Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [285]
From this one can deduce certain things, the first being that it’s probably not a good idea for a husband and a wife to work together in the same place, particularly if they have high-profile jobs. (Ironically, Joni and I had collaborated to edit Mary Cunningham’s book about herself and Bill Agee, the CEO of Bendix who had first mentored her, then had an affair with her, then married her, following which they both had to leave.) The second lesson is that almost no relationship can survive the kind of media scrutiny that was being given to book publishing. Perhaps most important of all, the old idea that job security was one of the benefits of publishing was, at last, definitely dead and buried.
THE ARGUMENT for working in book publishing had always been that while the pay was low and the perks consisted of nothing more than free lunches and all the books you could read, in most places you had to work hard at it to get fired. By the 1980s, that was no longer true. At the higher levels of book publishing, the pay was actually pretty good, and in those houses that were owned by big corporations or media conglomerates or movie studios, the perks began to include (at any rate for a lucky few) stock options, bonus plans, special retirement funds, a leased car, free parking, discounts on anything the parent company manufactured—all the bells and whistles, in short, of corporate America. At the very highest level, the cornucopia was tilted even more steeply and disgorged such goodies as private dining rooms, the use of corporate jets, and company-paid apartments.
While these benefits were limited to a very small number of people at the largest houses, the consequences went all the way down through organizations. When companies were merged and acquired, people got fired—indeed, that was one of the major reasons for merging and acquiring in the first place—and the need to make each year better than the one before in order to satisfy the corporate parent meant that more and more people got hired and fired as quick fixes. You didn’t find your editors in-house anymore, nor your executives. You hired a headhunter to raid other houses for editors, tried them out, and if they didn’t measure up quickly, you fired them and started all over again. Since, increasingly, the editors didn’t expect to be at a house for very long, they left the moment they had a better offer elsewhere. Star editors were wooed and fought over by major houses, though all too often they turned out to be past their peaks when they moved or to have grandiose illusions about becoming publishers.
Job security had always had two faces—on one side, the loyalty of the company toward the employee and the promise that he or she would be kept there for the long haul, and on the other side, the employee’s loyalty toward the company and his or her willingness to be patient and trust that long service would bring its own rewards. With companies being merged, bought, and sold, however, that kind of patience and trust was increasingly meaningless—the people who owned you had probably never heard of you, had no idea what you did, and couldn’t have cared less anyway. This was all the more difficult in the case of editors because it is hard to measure what they do in any simple way: The next book of the author whose novel has just failed may be a huge bestseller; an editor switching jobs might inherit a list and thereby get credit for a surprise best-seller he or she had nothing to do with. In any event, the gestation of books (and of editors, for that matter) is a long one, requiring considerable patience and optimism, and the process of editing is not one that lends itself to dramatic color photographs in the parent company’s annual report. The story goes that when Rupert Murdoch bought Harper and Row (which he was later to merge not very successfully with Collins,