Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [234]
Dark Harbor was a curious and unlikely place to choose for the summer, and perhaps if my mind had been less fixed on my work I might have wondered why Casey had chosen this remote island, where most of the tiny community of summer people were far richer than ourselves.
Dark Harbor might have been a place in which to repair whatever differences had begun to pull us apart, but as is so often the case, it had the opposite effect. Rather like Margaret’s travels with Burt, the more Casey and I were together, the further we drifted apart, and there didn’t seem anything to be done about it. By the time I met Margaret in Central Park, the thing we had most in common—though I didn’t know it then and resisted the notion for a long time—was that our marriages had drifted beyond the point of no return.
Oddly enough, the four of us became friends almost at once. Hardly a weekend passed that we didn’t go out to dinner together. Casey and I became frequent guests at the Glinns’ apartment, and we eventually even made plans to go away on a vacation together, renting a house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a third couple, despite the fact that Margaret and I had long since become lovers.
When Margaret’s marriage finally exploded (the only word that can describe the event), followed a year or so later by my own (which was more of a collapse than an explosion), it was as if we had known each other for a lifetime. After all, our balancing act had gone on for almost five years before we were finally able to go downtown to City Hall and tie the knot, during which time I had nevertheless somehow managed to write two books and maintain a successful career, which is a tribute to either my single-mindedness or Margaret’s patience.
Whichever, it was a period of great excitement and happiness for Margaret and me and for Dick and Joni, who had married before us. It seemed, for a time, as if anything was possible, not just in our personal lives, but at S&S.
CHAPTER 28
Bluhdorn liked growth. It was the lifeblood of his empire, and he lived to make new acquisitions. Had Dick been content to sit around buying books and increasing the company’s sales, Bluhdorn would have lost interest in him quickly and possibly in book publishing too. Fortunately, Dick saw his own future and that of S&S as one of growth by acquisition, so Bluhdorn was not disappointed. Shimkin had sold S&S to Bluhdorn in 1976 for $11 million, most of it in Gulf + Western stock, which wasn’t bad for a company that had been launched in 1924 with capital of $25,000 and that was grossing about $50 million a year at the time of the sale. In 1974, when S&S celebrated its first fifty years, it was a major publishing house, but that was no longer enough. The outline of the future was easy enough to perceive, as one by one, with a few exceptions, some of the most famous and illustrious names in publishing—most of them, it was true, poorly managed and short of capital—surrendered their independence. The big fish swallowed the small, without it crossing the minds of the biggest ones that they too might eventually be swallowed.
Size, of course, does not protect a publisher from failure. On the contrary, the bigger you are, the easier it is to make expensive mistakes—and to hide them. The late Ronald Busch, at one time publisher of Ballantine Books, which was bought by Random House in 1973, and later the publisher of Pocket Books, part of S&S, was quoted as saying that buying the big books got easier as the company got larger. “With all the conglomerate money today,” he said, “it’s like playing Monopoly. If we had to use our own resources, we’d think twice about bidding as much as we do.… But with a parent or a conglomerate that has annual sales of two or three billion dollars and up,