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By Root 712 0

older executives, many authors, and most of the outside world. It was bad enough that Bennett Cerf had sold Random House to RCA, but now Simon and Schuster had been bought by the most rapacious and ruthless of conglomerateurs. Shimkin could hardly have gotten a worse press among those who cared for culture and literature if he had owned the Mona Lisa and sold it for kindling. Bluhdorn was seen as the Vandal at the gates, no doubt eager to fire literary editors, put a stop to the purchase of first novels, and restrict the S&S list to vulgar best-sellers such as Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins. Since I was the editor of both Wallace and Robbins, I did not think I had anything to fear, but at some point Dick told me not to worry anyway. “Trust me,” he said, “nothing will change. We’ll just make more money and get stock options, that’s all.”

As a matter of fact, nothing did change at first. We did not quit our home in Rockefeller Center for G+W’s tower at Columbus Circle, nor were we told to stop buying first novels. Life went on much as before, except for Shimkin, who was swiftly replaced by Dick. The generous perks of a big conglomerate with a movie studio showered down on some of us, everything from our choice of leased cars to telephone credit cards, Simmons mattresses at discount, free health-club memberships, sales conferences in the Dominican Republic, first-class air travel, and unlimited movie screenings. More important, we had, for the first time, a sense of security. Bluhdorn liked books, much more than he liked mattresses, zinc, steam valves, or automobile bumpers.

Some time went by before I met Bluhdorn, partly because Dick was eager to protect what he regarded as my delicate sensibilities and partly because Bluhdorn’s ramshackle corporate empire was run like a feudal kingdom. The CEOs of each of G+W’s many components were like medieval barons, with unlimited power in their own fiefs. When Bluhdorn needed to talk to (or scream at) one of them, he sent for them; he did not need to meet their underlings. However, perhaps because of my family name—Bluhdorn was fascinated by the movie business—I was eventually invited to a pre-Christmas dinner in the G+W building.

As we milled about for cocktails, I got my first real glimpse of the diversity of G+W. I met executives from the movie business, the industrial-valve business, the truck-leasing business, the mattress business, the desk-lamp business, the zinc business—there appeared to be no end (or logic) to the businesses Bluhdorn had acquired, and of course there was none. G+W eventually contained divisions devoted to manufacturing, communications, foods, consumer products, agriculture, mining, and financial services, and included, among many other assets, New Jersey Zinc, Paramount Pictures, Desilu Productions, Merson Musical Products, Consolidated Cigar Corporation, Quebec Iron and Titanium Corporation, Madison Square Garden, Furniture City, Tool Industries, Bonney Forge and Foundry, Mal Tool and Jet Engineering, Collyer Insulated Wire Company, Simon and Schuster, Simmons Mattress, and a substantial portion of the Dominican Republic. Bluhdorn’s real secret was understanding the simple fact that if you owned a business, bankers would lend you money to buy another one. So long as you kept buying companies, you could go on borrowing more money, like a giant Ponzi scheme. The trick was to keep moving; the one thing you couldn’t afford to do was to stop and consolidate, even had that been possible, since the vital flow of money from the banks would then stop.

Shortly before dinner, Dick managed to steer Bluhdorn through the crowd in my direction. I was confronted by an energetic man in his early fifties, with a wild look in his eyes and the red complexion of someone whose blood pressure is off the scale and who doesn’t pay any attention to diet and exercise. Bluhdorn’s teeth seemed either too big or too many, like those of a shark. Huge and glistening white, they filled his mouth like bathroom tiles. I tried to shake his hand, but he gave me a bear hug, squeezing me