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By Root 717 0

because nobody else was available, but his promotion offended both those who thought that he was only a shadow of his brother and those who thought he wasn’t fit to sit in Goodman’s office. Merely by accepting an unlikely promotion, Henry had alienated many people at S&S, right down to the assistants and the mail-room boys. Worse, Henry was deeply embittered by all those years in his brother’s shadow, and he nursed an endless list of resentments and grudges; at the same time, he was too old to recognize that a new era in book publishing was just beginning. Very shortly, S&S would publish Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything—the very prototype of the hot “women’s novel” that would eventually reach its climax with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls—and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which was to start a whole new school of black humor in American literature. Neither of these books was Henry’s, nor was Henry even given an opportunity to read them in manuscript.

The Best of Everything would be a landmark in a number of ways: It had been bought as a movie by Jerry Wald before the manuscript had even been edited, so the movie company would be involved from the beginning in marketing the book; and it would begin, as well, a new tradition in popular fiction of using the author as a marketing tool. Philippe Halsman’s haunting, full-color jacket photograph of Rona Jaffe took as much time to get right as the jacket itself and cost a good deal more. Until then, it had been thought sufficient for writers—particularly first novelists—to send in an old snapshot to appear on the back flap of the jacket; The Best of Everything was to usher in the new era in which the author’s potential for glamour, real or faked, mattered almost as much as the writing, and the photographer’s fee often exceeded what the average first novelist was likely to make from his or her book.

It was as if there were a whole separate, parallel publishing house operating on the same floor, with the express intention of keeping the older generation from finding out what was going on. At its center was the late Jack Goodman’s former assistant, Robert Gottlieb, with Phyllis S. Levy, Goodman’s former secretary, and Nina Bourne, the S&S advertising director. In uneasy alliance with them was Richard L. Grossman, nominally in charge of marketing, who was determined to carry on Dick Simon’s tradition of photographic books, which had led to the publication of such successes as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man. Nevertheless, a nucleus of bright, ambitious youngsters had acquired just enough power to do what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do was to change the face of book publishing.

OF COURSE book publishing, like any other business, needs to be shaken by a revolution from time to time. The last big one had been in the late 1920s, but the war had since then delayed any further major changes in the zeitgeist of publishing, sending the young men who might have taken over from Max and Dick, or Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, or Alfred and Blanche Knopf, off to fight. When these men returned after 1945, they were happy to publish the same old safe books in the same old safe way as they and the whole country slipped quietly toward the Eisenhower years. It was the era of the suburban house, the six-o’clock cocktail shaker, and the regulation suit, a world defined by S&S with the publication of The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The revolution was now overdue and not only at S&S.

There had been a brief flurry of excitement when the men who had gone to war came home with their novels—among them Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw—and there had been a seismic tremor when the Beats became sufficiently commercial, like Jack Kerouac, who made that typically American jump from penniless outlaw to book-club selection and bookstore celebrity in one leap, with On the Road. But for the most part, publishing, like literature, slumbered on. It had upset many people when Mailer wrote the first war novel