Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [141]
“She doesn’t seem like Bob’s cup of tea,” I said.
Snyder laughed. He had two kinds of laugh—one was without humor, the other with. This was the former. “Bullshit,” he said. “It would have been a good move. Jazz up the list. It’s been a long time since S&S had a big number-one fiction best-seller. He’d have been a hero to the sales reps.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “It’s still not such a bad idea,” he said, musingly.
“How far advanced was the negotiation?”
“I don’t know. There was quite a way to go, I think.” He scribbled a note on a pad in front of him. “I’ll get the details,” he said.
He sat upright and took his feet off the desk, back in action again, eyes sparkling. “Keep it to yourself,” he warned. “Don’t tell anybody. The only way to make this fly is to keep it a surprise.” He waved me out of his office. “If we bring this one off, everything else will be easy,” he predicted.
And as usual, he was right.
CHAPTER 19
In some ways, my previous experience suited me well for taking on Jacqueline Susann—after all, when it came to commercial fiction, I had already had an apprenticeship that included Harold Robbins, and so far as “difficult” or “demanding” authors were concerned, who could be more difficult and demanding than the Durants? I had no reason to doubt my ability to deal with Jacqueline Susann and Irving Mansfield, nor was I among those who had been shocked by the success of her previous books, which did not signify to me, as they did to so many others, the beginning of the end of Western civilization.
In book publishing, however, vulgarity was still frowned upon. Bad taste frightened publishers. Bennett Cerf might flutter around the edges of show business, a Broadway groupie, joke anthologist, and panel member on What’s My Line?, but when it came to his publishing persona, he expected to be taken seriously and worried about books “in bad taste.” Max’s ambition as a publisher was to load the S&S list with works of philosophy, history, and great literature, and he put his ears back and shied at the idea of anything that might be in bad taste carrying his name.
It was simply understood that one did not stoop to a certain level of vulgarity; in fact, one of the reasons why people went into book publishing in the first place was in order to avoid the vulgarity, celebrity worship, and indifference to bad taste that were all too clearly the norm in the movie business, the television industry, and the tabloid press.
Then, in 1966, came Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, a huge best-seller that for the first time brought the worlds of Hollywood, TV, tabloids, and Broadway press agentry together to sell a novel in which they were all the subject. Jackie, then forty-eight, with her spiky false eyelashes, her gravelly chain-smoker’s voice, her glittery dresses, her thick pancake makeup, and her feisty, tough-broad image seemed to many of the old guard of book publishing like the beginning of the end, Hollywood vulgarity at the door of the temple of culture.
Jackie herself was in many ways a much more lively creation than her novels, hugely successful as they were. She had arrived in New York from her native Philadelphia with show-business ambitions in 1936 as a high school beauty-contest winner. She emerged from a family in which her father, a successful if somewhat flashy society portrait painter, was a handsome, high-living, charming womanizer, while her mother was a hard-driving, long-suffering perfectionist who wanted Jackie to go to college.
Although Jackie talked about her childhood in Philadelphia as if she had been a princess there, it does not seem likely that with a painter and part-time art teacher as a father and a Russian Jewish schoolteacher mother, Jackie could have found acceptance even among the wealthy (and stuffy) German-Jewish aristocracy of the City of Brotherly Love, let alone among the daughters of Main Liners.
Jackie’s family life, if