Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [290]
We took them to Rao’s, where Claus was treated with the grave courtesy owed a man who had beaten a murder rap, for dinner with Irving Lazar, who was eager to meet them—he was furious that he hadn’t signed up Andrea as a client and determined to get Claus to write a book of his own (an idea that Claus tactfully discouraged). During dinner, Andrea and I fell into a discussion about writing and editing (now that she was working on her book, she had taken on the airs of a writer and spoke of her new profession with grave authority), while Claus became increasingly bored, as was often the case when he was not the center of attention, at least of Andrea’s. Eventually, during a pause in our conversation, he interrupted. “Well,” he said, in his low voice, very slowly so that all attention was focused on him, “I’m an expert on comas, not commas.”
There was a moment of silence, then Lazar said, rather loudly, “Jesus Christ, he did it!” The same thought must have occurred to everyone around the table at the same time, because after that the dinner broke up rather quickly—there was none of the usual sitting around over coffee and brandy.
Shortly after my belief, such as it was, in Claus’s innocence was shaken, my confidence that we were going to get the book we wanted was also shattered when Andrea delivered her manuscript. We discovered that it was alarmingly reticent on the subject of Claus von Bülow and concentrated mostly on her own childhood, which, however picaresque, was not what we felt we had paid for. A tug-of-war followed in which we demanded more sensational newsbreaks and more about Claus and his trials, while she dug her heels in, and eventually we turned down the manuscript and never got our money back, yet another example of the dangers of celebrity publishing.
* Publishers were right to see that the hardcover mystery business was changing—the days when your local stationers rented out mysteries at a dollar a day (not so long ago—my ex-wife was still renting one or two a day even in the mid-sixties) went the way of the dodo—as mass-market paperbacks took the place of rentals, only to be supplanted, eventually, by the rental of videotapes. Things change, of course—the local stationer itself has been replaced by a convenience store owned and run by people who don’t even speak English. Nevertheless, the appetite for mysteries remains.
CHAPTER 33
As the eighties drew to a close, publishing was beginning to go through another period of rapid change, as the book suddenly seemed to be the way in which major news was made. Of course, books had always made news, but for the most part indirectly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had made news by drawing the public’s attention to environmental threats, but the material in the book had run in The New Yorker first, as had John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In the seventies, however, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men and The Final Days not only made news but were news. By the time Woodward wrote Wired, his book about the life and death of John Belushi, the “embargo strategy” had been adopted by many publishers, sometimes for books where a premature leak might matter, more often just to give the impression that a book contained newsworthy material when it didn’t. Books were thus not only an extension of journalism but a subject for journalistic scrutiny, as were, by extension, the people who published them.
This was something new. Books never brought people news. News was the business of papers or, later, radio and television. Now books, despite the slow, creaky, shade-tree-mechanic nature of producing them, which had not changed much since the invention of movable type, were becoming news carriers, even though it normally took nine months to go from a complete manuscript to a finished book, or perhaps three months if it was done on a “crash” basis, which required putting most of any publisher’s production department to work