Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [147]
She was also a phenomenally hard worker. She absorbed our notes and, with a total lack of prima donna behavior, carved out, with our help, a plot and structure that sounded pretty damned good and with any luck might even sound OK the next morning. I was impressed and relieved.
(Years later, at an ABA convention in Washington, D.C., I mentioned this to Bob Gottlieb, and he sighed. “Yes,” he said, “it’s true. Jackie was a pro. But you must be wary of thinking that’s a good thing for a writer to be.”)
I asked Jackie if she thought she could meet our deadline. She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You bet your fucking ass,” she said.
“Heh, heh,” Irving said. “What did I tell you? Isn’t she great?” Did we know that Jackie could also sing? Irving wanted to know. We shook our heads. He produced a tape and played a recording of Jackie singing “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” in a flat, harsh, totally tuneless baritone. It was, apparently, her theme song. We heard it twice, in awe, while Irving kept time with his right hand, clearly having the time of his life. Later on, people were to tell me that Irving used Jackie, but I knew better. No man ever loved a woman more than Irving loved Jackie. Only love could explain his listening to that recording for the umpteenth time with unfeigned pleasure.
“Am I right, or am I wrong? Isn’t she great?” he asked. He gave us each a copy of the tape as a souvenir. “Let’s go eat.”
Dolger, eyes rolling, pleaded another engagement and went home with a bundle of manuscript, his notes, and his tape of Jackie singing, but the Mansfields were not about to let me escape that easily. I was to have dinner with them—they would hear of nothing else, otherwise Jackie’s feelings would be hurt. Abby Hirsch, Jackie’s publicity assistant, whose salary had been a source of endless kvetching during the contract negotiations, since the Mansfields were determined that S&S should pay it, turned up from the bedroom, where she had presumably been baby-sitting Josephine, and booked a table for us at Danny’s Hideaway. Abby bore a remarkable resemblance to a younger and prettier version of Jackie—it was rumored that she wore the same dress size as Jackie and could therefore try on clothes for her, saving Jackie the trouble of shopping.
Before we left, however, Jackie was determined to change my appearance. At the time, in keeping with what was then the publishing tradition, I wore an old tweed hacking jacket from my Oxford days, with suede leather patches on the elbows. Jackie looked at me critically. “You’re a big-shot editor,” she told me, “but you dress like a bum.” Irving was wearing a brand-new dark blue cashmere blazer, cut in the Hollywood, Sy Devore style, with dramatic wide lapels and gold buttons engraved with an ankh. The ankh, an ancient Egyptian good luck symbol, was Jackie’s latest obsession. It was to play a major role in the plot of The Love Machine, and we created ankh pendants on gold chains for important lady booksellers and ankh rings for men, and we put gold-stamped ankhs on everything in sight. Some people involved with the book soon wore so many ankhs that they clanked and jingled like Gypsies at every step. We eventually came to refer to the ankh as “the ancient Egyptian symbol for schlock,” though never within Jackie’s hearing. She took the ankh seriously and made Dick Snyder spend thousands of dollars of S&S’s money at her favorite L.A. jewelers for ankh items.
“Give him your blazer, honey,” Jackie told Irving. For once, Irving rebelled. The blazer had just arrived from his tailor that morning, he was devoted to it, it had eighteen-karat gold buttons—all to no avail. Over his protests (and mine, for it was the last thing I wanted), Irving was forced to relinquish it. As I tried it on, I noticed that the lining was embroidered with ankhs too—the Mansfields never did things by half. I wondered in whose promotion budget the cost of Irving’s blazer had been buried, the movie company’s or ours? Unfortunately, Irving and I were different shapes. He was much bigger around the waist and had long arms,