Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [214]
Watergate made more careers than it unmade, though not everybody did well in the long run. Woodward went on to become a perennial best-seller and star journalist, Dick and Alice Mayhew rose in their separate (but linked) trajectories, but Bernstein eventually plummeted, and David Obst, who had begun the whole thing, ended up an S&S employee, representing the company in Los Angeles, and eventually sank for many years into obscurity, outstripped in fame by his wife, who became a much talked-about movie producer. It was a melancholy ending to a spectacular if short-lived career. The position of “West Coast editor” was in any case, at S&S as at most companies, a kind of elephant graveyard, a sinecure without power or responsibility for those whom the management hesitated to fire for one reason or another. Dick had done his very best for Obst—he was conscious of the debt he owed him and of their friendship—but the job itself was a dead end. (Later on, when Dick was picked by the press as one of “the toughest bosses in the country,” this and many other acts of generosity were ignored, in favor of constructing an image of meanness that was never a reality.)
That is not to say that life couldn’t be difficult at S&S. Dick was determined to build up a strong editorial team, by which he meant a team of what he liked to call heavy hitters. The truth was that he was only really comfortable with those editors whom he had long ago learned to trust. New ones were hailed briefly as “stars,” given freshly redecorated offices and inflated titles, then subjected to what must have seemed to many of them a system of institutionalized hazing that few survived. Nan Talese, though often miserably unhappy, survived, partly out of saintly patience, partly because she was capable of looking Dick directly in the eye if sufficiently provoked. Stubborn defiance from women he understood, and he usually backed off at the last moment. Richard Kluger, now a distinguished nonfiction writer, was brought in from the world of journalism under the impression that he was to have carte blanche to publish his own list of serious nonfiction books, only to find himself relentlessly criticized by Dick, who discovered that Kluger couldn’t—or didn’t want to—fight back. Kluger eventually resigned on the grounds that the job was making him blind. Patricia Soliman was hired away with much fanfare from Coward-McCann, where she had had a very successful career as a publisher and editor of popular fiction. She was allowed to create for herself an office environment in which everything was painted pink and mauve, given the meaningless title of “associate publisher” (which was Dick’s way of encouraging editors to think of themselves as part of management without giving them any power), then terrorized to the point where she could hardly perform. Some unhappy recruits, such as Erwin Glikes and Larry Ashmead, went on to spectacularly successful careers after their experiences at S&S (at Basic Books and HarperCollins, respectively) but looked back at their time there, in the words of Ashmead, as “the unhappiest years of my life.”
None of them was unhappier than Henry Robbins, whom Dick wooed away from his job at the distinguished literary house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robbins was a man who took himself and literature seriously (he was inclined to confuse them) and had brought a steady stream of literary writers to Farrar, Straus, most of whom were devoted to him. It was Dick’s hope that Robbins