theorists who wondered if it had been a signal of his intentions. Some suggested that Bob had involved S&S with Jacqueline Susann as an act of revenge, forever stamping the S&S fiction list as a home for schlock; others thought it might have been Bob’s last great contribution to S&S, exactly the kind of big-time purchase that was needed to liven things up. The likelihood is that none of this was true—it was simply a question of timing. Bob had opened discussions with Jackie Susann, her husband Irving Mansfield, and their lawyer, Artie Hershkowitz, before