Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [165]
It was not so much a question of Dick’s bark being worse than his bite—his bark was certainly menacing, but he could bite fiercely, too—as it was of dealing with his naturally combative nature. He expected people to put up a fight and relished it when they did; at the slightest sign of fear or timidity, he bored in relentlessly, seeking the weak, vulnerable spot, going instinctively for the soft underbelly. What nobody understood is that he had an essentially Darwinian view of the world: People ought to fight for what they wanted or believed in and fight hard. Those who fought back for what they wanted to do gained his respect; those who didn’t, he lost interest in.
Nobody in the industry would have put S&S high on the list of places that were fun to work at, but the odd thing was that those of us who made the grade were happy and wouldn’t have wanted to work anywhere else. Like the Marines, people at S&S were proud of themselves for working under conditions that elsewhere were thought barbarously harsh. As one graduate of this trial by terror said, “If you can survive this, you can survive anything.”
Dick worked harder and longer than anybody, setting the pace by example. Those who thrived did so because they gave 100 percent to the job and cared about doing things right; those who failed failed because it was a tough, unforgiving environment, very unlike the “loved ones” atmosphere of S&S under Bob Gottlieb, when Bob had played the indulgent and wise papa bear to an adoring circle of acolytes that shared his views and lived for his praise. The reward for the members of Dick’s inner circle was to have passed the test.
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SINCE SCHWED was still doing his London trip, largely as a reward for having acquiesced to Dick’s taking his place without a fight, and since I was still unwilling to sit around waiting for agents to send me manuscripts, I devoted myself for a while to traveling around the United States in search of books. Next on my agenda was Texas, a state I had always liked, ever since visiting my mother in Dallas, whence she had moved from Chicago when my stepfather took over one of the major hotels there. I was at a stage of my marriage when travel seemed an interesting alternative to staying at home, and I developed a passion for the West. During the time I spent in Hollywood in the 1940s, my father, partly out of guilt at being absent so often, partly to escape from domestic difficulties, had taken me to the desert, to the Grand Canyon, to Yosemite, and to ski at what were then pretty backwoodsy and primitive ski resorts in the Rockies, hardly more than miners’ camps in the early stages of becoming tourist attractions. I learned how to ride, and horses became a part of my life. Even in New York City, I managed to ride as often as I could and on my own horse. I became the only member of the New York book-publishing community to be a paid-up member of the Rodeo Cowboy Association (whose permanent secretary, I was later to discover when I met him on a trip to Montana, had been the young boy for whom Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Dolittle) and subscribed to their newspaper. I joined the American Quarterhorse Association and even rode in the rodeo in Madison Square Garden, cantering into the arena on a chunky palomino in the opening parade behind Monty Montana and his Wonder Horse Rex. I carried, prophetically, for I was to one day build a house there, the state