Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [255]
DICK AND Joni had found it, perhaps not surprisingly, increasingly hard to work together now that they were married. Joni had risen to become publisher of S&S, and Dick was finding it difficult to defuse charges of nepotism. The press might ooh and aah over a marriage that seemed to prove that two ambitious people could make a good team at work and still be a romantic couple at home, but no doubt at Gulf + Western it didn’t look that way. Nor, given the personalities of the two people involved, can it have been easy for Joni to be Dick’s subordinate at S&S while being his wife at home. It was natural for those who were jealous of Joni to suppose that she benefited somehow from going home every night with the boss, though in practice it was rather the reverse, since Dick went out of his way to avoid showing favoritism.
Still, the relationship between the two of them had already led to a certain amount of unhappiness among the rest of the S&S executives. Phyllis Grann moved downstairs reluctantly to take charge of Pocket Books, reporting directly to Snyder. She had resented Joni’s role and was not noticeably more pleased when Joni later traded her somewhat ambivalent position for that of wife. In effect, Phyllis went into exile on the floor below, and took on a host of problems that were not of her own making. This eventually led her to resign and move to Putnam, where her dazzling success as both an editor and a businesswoman was to serve as a permanent reminder to Dick that he had lost one of the brightest stars in publishing and made her a competitor. His boss at Gulf + Western, the caustic and sharp-tongued Martin Davis, who took Bluhdorn’s place after the latter’s untimely death, seldom failed to bring this to his attention.
Davis, whom a major magazine had named one of the hundred meanest bosses in American business, had once been in charge of publicity at Paramount. He was now Dick’s boss and nemesis. Bluhdorn’s demise had been followed by a brief but bloody struggle for power. The leading contender was Jim Judelson, an affable engineer-businessman, whom Dick had cultivated assiduously, and whose chief pride was a remarkable desk lamp designed like a giant articulated, stainless steel crane, on a marble base. Judelson had been, to outward appearances, though for no very obvious reason, Bluhdorn’s designated heir, and on Bluhdorn’s death, Dick had confidently declared his loyalty to him. Unfortunately for all of us, Judelson came out the loser to Davis.
Dick had made the mistake of a lifetime, the kind that, like the curse of the Fates in Greek tragedy, cannot be repaired or expiated. Davis took a certain grim pleasure in giving Dick orders that he knew would be difficult and personally painful to carry out. (This reached its apotheosis when Davis ordered him to change the name of Simon and Schuster to Paramount Publishing, a humiliation on a grand scale that involved chipping the company’s name off the stone of its own building in Rockefeller Center, as well as reprinting all the company stationery.) It is very possible that the decision to move Joni from her job as publisher of S&S to an imprint of her own was in part inspired from above. Dick told those close to him that it was a move intended to save his marriage—in effect, to take Joni out of the chain of command and give her a place of her own—and he may have been right about that too. After all, he had reached the age when he wanted to sit back and enjoy his success, whereas Joni was still immensely ambitious and anxious to succeed. In any event, for all these and many other reasons, Joni’s new imprint, Linden Press (named after the trees that bordered the drive of the Snyders’ new country house in Westchester County), was announced and soon off to a rousing start with best-sellers by Mario Puzo, Jeffrey Archer, and Joseph Heller.
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