Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [150]
Most of the young women who worked in book publishing (“editorial assistants,” never secretaries) were college educated (often from one of the Seven Sisters) and drawn to publishing by either a genuine love of books or the desire to become an editor or a writer. Shamelessly exploited, they were paid miserable salaries and allowed in compensation to read all the unsolicited manuscripts—the famous slush pile. Many of them were the daughters of publishing executives or well-known authors, unaccustomed to hearing a voice raised at them in anger.
The Mansfields were deaf to these social niceties. So far as Jackie was concerned, the assistants were the help, and therefore she took her anger out on them, if only because they had the least chance of shielding themselves. It was not just being put on hold that made her angry: She didn’t like being told that someone was unavailable or in a meeting or out to lunch, and God help the assistant who didn’t know the answer to any question she might ask, even if it wasn’t her job to know or even her department. When angered, Jackie’s voice rose to the sound of a buzz saw at full throttle—worse yet, she often complained about the assistants to their bosses or even to the top management. She was always asking for people to be fired, and we found the simplest way of handling the problem was to tell her they had been and move them out of sight.
Nor did she always confine her anger to the underlings. According to Barbara Seaman, Jackie once called poor Bernie Geis at three in the morning to complain there weren’t enough books in the stores. When he pointed out the time to her, she replied: “You son of a bitch, I can’t sleep, so why should you?”
No doubt the Mansfields cannot be blamed for the erosion of manners in the book-publishing business, but they certainly heralded a new era in which the old-world charm of publishing, admittedly always a little self-conscious and bogus, gave way to the kind of behavior that had always characterized the movie business. Jackie Susann’s success unintentionally coincided with the decline and fall of the ancien régime and the rise of modern publishing, with its gargantuan mergers, its pretensions to big-business status, its impersonality, and its abrasiveness.
Jackie, to paraphrase Talleyrand’s comment on the Bourbons loosely, neither forgot nor forgave anything. During the planning of the parties accompanying the publication of The Love Machine, Jackie had puzzled us all by warning Dan Green, the S&S publicity director, that no cripples were to be invited. I probed for an explanation. It wasn’t that Jackie had anything against the people now called “the handicapped”—she simply felt that the sight of them depressed people and was therefore counterproductive to good promotion. In vain did Green protest, with a smile, that he wasn’t about to turn one of her parties into a scene from the Cour de Miracles in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, as described by Victor Hugo in his novel of the same name. Jackie was not amused, and she never forgave anybody for putting her down with a reference she didn’t understand. “I don’t care what they do in Paris,” she snapped, staring at him suspiciously with narrowed eyes. Jackie had a sense of humor but not about herself, and she thought that Green was having fun at her expense. “No cripples,” she said firmly. “You heard me.”
We put this down to unamiable eccentricity on her part, but as usual she meant business. Toward the end of the Leonard and Sylvia Lyons party, the first of many (held in their apartment but for which S&S footed the bill), a distinguished older publishing figure arrived late, on crutches, having broken