Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [192]
As I thought about it later, I decided that she had a point. I had assaulted the man because he was making lewd remarks about my wife—it was my own amour propre that was at stake, not Casey’s. I was not sorry to have thrown the ashtray at a rude and noisy oaf, but on the other hand I could understand that Casey felt the situation had been taken out of her hands.
Lynn Nesbit passed my account of the ashtray incident on to Felker, who instantly saw that it spoke to many of the questions that were beginning to trouble women about their relationships with men. Himself an unapologetic male chauvinist at the time, Felker nevertheless had an eagle eye for the kind of popular psychology that appealed to women readers, and he knew just what to do with the goods when he had them. My story appeared with a striking cover and was soon at the center of a fierce debate. For some time I had been writing, in Glamour, about the ways in which women were badly treated—or perceived themselves to be—in the workplace, using for examples the everyday evidence before my own eyes at S&S. S&S was not worse than anyplace else, but there was no shortage of horror stories about male chauvinism. Some men, then, felt that in the war between the sexes I had betrayed my gender.
With the piece in hand, Lynn Nesbit managed to persuade Nan Talese, then an editor at Random House, that she should commission me to do a book on the subject. With considerable misgivings, but won over by Lynn’s enthusiasm and Nan’s quiet confidence in her own judgment, I agreed. I did not ask anybody at S&S what they thought about my signing a book contract with Random House—the whole idea seemed to me so unreal that I didn’t take it seriously. Editors sometimes wrote books, I knew—Hiram Haydn, then at Atheneum, had written a novel, and it was not unknown for an editor to write a book about a subject that interested him or her, stamp collecting, or photography, for instance. Mostly, however, when editors wanted to become writers, they resigned, as Justin Kaplan had done when he decided to write a biography of Mark Twain. The general feeling was that an editor should be one thing or another and not “play both sides of the street,” as it were, but I couldn’t see what harm it would do, and in any case, despite Nan’s optimism, I took it for granted that the book, like most books, wouldn’t go anywhere.
Of course, that was underrating both the subject and my own nascent ability to attract media attention, which had so far been hidden under a bushel from everyone, myself included. No sooner was Male Chauvinism published than I was swept into a whole new world, about which my only knowledge was vicarious, gleaned from people such as Jackie Susann and Connie Ryan—instead of organizing a book tour, I was doing one. The subject of male chauvinism was hot enough to get me on Today, Merv Griffin’s show, Irv Kupcinet’s show in Chicago, and even The Tonight Show (then starring Johnny Carson), not to speak of radio talk shows that I hadn’t even heard of. To my surprise, I did not suffer from stage fright—I was not my mother’s son for nothing, it appeared. Fame, it turned out, was transitory—twenty-four hours after doing Tonight, total strangers in the street recognized me on sight; forty-eight hours after doing it nobody gave a damn or could remember my name—but it was heady while it lasted.
I had stumbled across the idea of writing about power, thus fulfilling Carlos Castaneda’s prediction, because S&S was as fertile a ground