Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [193]
Nan Talese, who loved this idea, had no sooner bought it for Random House than, in a crosstown shuffle that was to become familiar, she moved to S&S and handed me over to Jim Silberman (who would later follow her to S&S himself).
Silberman liked the idea of a book about power, too, but his intention was for it to be taken seriously, as a guide to getting ahead, in the American tradition of self-help books. Had he told me this outright, I would probably have refused to do it or claimed that I didn’t know how. Very fortunately, he did not approach the problem frontally but merely led me by indirection (and by very clever editing and packaging) away from the fairly broad humor of Parkinson toward something that might be taken seriously by an ambitious junior executive. I thus found myself launched on the road again, this time in the role of an expert on power. Silberman had calculated shrewdly that the time was right for the subject. The self-help career-advice book, a staple of American publishing since the days of Benjamin Franklin, had reached a kind of temporary peak with big best-sellers such as Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No and Winning Through Intimidation. The old tried-and-true message that had made Dale Carnegie famous (and Leon Shimkin rich) with How to Win Friends and Influence People had given way to more threatening and aggressive formulas.
Power! had seemed pretty funny to me when I wrote it, but it didn’t seem to me to have the makings of a best-seller. That, however, was exactly what it became. Reviewed everywhere (often with outrage), Power! leaped onto the New York Times best-seller list just as Silberman had predicted. It was as if a blast-furnace door had suddenly opened, blinding me with the brightness within. Male Chauvinism had been a heady experience, but Power! was on an altogether different scale, a brief taste of what media celebrity is like, a ride on the uphill curve of a roller coaster. Time and Newsweek consecrated long articles to the book, media pundits wrote serious think pieces about what the book’s success portended for our society, I was lampooned and parodied by countless humorists, bitterly attacked by Richard Reeves in The New York Times Book Review—my first experience of being savaged as a person, as opposed to merely having my work savaged—and caricatured by cartoonists all over the country, even in The New Yorker (fame indeed!). I appeared on every possible talk show—in one hilarious encounter, Johnny Carson tried to move his desk into the “power position” as we tried to psyche each other out. I had—rather cavalierly—chosen blue as the “power color,” mostly because I have always been partial to blue when it comes to suits, shirts, and ties. If there was going to be a power color, I decided, why not blue? Soon after the book was published, people started having their offices painted blue and ordering blue carpets and upholstery, even at S&S and Random House, where one might have supposed people would know better than to take my word for it.
Men bought blue power ties, wore power shoes (four eyelets, plain toes, highly polished), and rearranged their office furniture overnight to produce the power look. Businesswomen went for their kind of power clothes, hired male secretaries (at that time the ultimate power symbol for a woman), and bought the right kind of power briefcase. As for Power! itself, it zoomed up the best-seller list to number one.
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NOT EVERYONE shared my pleasure at this unexpected success. A good many of my authors sounded very frosty indeed