Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [225]
Diller nodded sagely and agreed. He leaned back and waved me to begin. I read off the first title on my list and quickly summarized the plot. Before I could finish, Diller had raised his hand to silence me. “Let me explain to you why that won’t make a movie,” he said.
I shook my head and tore up the list.
Diller raised an eyebrow, but he seemed pleased and relieved. “I’ll let Charlie know that we had a successful meeting,” he said pleasantly, rising to shake my hand. He saw me to the door, we both reported a major blow for synergy, and the meeting never took place again—indeed, once it happened, Bluhdorn apparently took it off his checklist and never mentioned it again.
IT WOULD not have occurred to any of us in the 1970s that we would one day look back on it as a golden age, at least in terms of the publishing business. Admittedly, the period in which the majority of publishing houses were still privately owned had gone, and with it the close, day-to-day relationship that had once existed between ownership and the editorial staff. Except for a few cases—Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for example, or (hanging on by the fingernails) Viking—ownership was now more remote, in some cases so remote as to be invisible. S&S was an exception only in the sense that Bluhdorn occasionally took a personal interest in our affairs, partly because he liked books and partly because Dick Snyder had won his respect.
Still, even Bluhdorn was as remote as Zeus for most of the people who worked at S&S. One could not imagine him dropping by people’s offices to share a joke with them, like Bennett Cerf at Random House, nor could one walk into his office to read him a couple of pages from a hot new manuscript, as people had often done with Dick Simon.
Management in the recent past had been a meaningless term in most publishing houses. At S&S management consisted of hardly much more than the treasurer, Sy Turk, and his secretary, whose job under Shimkin had been to urge caution when ordering office supplies. At Random House, Viking, Knopf, and almost every other major publishing house, the situation had been roughly the same. Management was basically housekeeping. “The chain of command,” to use another term then unfamiliar in publishing, went straight from the owner(s) to the publisher (sometimes they were the same person) to the editors. The “business people” were on the sidelines, looking on in horror or, like Chicken Little, predicting disaster, but they were seldom brought into the meetings that really mattered. Their advice, if sought at all, tended to be sought after the fact, the usual question being some version of “This is what we’ve decided to do, now how do we pay for it?”
With publishing becoming a big business and the major houses increasingly owned by outsiders, the concept of management took on a whole new meaning and importance. The managers of RCA, which owned Random House, and Gulf + Western, though very different companies, both wanted their publishing asset run like a business, and at most levels were really at ease only when talking to businessmen like themselves. Dick realized this early on and began transforming himself from a successful publisher to a businessman/manager, though he never lost his publishing skills or altogether gave up his hold on the publishing process. Everywhere, though, however it was accomplished, management, hitherto despised, took on a new importance, with the effect that layers of management