Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [254]
Since I began Charmed Lives at just about the time when my marriage to Casey was breaking up (and when Margaret’s already had), it was written under conditions of some stress—though the emotional complications of separation and divorce put me in the right mood, perhaps, for tackling the tangled lives of my father and his brothers; or at any rate, they gave me a greater understanding and tolerance for many things, including the feeling of abandonment I had experienced during my own parents’ divorce.
When it was done and I had finished basking in the warmth of the unexpectedly positive reviews, I began to worry about what I was going to write next. Already, the thought of not writing a book—of sticking to my last like the proverbial shoemaker—did not cross my mind. By now, writing a book was a fixed part of my life. Without a book contract to fulfill, I felt like a man with too much time on his hands. Besides, although I was happy enough to have put my family behind me by writing about them, I was already beginning to miss them. The research for Charmed Lives had brought me closer to them, in some ways, than I had ever been in real life. In reading about them, I began, at last, to understand them, and many things that had hitherto been mysterious were clear to me. It was hard to give that up. Friends and acquaintances (not to speak of many of the critics) described Charmed Lives as the book of my lifetime, but I clearly couldn’t write another book about my own family, even had I wanted to.
On the other hand, the dark background of anti-Semitism in Hungary, which I touched on lightly in Charmed Lives, fascinated me. I decided that the only way I could persuade anybody to read about this unhappy chapter in Central European history was by putting it into the form of a novel, and to my surprise, Epstein agreed. After all, I thought, why not? I had written a book that had become a number-one bestseller in hardcover, with Power!, Charmed Lives had been a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, why should I not try a novel? I soon discovered that it is easier to tell writers what is wrong with their novel than to write one; still, I flattered myself that I eventually got the hang of it, and within a year Worldly Goods was written. It was chosen as a Full Selection of the Literary Guild, went to paperback for a lot of money, and sold more than enough copies to satisfy Random House—it was even optioned briefly as a feature movie.
I was more aware than most that for a first novel it was something of a triumph. It had the effect, however, for the first time, of attracting in-house attention to my second career. So long as I was writing nonfiction, however successful or highly praised, nobody at S&S or, more to the point, Gulf + Western, seemed to mind. Dick Snyder was delighted to have an editor who could actually write books and happy on my behalf when they were successful, while everybody else did their polite best to pretend that it wasn’t happening. I had never felt that there was any conflict, and on the whole it seemed to me better from everyone’s point of view for me to be a Random House author, rather than published in-house—which, in any case, nobody had ever suggested. Besides, I had a deep loyalty toward Random House, where I had been treated with great courtesy and genuine enthusiasm and recognized that my career as a writer of books owed much, if not all, to the efforts of Nan Talese, Jim Silberman, and Jason Epstein.
Perhaps because the movie rights to Worldly Goods were optioned, however (and perhaps too because I based the sinister billionaire hero of the novel on Bluhdorn), questions began to be asked about why an S&S employee was making money for one of our competitors. It looked bad to the corporate people, even disloyal, and pressure was put on Dick to