Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [212]
* Dominique Lapierre tested this by slipping a hundred-dollar bill into the copy of the manuscript he gave Lazar to read. Lazar returned the manuscript saying how great it was, the hundred-dollar bill still in place.
CHAPTER 25
Gulf + Western’s purchase of S&S took place at just the moment when Dick Snyder had engineered his greatest triumph and brought about the publishing coup of a lifetime. It was to transform him overnight into a major publisher and a celebrity in his own right.
I had thought it odd when he called me at home from Washington late one night, speaking in a deep, conspiratorial whisper. Can anybody overhear our conversation? he wanted to know. Only the cats, I told him, but he was in no mood for banter. “This is serious stuff,” he growled. “Listen.”
I listened. For some time, Dick had been traveling to Washington. I attributed this in part to a desire on his part to get away from New York and home and in part to his burgeoning friendship with David Obst, a beaming, bearded young agent who then specialized—insofar as he had any direction at all—in Washington political books. As the Watergate scandal heated up, this category, once tepid, had become red-hot. The focal point of public interest was no longer New York, nor even Hollywood, but Washington, and Obst, by a singular combination of sheer dumb luck, extravagant chutzpah, schoolboy charm, and shrewdness had managed to carve out for himself a special niche as the literary agent for political figures in trouble. It was said that what you needed to survive in Washington in the early seventies was a good criminal lawyer and a book contract, and Obst became the man you called the moment you were indicted.
Obst resembled a plump, Jewish Jimmy Stewart, if you can imagine such a thing, which is to say that his persona was that of a country bumpkin in the big city, but underneath that facade, he was fiercely ambitious. He suffered from neither fear nor shame. He would not have hesitated to walk right up to a widow at her husband’s funeral and sign her as a client if he thought she had a story to tell. What he was not was disciplined, organized, or a businessman, and in Snyder he found at once the ideal purchaser of his goods and a kind of surrogate older brother, tough, demanding, smart, but willing enough to let his hair down and have a good time once the deal was done.
It was love at first sight on both sides. Dick had been looking for somebody to mentor, as well as a territory of his own. He could leave me to do big-ticket fiction and the occasional piece of nonfiction. He found in Fred Hills somebody (at last) who knew how to do lucrative self-help books. He eventually hired Nan Talese for quality and Jim Silberman for solid midlist books, but he himself, with the help of Alice Mayhew, made Washington his turf and the Washington political book his specialty. (The fact that all these people came from Random House did not stem from any vendetta on Dick’s part after the defection of Gottlieb—it was simply that Dick believed in hiring the best people he could get, and Random House was full of them at that time.)
What he was calling me about in such secrecy was a book Obst had steered him to by two young reporters at The Washington Post. Knowing my lack of interest in politics, he did not bore me with the details. I had to believe, he said, that these two guys, whom he had just met, were onto the biggest story of the decade, maybe the biggest political story of the century. This would be a sensational book, one that might bring down the president, even change the country. I had never heard my friend sound so excited.
Did he want my opinion? I asked. If so, I would need to know a little more. No, he said, with a trace of impatience, he didn’t need my fucking opinion. Politics was something he knew more about than I did. This was a terrific story, and that was that.