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By Root 775 0

history, a book’s editor was quoted in a Times review (up until then, editors, like valets and tailors, remained silent). “You have to push this book beyond regular book buyers,” I said (correctly), “to people who haven’t been in a bookstore since Valley of the Dolls was published.” Ephron noted that we had paid $250,000 for the book (a fortune in those days) and that Twentieth Century–Fox had offered a million dollars for the movie rights (which the Mansfields turned down)—the first time that the grubby subject of money had been raised there—and also brought up the hitherto taboo subjects of masochism, nymphomania, and incest. She also quoted me as saying, in regard to the competition between Philip Roth and Jackie Susann for first place on the best-seller list, “It’s wild! You have these two books out at the same time, and their merits aside, one of them is about masturbation and the other is about successful heterosexual love. If there’s any justice in the world, The Love Machine ought to knock Portnoy off the top simply because it’s a step in the right direction.” (This comment was to cause me untold grief when the wheel of life turned and cast me, years later, as Roth’s editor.) Newsweek compared Jackie to “an Egyptian love goddess,” called the book “an engaging sex-power fantasy,” and compared her (unfavorably) to Thomas Wolfe.

There were two immediate consequences. The first was that Dick and I were proven right. We had gambled big and won, and there could henceforth be no doubt that I belonged in the editor in chief’s office or that Dick’s ascent to the top would be seriously delayed, least of all by Peter Schwed. The second was that having been quoted again and again in the press on the subject of Jacqueline Susann, I glimpsed, for the first time, the possibility that an editor need not necessarily be mute and invisible—that he or she might become as much of a celebrity as the best-selling authors were. Reporters, reviewers, professional deep thinkers called, one replied to their questions, and lo and behold, the next day there were one’s words, appearing in print all across America and, for that matter, around the world. That this might turn out to be a two-edged sword had not yet occurred to me, but in the meantime Jackie Susann and Irving Mansfield had dragged me all too willingly into the limelight, and I was reluctant to fall back into the shadows.

In a curious way, The Love Machine sharply changed the stakes for both Dick and me. In the first place, we had proven ourselves as a team—a fact of more importance to us than to the rest of the world—and in the second place, perhaps more important, Dick had demonstrated his skill as a publisher in conditions of extreme stress. Successfully articulating the publication of a big book is the test of good publishing, involving the ability to keep in one’s head not only the numbers and their daily fluctuation but the harmonious synchronizing of publicity, manufacturing, advertising, and sales—departments often run as independent fiefdoms. Dick established immediate control over the whole process and won universal respect (if not affection) by his absolute recall of even the smallest bit of information and by the fact that he was usually a step ahead of everybody else. Whatever the subject was, he knew the right questions to ask and also knew when he wasn’t being given a straight answer. When a book is selling fast and in big numbers, the publisher has no option but to go back to press blindly for more printings of the book for fear of running out of stock, with the result that when sales start to slow down or stop, there is still a torrent of books coming in from the printer. Many best-sellers end up losing money for the publisher because of overprinting, while, of course, uncounted best-sellers that might have been fail to happen because the publisher prints too cautiously or fails to respond quickly enough to demand. (The adoption of the computer was supposed to cure this problem but has made no difference at all—returns of unsold hardcover books still run at a crippling