Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [144]
It did not hurt that, when I was proposed to them as a replacement for Bob, they discovered that my uncle was Alexander Korda and my aunt Merle Oberon, for though they pretended otherwise, they were snobs and suckers for showbiz aristocracy. It was not for nothing that Jackie’s motto was “too much is not enough,” and her passion for upper-crust brand names was such that when one reporter eavesdropped on her conversation at a party, all she could hear, she said, was “Gucci-Gucci, Pucci-Pucci.”
Dick and I negotiated laboriously with Hershkowitz, for whom the words fine print were the Holy Grail, and eventually a deal was concluded, on terms that left Shimkin breathless and shaking. Now it only remained to meet the author. It was thus that I first went to meet Jackie Susann in her apartment at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. I was accompanied by Jonathan Dolger, another S&S editor, Dick’s theory being that we had spent so much money—and agreed to such onerous terms—to acquire The Love Machine that everybody involved needed an understudy.
Our mission was a delicate one: We were the first people at S&S to have actually read a portion of the manuscript, for Mansfield and Hershkowitz had sold us Jackie’s novel without providing a page of manuscript to read, something of an innovation at the time. It was Jackie—and the sales curve of Dolls—that Irving was selling, not, as he put it indignantly when challenged, “some goddamn pile of paper.” Once the ink was dry on the contracts, we received, after much prodding on our part, about a hundred pages of what Irving referred to as “rough draft,” for once only too accurately.
The prospect of turning these pages into publishable prose in the time allotted to us had rendered us briefly speechless. Jackie wrote on pink paper, and despite Truman Capote’s insult, typing was not her forte. Although she had two best-sellers to her credit, it appeared she had not yet discovered the shift key on her pink IBM Selectric, since she wrote everything in caps, like a long telegram, revising in a large, forceful, circular hand, with what looked like a blunt eyebrow pencil.
Neither the plot nor the structure was readily apparent, despite numerous “notes to the editor” written on cocktail napkins from the Beverly Hills Hotel and Danny’s Hideaway, a show-business bar and steak house in New York City. Once Dolger had read the manuscript, he called me late at night in panic and asked, “What are we going to tell Dick Snyder?”
Dick’s instructions to us the next day were simple and Napoleonic: “Just turn it into a goddamn book somehow, that’s all I ask,” he said, and that was that.
• • •
THE PURPOSE of our visit, though ostensibly social, was in fact to see if we could turn Jackie’s pages into a book—or rather how, for Dick had made it clear that failure was not an option. Too much was at stake: his career, mine, and the whole question of whether S&S could make a go of it with high-stakes “commercial” fiction.
Dick, though he had no objection to solid nonfiction—if anything, he preferred it, since it was less of a gamble—had seen the future, and it included Pocket Books, movie tie-ins, and hype. He was already working night and day to launch The Love Machine with an unprecedented promotion campaign, every detail of which was subject to the Mansfields’ approval. Plans for everything were being made on a scale exceeding even that for Dolls: sales dumps, displays, posters, Jackie