Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [155]
I must have been on Jackie’s list of friends, too, for I continued to receive PR releases and even birthday cards. Years later, one night at home, the telephone rang at some ungodly hour. My wife picked up, listened for a moment, and, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, whispered: “There’s a drunken woman on the phone asking for you.”
I took the receiver groggily and at once recognized Jackie’s voice, not drunk but hoarse and inarticulate with grief. “I just wanted you to know,” she said haltingly, “Josephine is dead.”
And in some strange way I felt sad—though I had never known Josephine in her prime. To tell the truth, Josephine had never much liked me. I had the impression, in fact, that she didn’t much like men in general, not even Irving, though it was possible that she merely resented being relegated to the background. In the old days, Josephine had been the star, not Jackie, and went everywhere with her owners: restaurants, nightclubs, talk shows. Then, as Jackie herself became the star, Josephine was eclipsed, left behind, loved perhaps but no longer in the limelight, which probably explained why she sulked and occasionally snarled at Irving. Still, with her death, it was as if a chapter of what Jackie liked to call “the book of life” had come to an end, though I couldn’t have guessed Jackie’s own life would end so soon, in 1974.
In her own way, she changed the course of popular fiction, a prophet without honor to whom John Grisham, Robert James Waller, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Danielle Steel all owe a debt. Jackie, after all, reinvented the woman’s novel, the mainstay of popular fiction, opened it up to a franker sexuality, to a tougher kind of story, to romance with tears and oral sex, to heroes with good looks and icy cruelty. She introduced readers of fiction to a rawer kind of sensation than had hitherto been acceptable to members of the Literary Guild and fiction buyers at the Doubleday bookstores, while, at the same time, introducing into the genre the first big dose of celebrity worship that was to blossom into the full-scale celebrity cults of the eighties and the nineties.
Jackie was ahead of that curve. More important, she taught everybody in book publishing a lesson: not just that books are merchandise and that nobody who wants to be a good publisher should ever forget that, but also that what most people want to read more than anything else is, quite simply, a good story. The rags to riches, poor little miss nobody in love with her all-powerful boss, the understudy who gets her chance to strut the stage in the star’s role and becomes a star—these are not just clichés, as reviewers would have us believe, but part of the very reason why people buy novels in the first place: to get out of their own lives and troubles by reading about other people’s.
Maybe Jackie picked that up from her mother, a great reader, or maybe she picked it up from being around her father, in what passed for the Philadelphia Jewish version of la vie de bohème, or maybe it was just all those hours as a kid reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but wherever it came from, she knew it better than anyone before or since.
CHAPTER 20
The Love Machine sold more copies than any work of fiction S&S had ever published and even garnered some good reviews, including perhaps the most selling review ever to appear in the staid, stuffy, and august New York Times Book Review, in which Nora Ephron called it “a long, delicious gossip column” and summed it all up by writing that “it shined like a rhinestone in a trash can.” Perhaps for the first time in publishing