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I knew that I was going to call the novel Queenie before I’d written a page, and unlike anything else that I’d written, I knew from the start that it was going to work—Queenie herself was simply too strong a character for the book not to work. Before that, of course, it needed an enthusiastic publisher. This was complicated by the fact that Dick now wanted me to be published by S&S, in order to put an end to the complaints he had been receiving from Gulf + Western. I had resisted the idea, but the announcement of Linden Press resolved that difficulty—Joni was her own publisher, and I could not have asked for a shrewder, more skillful, or more enthusiastic editor. She shared my affection for Queenie, and much as I regretted leaving Random House, nobody could have worked harder for a book than Joni did for Queenie. Joni was determined to make the book a best-seller and made the whole process seem fun—no easy task.

In the end, Queenie succeeded even beyond our wildest expectations. It became an international best-seller, went high up the best-seller list (and reached number one in paperback), and was eventually made into a seven-hour television miniseries, with Mia Sara as Queenie, Claire Bloom as her long-suffering mother, Kirk Douglas as my Uncle Alex, and Joel Grey as the Irving Lazar character—an experience made odder by the fact that Kirk Douglas had looked after me when I was ten years old and used to spend the evenings in my mother’s dressing room on Broadway during the long run of The Three Sisters, in which she appeared as Irina, the youngest of the sisters, together with Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and Ruth Gordon. Douglas, who had only just changed his name from Issur Demsky, had one small scene in which he appeared in a white tunic to bring in the samovar for tea and therefore plenty of time to teach me to play chess. It was with some dismay that I saw him play Alex, almost forty years later, with a vigor that would have surprised poor Alex, always the most languid of men. Still, even on the small screen, Douglas captured something of Alex’s spirit—a combination of charm and shrewdness that would have done justice to a Renaissance cardinal, together with a certain indefinable melancholy, which was hugely attractive to women.

THE EXPERIENCE of actually becoming a best-selling novelist after having published so many was, of course, hallucinatory. Being one of the few people in publishing who actually knew what it was like to be a successful writer and who had been out on tour time after time promoting my books gave me a curiously mixed perspective. There is an Italian saying that the translator is a kind of traitor (“Traduttore, traditore”), and something like that applies to editors who moonlight as writers, particularly if they are successful. Throughout the publishing industry, the editor is widely viewed as suspect to begin with by those in management, and an editor who is also an author is doubly suspect. Whatever the difficulties, humiliations, and anxieties of the author’s life—and there are a good many, not all of them the publisher’s responsibility, to be sure—I have experienced them in one form or another. I have been bumped from major television shows at the last moment (I began one promotion tour on the evening Operation Desert Storm began, with the entire country glued to CNN), set up (I did an interview with Johnny Carson without knowing that Merle Oberon had died while I was in the greenroom; Carson mentioned it at the end of the interview, by which time I had been talking about her for five minutes), left stranded (with food writer Gael Greene and her mother in the empty cafeteria of a radio station miles outside Detroit in a blizzard), missed connections, even been flown from Boston to Toronto at the last minute for an interview only to discover that I didn’t have any proof of citizenship on me and couldn’t get back into the United States. I have actually sung a number with the Chipmunks on an early-morning television show while promoting