Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [168]
I paced the lobby until the crowd began to disperse—it was dinnertime—until there were only two people in it except for the staff; myself and a very tall, lean, serious-looking fellow, dressed in a sports jacket. He did not, at first glance, look like a Texan to me. He wore glasses and had a thick head of black hair, emphasizing his pallor. He was staring hard at me, which I thought was odd, since I had dressed, with Texas in mind, in jeans, my best pair of cowboy boots, handmade for me in El Paso with custom sharkskin bottoms and my initials in multicolored stitching, and the same pearl-colored Stetson I had worn in the Madison Square Garden rodeo. Instead of a tie, I wore a silver bolo of a cow’s skull, which I had picked up in New Mexico. Eventually, the tall young man made his way over to me and coughed discreetly. “You wouldn’t be Michael Korda,” he asked, “would you?” I said I was, and we shook hands. “I was expecting somebody who looked a little different,” he said warily.
I explained my interest in rodeo as we walked to his car. “Uh-huh,” he said. He said “uh-huh” a lot, I was to discover, and it conveyed many meanings, from approval to outright disagreement, if one listened carefully. His accent identified him as northwest Texan (or southwest Oklahoman) to any amateur Henry Higgins, but he spoke in flawless, carefully articulated sentences, not at all those of a country boy, and didn’t swear—a noticeable omission from his speech pattern, since most people at S&S laced even the most ordinary and innocent remarks with swear words. I did it myself, having fallen into the habit in the RAF, and those around Snyder did it because he did it, and also because, at least among the younger members of the staff, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had won them the right. Now that the shock value of swearing had worn off, it was surprising—and pleasant—to note its absence. There was a grave, old-fashioned courtesy to McMurtry, which put me immediately at ease.
I told him how much I liked his work, especially the rodeo novel, although it turned out that his own interest in rodeo was rather less than mine. He had seen plenty of rodeo in his life, and he could take it or leave it alone. He did not share my enthusiasm for horses, either, having spent his full share of time on them as a teenage ranch hand for his father. So far as he was concerned, he had seen as much of horses as he ever wanted to. Still, we had a lot in common (our sons were the same age), and we got on well (so well that we are still close friends nearly thirty years and many books later), and I returned to New York as his publisher, carrying with me a carton of Diet Dr Pepper, to which McMurtry had converted me and which was at that time unobtainable in the Northeast.
My only reservation about The Country of the Horn had been its title. That was not the result of any prejudice about cows on my part—in fact, I had at first associated the title with the horn of plenty rather than with cattle—but simply because it didn’t sound to me like a bestseller. McMurtry himself was not passionately attached to the title. When my wife suggested calling it Movin’ On, a thought inspired by a recent country-western song, he was not exactly enthusiastic but acquiesced after the g had been reinserted. He seemed resigned to the fact that people always wanted to change the titles of his books. The movie people had insisted on changing Horseman, Pass By to Hud, on the grounds that the book’s title made it sound like a Western, and now I was insisting on changing the title of The Country of the Horn to Moving On, on the grounds that our sales reps would like it better. McMurtry was willing to give us a sporting chance with the new title, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it, and looking back twenty-nine years later,