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By Root 754 0

of book publishing, outwardly one of the more conventional occupations, was touched by the craziness of the era. Sales conferences, which had usually been held in New York, began to take place in Florida or the Caribbean islands or the Georgia seacoast and rapidly developed a wild, permissive, anything goes tradition—at S&S and Random House, certainly. Once defined by heavy drinking, marathon poker playing with the sales reps, and an occasional bit of bottom pinching in the “hospitality suite,” these twice-yearly events took on the appearance of a saturnalia, with rock music blaring at all hours of the night, the smell of marijuana drifting through the corridors, and an atmosphere of sexual license that shocked many of the older generation—not that sales conferences hadn’t always caused a few knowing winks among publishing executives and editors and given heartburn to any number of suspicious spouses, but in the sixties the partying got serious the moment the last slide of the day had been shown to the reps and the torches were lit for the luau cocktail party in the hot, moist, tropic air. Some kind of peak was to be reached when an S&S all-girl singing group, composed of Joni Evans, Susan Kamil, assistant art director Judy Lee, and several other executives, fêted Dick with a rendition of “My Guy.”

The American Booksellers Association convention, often held in Washington in the middle of the summer—surely the most hot and uncomfortable setting imaginable for a convention outside of hell—became another place for licensed play, perhaps because it was closer to New York and attended therefore by more people from the home office, particularly since most of them had nothing to do there except cruise the booths of rival publishers picking up freebies. I remember a party in the S&S hospitality suite in a Washington hotel when a young assistant editor, dancing in an abbreviated dress, did a high kick and accidentally sent a lamp shade flying, to land on the head of the wife of the then heir-apparent, Michael Shimkin. With the air conditioner overburdened in the August heat of Washington, the buckets of ice melting on the table, and half a dozen sales reps smoking cigars and playing cards in the bedroom, it was like dancing in a sweat bath, and shortly after the Shimkins left there was a nasty fistfight, quickly settled by Snyder, over the young editor. And that was before the fun really started.

It was a period when anything seemed possible. Dick Snyder’s marriage had already faltered, Bob Gottlieb left his wife, Muriel, after God only knew how many years, to marry the actress Maria Tucci, beautiful daughter of one of his authors; Tony Schulte’s marriage ended; Jim Silberman left his wife, mass-market publisher Leona Nevler, for Selma Shapiro, causing such a scandal that they were both obliged to leave, Selma to set up her own publicity firm and Jim to begin an imprint of his own at S&S.

In the early seventies, the publishing business was following in the wake of the country’s flirtation with sudden social change. The old certainties seemed dead and buried, all hell had broken loose, and the ties that people had supposed were bound for life came suddenly undone.

People not only made strange (or at least unexpected) life decisions, they made even stranger career decisions. In a move that surprised everyone on both sides of the Atlantic (but was to set something of a pattern for the future), Tony Godwin, the mercurial and much-admired joint managing director of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, in London, came to New York to become editor and publisher of his own list of books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. One of the statelier and more ponderous old-line New York publishing houses, HBJ was then undergoing an ambitious (and ultimately unsuccessful) face-lift at the hands of its testy and demanding chief executive, Bill Jovanovich. Jovanovich, a maverick himself who wanted to control every aspect of his publishing house right down to the smallest detail (and considered himself qualified to do so in any area), had picked an equally maverick