Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [231]
For the first time, book publishing became not just fashionable but chic. The National Book Awards, which, under one name or another, had schlepped on year after year, arousing no interest at all beyond a narrow circle of book publishers and authors who attended it, was transformed from a typical book-business get-together, in which men in tweedy suits and odd footwear and young women in off-the-rack dresses lined up at the bar in a fog of cigarette and pipe smoke and elbowed their way forward to clamor for drinks in plastic glasses, into a formal black-tie banquet with exactly the same people, needless to say, only now in dinner jackets and evening gowns. The black-tie banquet of the Literacy Volunteers, in part the brainchild of columnist Liz Smith, actually managed to mix book people and social celebrities at one yearly event, as if the book itself had become an object of fashionable charity. Journalists, credulous as ever, took all this at face value and began to treat publishing as a “hot” business. Book parties, which had once been equally tweedy and small-bore in social value, blossomed into full-scale extravaganzas, complete with celebrity guests and coverage in the newspapers and local television news. Editors, publishers, and writers who had hitherto labored in decent and often well-deserved obscurity were themselves presented as glittering celebrities, and their doings were chronicled in the gossip columns and in fulsome magazine articles. (I myself appeared on the cover of New York magazine, riding a motorcycle and smoking a cigar, and in The New York Times Magazine, riding a horse.)
Nothing could be more extraordinary than the way in which book publishing was swiftly transformed into a glamorous occupation—so much so that Irving Lazar, who had for years been considered a movie agent who dabbled in books, refashioned himself almost overnight into a book agent who dabbled in movies. The book business was where the action was, or at any rate where it was thought to be. Book deals, hitherto mostly of interest to the small circle of people who read Publishers Weekly on a regular basis, began to be reported on in the big-time media, and publishing news became a hot item, and book publishers, most of whom had hitherto eaten at rather modest restaurants, swiftly took over the new Grill Room of the very expensive Four Seasons restaurant, making it a kind of exclusive club. It is a measure of what was happening that when Random House regretfully gave up its old digs in the Villard Mansion, on Madison Avenue, it moved to a modern, glass-fronted skyscraper on the East Side. When S&S moved into its own building in Rockefeller Center, Dick hired a noted architect, James Polchek, to design luxurious new offices that included a private dining room, with its own kitchen, for the CEO, carpets with the S&S logo (Millet’s sower, chosen long ago by Max Schuster to symbolize the dissemination of knowledge) woven into the design, hallways lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and decorated with valuable antique American quilts, and a conference room that doubled as a screening room. Dick’s personal chef, his private dining room, his executive gym, the Mercedes with a chauffeur that waited for him downstairs, and his use of a G+W jet came to symbolize the ambitions and the freewheeling lifestyle of book publishing. When we flew down to Washington for John Dean’s publication party, we did not take the shuttle as ordinary human beings did; we were driven out to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in the Mercedes, then flew down to D.C. in a Learjet, with the refrigerator stocked with Dick’s favorite brand of vodka, caviar, and black bread.
The expensive, glamorous surroundings seemed appropriate to the ambitious plans that were being made in the executive offices of publishing houses all over town. It is some measure of just how futile these ambitions were to prove to be that at both Random House and S&S dramatic hallways have been filled with secretarial cubicles,