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By Root 890 0

already decided that this was not the profession for me. I had neither the shtick nor the passionate zeal that was called for if one wanted to make a living in the self-help trade, and perhaps more important, I wasn’t myself a true believer in my own formula, nor quite cynical enough to go on selling it from city to city despite that. It was a relief when the dark night of the soul caught up with me at last, at midnight in the Albert Pick Hotel in Cleveland, during a Shriners’ convention, with middle-aged men in funny costumes and gold-laced fezzes raucously chasing women up and down the halls as bells rang and the fire alarm pealed incessantly. I had finally had enough. I called Selma Shapiro, the Random House publicity director, and said, “For God’s sake, get me home!”

• • •

IN YEARS to come, I have often met people (mostly, but by no means only, men) who tell me, often in terms of the greatest sincerity and gratitude, that reading Power! changed their lives. This happens not just in America, either, since the book has by now been translated into almost every conceivable language (and is currently having a new lease on life in Eastern Europe, where the fall of communism has made it necessary for a whole new generation of readers to learn where to put their desks or what the power color is). To this, I have always been able to answer, with perfect sincerity, that it changed mine too.

Not immediately, however. Because of the endlessly slow way in which authors receive money (they wait until the end of a six-month royalty period, only to find, as a rule, that rights income from a mass-market sale will be reflected on the next statement, so the money tends to trickle in over a long period of time instead of in a single gusher, like movie sales) I did not feel immediately rich, which was probably just as well. I did feel what the French call dépaysé, as if I had lost my bearings. For a brief, perilous moment it seemed as if I might actually have to choose between the two professions. Very fortunately, Dick Snyder told me not to even think about it. I could write as many books as I liked, he didn’t care. Snyder still knew how to crack the whip, however—indeed, one reason for my dark night of the soul in Cleveland was that I had inadvertently missed an appointment with Paul Gitlin and Harold Robbins, obliging Snyder to fill in for me. I was still working for S&S, he had reminded me in a brief, curt message, and it was time to cut the crap and come home.

The real problem was not at work, however, but at home. While success was not the only reason for the slow deterioration of my marriage to Casey, it certainly didn’t help. As is so often the case, the first person to become dazzled by fame was the person who had become famous. While I was to write later that successful people are generally nicer than those who are not, I’m not sure that I fit into that category. With so much of my attention focused on S&S and what remained of it directed toward writing and promoting my books, domestic life got short shrift. It was a condition I had observed often enough in my authors’ lives, not to speak of my own family’s, so I should have known better. My father and his brothers seldom came home from the studio until late at night, worked seven days a week, and were often on location for months at a time. They considered this normal and did not connect it to the domestic complaints and unhappiness that greeted them on the rare occasions when they were home.

In any event, my sudden and bewildering emergence as a self-help guru coincided with a period in which my marriage took a turn for the worse. It does not seem particularly surprising, in retrospect. As if there were a contagious epidemic of flu, everybody’s marriage seemed to be collapsing in the early seventies, even those of people whose marriages had seemed to outsiders as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar—it was no doubt partly the logical aftermath of the sixties, when, for a decade or so, everything had seemed permissible.

There had been moments, in the sixties, when even the world