Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [15]
Nor did book publishers seem like a particularly friendly lot. After responding to an advertisement in the help-wanted section of The New York Times, I was interviewed by the publisher of Henry Holt, an impressively suited and aggressive executive type who read my résumé with deep mistrust. “It says here you went to Oxford,” he said.
I nodded.
“Can you prove that?”
The question startled me. I suppose Oxford does hand out diplomas of some kind, but I had certainly never bothered to collect mine, nor had anybody else I knew. It had never occurred to me that anybody would lie about things like that—or, perhaps more important, that anybody would suspect me of doing so. Besides, in England, one’s accent, one’s tailoring, one’s haircut, not to speak of a thousand other small and subtle class distinctions, make it almost impossible to fake things like that successfully.
With some embarrassment, I conceded that I couldn’t prove it. Could I prove the other stuff? he asked accusingly, thrusting a firm chin in my direction. School in Switzerland? Service in the RAF? I shook my head, feeling like an impostor. At any moment, I thought, he is going to ask me if I can prove that I’m Michael Korda. He stared at me darkly. “It says here you can speak French and Russian. That true?”
I said it was, a little defensively.
He looked at me with deep suspicion, and for a moment I wondered if speaking Russian might have made me seem like a subversive or a fellow traveler to him. Those were the days of the John Birch Society, the height of the cold war, with Ike and Nixon in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin, perhaps not the ideal time to claim a knowledge of Russian. Even the English seemed subversive to many right-wing Republicans, on the grounds that we didn’t take the cold war seriously enough.
My interviewer picked up his telephone and whispered into it. Was he calling for the police, I wondered, or for security guards to eject me from the building? We sat tensely for a moment, then the door opened and an attractive young woman entered. “Say something to her in Russian,” he said to me, with a smile of satisfaction. We spoke in Russian for a minute or so. She nodded at her boss.
A look of gloom settled on my interviewer’s face. He had clearly expected to catch me out in a lie. He waved her away, gave me a thin smile, and made a steeple with his fingers. “You can’t be too careful these days,” he said. He stood up, to show the interview was over. “You’ll hear from us,” he said.
I did not think that was likely, which proved to be correct. After quite a few similarly depressing and unsuccessful interviews, I decided that something must be wrong with my résumé, though I couldn’t think of anything I could change. Would it be better not to admit to knowing foreign languages? Was it a mistake to say that I loved reading? Did the combination of Le Rosey and Magdalen College, Oxford, sound too frivolous or snobbish? Did my curriculum vitae lack the common touch? The few people who were willing to give me an explanation for turning me down said that I was overqualified to be an assistant editor, but one or two said that I was too inexperienced. They did not suggest how I was to gain experience, however.
Just as I was about to give up on the whole idea, I was saved by an old friend of my father’s, Morris Helprin (father of novelist Mark Helprin, who would eventually be my assistant). He had run the London Films office in New York during and after the war, and I had called him in case he had any suggestions. He had a friend, Herbert Alexander, who was a vice president at Pocket Books. Paperback publishing might not be what I was looking for, of course, but it might be a way to get my foot in the door, if I wasn’t too fussy to go into a business where sales meant