mustache and steel-rimmed glasses with tiny lenses that made his eyes look like those of the little bon vivant who used to be Esquire magazine’s trademark. The eyes were prominent, piercing, and showed no trace of good humor. The old Hollywood adage “Dress British, think Yiddish” might have been coined with Perelman in mind—might even have been coined by him, now that I think of it. He walked around New York in spiffy tweeds, a jaunty green hat, a loden cape, and handmade brogues, as if he were deer stalking in the Scottish Highlands. His home life—not that he ever discussed it—was reputed to be tragic. His wife, Laura, the sister of Nathanael West, was an alcoholic; his son was hostile; like most of the long-term New Yorker writers, he nursed endless grievances and feuds against other members of that narrow and all too often uncharmed circle. In short, he was not a happy man. Perelman took his writing more seriously than his public did, and he yearned to have his work celebrated as literature. He was not consoled when the reviewers merely praised him to the skies for being funny, and therefore he bore a grudge against even the best and most generous of reviewers. He was not pleased by his sales, either. He wanted to be a major bestseller, on the scale of Harold Robbins, but while his sales were respectable, they remained comparatively small, partly because most of his books were collections and most of his fans had already read the pieces in The New Yorker. He had left Random House after many years, out of disgust for his low sales, and was beginning to feel the same way about S&S. Low sales were not the only bone he had to pick with Random House. Bennett Cerf fancied himself a humorist and a punster and was the author of numerous collections of jokes. He was a fervent Perelman fan, but on some deep level he was also a competitor, determined to prove that he was funnier than his own author. Perelman’s sense of humor did not extend to other people’s jokes—in any case, what he wanted to hear from Cerf was glowing reports of sales, not jokes—and the relationship between the two men was inevitably frayed.
Unfortunately for Perelman, Max Schuster prided himself—improbably—on his ability as a humorist and a punster. A sample Schusterism was that when he was asked about whether he exercised, he replied, “At S&S we start every day by exercising our options.” Max labored under the misapprehension that Perelman lived to hear other people’s jokes, and he actually kept a file of fresh ones on his desk just in case Perelman should turn up. At some point, Schuster had taken to greeting Perelman by saying, in a loud stage whisper, “The jig is up!” whenever he sighted him, until Perelman complained that Schuster was deliberately persecuting him. Wherever he went, there Max was, waiting to rush up to him. In Paris at the Hôtel Georges V, in Venice on Saint Mark’s Place, in New York in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel, there was Max, lying in wait, as if he were playing blindman’s buff, to rush out and say, “The jig is up!” at the first sight of Perelman. “He’s following me around,” Perelman complained wildly, eyes full of indignation and anger behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “Who needs that kind of craziness from a publisher!”
Perhaps the only benefit from this misunderstanding between author and publisher was that Perelman was unusually reluctant to appear on the premises of S&S, for fear that Max would be waiting to leap out at him and utter the dreaded line. Eventually, Bob had managed to calm Perelman, keeping him away from Max and treating him with great courtesy as the touchy man of letters he was, instead of the comedian he was not, and it fell to me to continue the job.
I had always thought that Perelman was a genius and once took The Most of S. J. Perelman on a week’s vacation in Montana and read nothing else—in fact, I laughed so hard every night at pieces that I had read a dozen times before that my wife threw a pillow at me.
All the same, nothing I could do seemed to increase poor Perelman’s sales, and eventually