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By Root 901 0

was getting deeper when I plunged in, but instead I had landed headfirst on the rocks. Fortunately, I was floating, but I was quite unable to move. Not far from me, as my vision came back into focus again, I could see Ronnie sporting about in the freezing water like a whale, his breath forming clouds of vapor. He waved at me cheerfully. “Grand, isn’t it?” he called out. By now my teeth were chattering, my fingernails had turned an ugly purple color, and I could feel a warm trickle running down my forehead that was surely blood. I gave a hoarse bellow, and Ronnie swam over with a stately breaststroke to investigate. “Bloody ’ell!” he said, as he caught a closer look at me, and hauled me ashore. In a moment, he had me wrapped in his dressing gown, and before long I was back at the cottage, drinking tea with rum. Whether it was from the guilt of having nearly killed me or because we became, in fact, really good friends, Ronnie Delderfield remained an S&S author until his death, many years and many thousands of pages later.

When I told Dick the story on my return, he was delighted. For a long time afterward he told it himself, as an example of just how far an editor ought to go to keep an author happy. He always added at the end, “They say Bobby Gottlieb’s a great editor, but let me tell you this: he doesn’t have the balls to go swimming in the English Channel at dawn, the way Korda did.”

PERHAPS AS a reward for service above and beyond the call of duty in England, Dick shortly afterward encouraged me to go to Los Angeles, partly to mend fences with Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, and the Durants, partly in the belief, common to all those who live on the East Coast, that California is full of interesting new writers who don’t have a New York agent. In those days, before the advent of the chain stores, I considered it part of my job to visit local bookstores and schmooze with the owners, a breed only slightly more pessimistic than dirt farmers, who blamed the publishers for most of their misfortunes, despite having the only product that can be returned unsold months, even years, after they have received it and for full credit. Given this, it has always been hard to understand how it is possible to lose money selling books, but most booksellers skated on the thin edge of bankruptcy. The visit of a book publisher always brought out the gloomiest side of them—here, after all, was, in their eyes, the person responsible for all their woes—so I usually approached any bookstore with a sinking heart. I usually asked if anything was selling, in the hope of at least hearing something cheerful, and this time, from bookstore to bookstore throughout Beverly Hills and Brentwood, the surprising answer was that something was indeed selling like crazy. Needless to say, it wasn’t an S&S book, nor a book from any of the major East Coast publishers that had brought a ray of sunshine to the lives of the booksellers of Southern California—it was a paperback from the University of California Press, and it was selling so fast that they couldn’t keep it in stock. Intrigued, I tried to buy a copy, but the booksellers were not exaggerating for once: There were none available. In the end, I managed to borrow a well-thumbed copy from one of the clerks at the Pickwick Book Store on Sunset Boulevard and took it back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I read it in one gulp, with absolute fascination.

The book was The Teachings of Don Juan by a UCLA professor of anthropology named Dr. Carlos Castaneda, and it purported to tell of his initiation into a peyote cult by a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan. In the drug-obsessed culture of the late sixties and early seventies, it was hardly surprising that Castaneda’s doctoral thesis should have broken out of the academic world to become a local best-seller, though it was very possibly the first (and last) doctoral thesis in history to do so.

In later years, when Castaneda had become a kind of guru to a whole generation of college kids and his books had sold in the millions of copies, he was to take on a kind of mystic