Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [169]
The problem, as I discovered the moment I was back in New York, was not the title, it was Patsy. This came as a surprise to me. I had expected to be told that there was too much rodeo in the book and maybe too many cows but not that there was too much Patsy. Every woman who read the book, however, complained that Patsy cried too much. Of course, Patsy had a lot to cry about—none of the men in her life was right for her—so it seemed to me perfectly natural that she should do so. It seemed that way to McMurtry too, who pointed out that most of the women he knew—and certainly all those on whom Patsy was based—cried pretty much all the time. There was certainly plenty for them to cry about in Texas, he pointed out, a place that was notoriously hard on both women and horses.
We had struck, it seemed, a basic difference between the East and the West, or at any rate between Texas and New York City, and there was nothing much we could do about it, since trying to stem the flow of Patsy’s tears would have meant totally rewriting the novel, which McMurtry wasn’t about to do, and I wasn’t about to ask him to. As a kind of counterpunch, I had buttons made up to give away at the ABA convention along with an advance reading copy of the book that read “I’m a Patsy” (they probably should have read “I’m a Patsy for Patsy”). The booksellers wore them all right, but the ones that read the book came back to the stand to say how much they liked the book except for Patsy’s crying. In the end, Moving On did OK—a lot better than McMurtry’s previous books had—and was even taken by one of the major book clubs, but it wasn’t the big blockbuster breakout book I had thought it would be. We had to wait fifteen years until Lonesome Dove, a book in which there are remarkably few tears, finally gave McMurtry the attention and reviews he had deserved right from the beginning. Still, we gave it our best shot in every possible way, which was more than you could say for his previous publisher, and to this day Moving On remains one of my favorite books.
COUNTRY MUSIC had been on my mind when I flew down to Houston to see McMurtry, in part because I had received in the mail a manuscript from Atlanta Journal columnist Paul Hemphill about the country-music business. Our sales rep in Georgia, a gentleman of the old school named J. Felton Covington, Jr., perhaps the most charming book salesman who has ever lived, had buttonholed me at a sales conference and made me promise on my mother’s grave (though she is still very much alive) to read Hemphill’s book myself. Since I not only liked Covington but had long since learned never to say no to a sales rep, I gave it my full attention.
If there was any subject less likely to cause enthusiasm at S&S than country music—except perhaps rodeo, cows, and crying women—I didn’t know it. The point of the book was that country music was no longer a peculiarly Southern phenomenon and was going mainstream. This has certainly happened with a vengeance, but at that time it hadn’t yet reached New York book-publishing circles, where if it was noticed at all it was regarded with disdain. The only person I could find who shared my enthusiasm for country music was a tall young woman named Julie D’Alton, at that time Schwed’s assistant, who seemed to know the words to every country song. As it turned out, she was one of five similarly tall and beautiful sisters who could have, had they wished, formed a country group all of their own, though they were born and bred New Yorkers, educated at Convent of the Sacred Heart.
Encouraged by Julie’s reaction to the manuscript, I called Hemphill in Atlanta and told him how much Julie and I liked his book and how hard it was going to be to sell it to anyone else at S&S. Even my own assistant, who was up on every aspect of the rock-and-roll scene, turned up her nose at the corniness of country music.
Hell, he could understand