Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [230]
Shortly after I had turned in the manuscript, which was very long, Milly Marmur called me to tell me in confidence that the Book-of-the-Month Club judges loved Charmed Lives and might well take it as a Main Selection, except that they felt it was too long. In those days, a Main Selection of the BOMC was a very big deal indeed—they picked only eleven books a year—and made a real difference in sales. But the thought of going through the manuscript and cutting it one more time made my heart sink. “Listen, bubbi,” Milly said firmly, “I’m ordering in, you’re coming over to Random House, and we’re going to cut this book together, every night this week if we have to, so they can have a clean, cut version back on their desks by next Monday. It’s now or never. They need a selection, but something else could come up, and that’s it for you. Are you on your way, darling?”
I was on my way shortly. Milly and I spent the next few evenings huddled on the floor of her tiny office, cutting, pasting, retyping, renumbering until we had a tighter, slimmer manuscript ready for the BOMC. The BOMC took Charmed Lives as a Main Selection, which set the tone for its success in hardcover, and later in paperback, but it wouldn’t have happened if Milly had not intervened forcefully.
It was a bravura performance but not atypical of what was happening everywhere in publishing. Rights directors knew what was happening, and knew how to make things happen. “Ask Joni what Rights thinks about it,” Dick said more and more often before making a decision on a book. It did not take long before Joni moved out of the rights department and began to acquire her own list of authors, for she had formidable editorial talents too. Not only that, it became apparent to those in the know that she and Dick were a couple, a change that not only had a major impact on S&S but, in its way, on the whole publishing business. A relationship between two strong-willed, ambitious people, both of whom lived, breathed, and talked publishing and worked in the same office was bound to be unusual. Further, he was her boss, and not an easy or forgiving one at that; once they were married, their private and their public lives became almost inextricable, which was not always a blessing. Dick began by boasting that he was never bored because they could talk about publishing all the time, but this attraction eventually palled and became a subject of complaint rather than satisfaction.
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IN THE meantime, however, the Snyder/Evans relationship ushered in a new era in book publishing. Dick-and-Joni, as they came to be known once they went public—even to people who had never met them—or the Snyders, as they became once they were married, not only liked to live well, they liked to flaunt it. Their relationship made the gossip columns (albeit at first in harmless ways), partly because they liked to give large parties in their glamorous digs (first a duplex penthouse at the top of the St. Moritz Hotel, overlooking Central Park, then a town house in the East Sixties) and partly because they were publishing books that made news. At first, it was hardly noticed, but gradually it became apparent that book publishing was in the process of becoming glamorous. The Snyders, for a time, epitomized the change, indeed were in