Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [19]
“Tell Henry from me he’s wrong about Harold Robbins,” he said, and dismissed me.
HERB ALEXANDER’S secretary led me to a stairway that took us up to the Simon and Schuster offices on the floor above. The stairway had been opened only recently, she told me. It had been bricked up for some years, on the orders of Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, but Mr. Shimkin had recently had it opened again, so people could go back and forth between the two floors more easily. It took very little imagination on my part to guess what the relationship was between the owners of Simon and Schuster if they had been struggling for years over whether their employees could get from Pocket Books to Simon and Schuster and vice versa by the stairs.
Indeed, my guide looked nervous on the floor above her own, as if we had ventured into Indian territory, and seemed relieved when she handed me over to Henry Simon’s secretary, who showed me right in. Seated behind a pale wood desk in a large corner office, Henry Simon was an impressive figure. It was easy enough to guess that he had once been a very handsome man indeed, almost theatrically so in fact, but age and what I imagined was ill health had given him a ghostly look. His pallor was alarming, and his long, thin hands—the hands of a musician, with narrow Giacometti-like fingers—trembled noticeably. I guessed him to be in his sixties (he was, in fact, then in his late fifties, but the young are never good at guessing older people’s ages). His hair was silver, there were dark circles under his eyes, and his face was hollow-cheeked and deeply lined, as if all the cares of the world were on his shoulders. When he rose, I could see that he was tall, six foot or more, but painfully thin and slightly stooped. He came around from behind his desk and shook my hand, a quick, dry, whispery handshake, unlike Herb Alexander’s, which had felt like being squeezed hard by a pipe wrench. Henry slipped behind his desk like a shadow, sat down again, and lit a cigarette.
Even in those innocent days when almost everybody smoked—as I did—Henry’s consumption of tobacco was remarkable. There were two racks of pipes on his desk, all of them well used, and a huge, round ashtray the size of a pie plate that contained too many cigarette butts to count. His desktop was littered with cigarette packages, matchbooks, and tobacco ash, and his fingernails had a nicotine stain so dark that it seemed baked on. Not surprisingly, his voice, though soft and melodious, was a hoarse whisper. He spoke slowly, with the slightly prissy exactitude of the university professor he had once been, and it all seemed to me very much like an Oxford tutorial, except that neither of us was wearing a gown and he didn’t offer me sherry.
If Herb Alexander had considered me to be rather too much of a hothouse flower for the world of mass-market paperback publishing, Henry’s suspicion, perhaps because Alexander had sent me to him, appeared to be that I was an ignorant yahoo from the movie business, unsuitable for the refined world of hardcover publishing. My family’s fame—then very much greater than it is now—had seemed to Alexander something I would have to overcome but not otherwise of any concern. At worst, he had feared it would prevent me from being “one of the guys” and make me a poor bet for servicing the racks. Henry Simon, to my consternation, was deeply suspicious of it. Why wasn’t I working in the movie business? he wanted to know. How could he be sure I wouldn’t rush off to Hollywood at any moment, if he hired me?
It would have been helpful if I had understood then that Henry’s whole adult life had been a tug-of-war between his own inclinations as a teacher, writer, and musician and his older brother Richard’s determination to find a place for him at Simon and Schuster. The phrase love-hate relationship might have been coined