Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [18]
While the hot towel was doing its work, I managed to ask Herb if he thought he had a job for me.
Herb launched into a new tirade as the barber splashed him with bay rum. His beard seemed to be growing back already—he had the kind of five-o’clock shadow that used to make Richard Nixon look so sinister in photographs. The best thing for me, frankly, Herb thought, would be to throw me into the mass-market business, right up to the goddamn neck, and get rid of all my fucking Oxford, Limey intellectual pretensions and prejudices once and for all, so I could get a grip on what real people did in the real world. It would do me no harm to go out at dawn with “the guys in the trucks,” carrying cartons of mass-market titles and arranging them in the racks. That’s how you learned the business, the only way, if I wanted his opinion, and if I didn’t, what the hell was I doing here? (I was later to discover that this was something of a romantic illusion in the mass-market business—neither Herb nor any of the other Pocket Books senior executives and editors had ever gone out with the trucks, nor served their apprenticeship by handing a druggist a five-dollar bill so he would turn his back while you threw all your competitor’s titles out of the racks and replaced them with your own. There were people who did this, of course, but they did not as a rule get to the company’s offices at Rockefeller Center.)
Herb paused for breath, while my heart sank. I wasn’t fussy when it came to a job, but I didn’t like the sound of starting off my career in book publishing at dawn in a delivery truck. It wasn’t, as Herb seemed to feel was the case, that I thought this kind of thing was beneath me—I just didn’t believe then, and don’t now, that you can learn much about a business by carrying cartons.
If it depended solely on him, Herb went on, that’s what I’d be doing, and who knew? It might even make a man of me. But he had two problems, when it came to me: One was that he just didn’t have any jobs available at Pocket Books; the other was that he had sort of promised Morris Helprin that he would take good care of me, and he felt that Morris would be happier if I started out at a somewhat classier level. As it happened, there was a job available upstairs—he rolled his eyes heavenward—at Simon and Schuster, which was owned partly by Leon Shimkin, so the two companies had a relationship of sorts. Henry W. Simon (as I was beginning to discover, almost everybody of any importance in book publishing used a middle initial), the editor in chief, one of cofounder Richard L. Simon’s brothers, was looking for an assistant even as we spoke.
Henry Simon, Herb went on, with a certain invisible sneer in his voice, was a former Columbia University professor, a Shakespearean scholar of some note, and a classical musician. I would probably feel more at ease upstairs with him than downstairs in the rough-and-tumble world of Pocket Books, though he hoped that when I’d found my feet I might realize where the action really was and transfer my allegiance to the mass-market business. In the meantime, I should go upstairs and see Henry, who was expecting me.
I thanked him, but he cut me off abruptly.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said, examining the manicurist’s work carefully. “If it doesn’t work out with Henry, you come on back down here, and I’ll find something for you, even if it’s in the warehouse, you have my word on it.”
The barber removed the towel, and Herb