Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [224]
We never did publish Fairy Tales. Somewhere in the margin of one of his stories, he had typed: “I am being interviewed by Gayblevision and I think I am being quite indiscreet in some of ’y [my] disclosures, but then I think, ‘When have I ever been other 5wise%(and is not all art an indiscretion if it is true.’ ”
He had promised me one more story, “The Final Strategic Retreat of General Scronch,” and to this day I’m sorry it never arrived.
CHAPTER 26
ONCE S&S was firmly established as part of “the G+W family,” flying to the West Coast became more frequent. After all, Paramount, our “sister corporation,” was there, and if any synergy was ever to take place, there would have to be some exchange of ideas on a person-to-person basis. Dick, who could take advantage of the G+W corporate airplanes, was frequently in Los Angeles and was soon on a first-name basis with everyone who mattered at Paramount. I was less enthusiastic about going there, but eventually Dick somehow managed to plant in Bluhdorn’s feverish mind the notion that I was the key to the synergy he craved between S&S and Paramount.
Since synergy was the ostensible raison d’ětre for having bought us in the first place, Bluhdorn was determined to see it flourish, or at least to produce an example of it for the shareholders, and it was eventually decided that Barry Diller and I were to meet at regular intervals so that I could brief him on the books we had under contract, just in case one of them might sound to him like a possible movie.
For many reasons, these meetings never took place, the most important of them being that Diller didn’t want to hear the plots of a lot of novels that he wasn’t interested in. His interest was aroused only by the novels he couldn’t get access to—those he could find out about simply by listening to me he automatically wrote off as useless. When he was in New York, he found innumerable reasons why he was unable to see me; when I offered—unwillingly—to see him in L.A., he also found reasons why that was impossible. Months, even years, went by, punctuated by angry memos and telephone calls from Bluhdorn, demanding to know when a meeting was going to take place. Eventually, Bluhdorn simply set the date himself, sent me over an airline ticket by messenger, and told me to go or else.
A limo picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Paramount, where I was to meet Diller for lunch in his office. When I arrived there, however, he wasn’t there, though a lavish cold lunch had been spread out in his sunny, spacious office. He was in Palm Springs and would probably not arrive before three, his secretary informed me. I had brought some manuscripts with me, so I helped myself to lunch and settled down to read. Eventually, reluctantly, Diller arrived, full of apologies, and sat down to listen, with the expression of a man who is about to undergo root-canal surgery.
I didn’t blame him. Nothing is more boring than listening to somebody tell the plot of a novel. I resist listening to this kind of thing myself at all costs, even to the point of rudeness. My heart went out to Diller, but I had a job to do.
I promised Diller I would make it as quick and painless as I could. There was just one small point, I told him—traditionally, whenever somebody from outside the movie industry offers a movie person an idea or a story, he or she will listen politely—or as politely as anyone can listen whose only desire is to get on with the next appointment—then say, the moment their interlocutor pauses for breath, “Let me explain to you why that won’t make a movie.”
It doesn’t matter what the story in question is—it could be Gone with the Wind or Funny Girl—it is in the nature of a fixed, knee-jerk response to anything coming from outside “the industry,” or to the east of the San Bernardino Mountains. I explained to Diller that I had no vested interest in any of the novels I was about to talk to him about, that