that Evans was onto something—his mediagenic publishing breakfasts at Barneys, his cheerful optimism, the big risks he took, his willingness to talk to the press, and his sense of humor and lack of self-importance, all had the feel of a fresh breeze in a stuffy room to people in other publishing houses but seemed to provoke the equivalent of class warfare among his colleagues. It is, of course, always risky to enter publishing late in life from another profession. Publishing people are by nature clannish and suspicious of outsiders, and Evans was a celebrity, a social figure, a famously expatriate Brit, the husband of the even more famous Tina Brown, a major figure in Fleet Street journalism, and an early victim of Rupert Murdoch (the last ought to at least have won him the sympathy of any right-thinking person in publishing). Evans, however, had not risen through the ranks as an editor or a book publisher and didn’t seem much to care or think that it made a difference. As a result, one heard a lot about his failures and excesses but nothing about his successes—he was portrayed persistently as an amateur with a flair for self-dramatization and no interest in the details of publishing, even at times within Random House. Worse, to journalists, he was an apostate, having escaped from the newspaper world to the more glamorous world of book publishing, where his major interest might have seemed to an unkind and casual observer to lie in attending as many black-tie functions as possible. All the same, when Evans left Random House in 1997, it occurred to me that if there was no future for somebody as gifted as he in book publishing, it was a pretty bleak prospect for the rest of us. Here, after all, was a man of taste, judgment, proven editorial skills, a sense of the jugular for news and publicity and the courage to throw the dice, who had tried to make publishing fun, yet it was as if his departure, whether voluntary, or, as it was rumored, under pressure, was the first step toward the cleansing of the temple, a warning sign that it was important to take publishing seriously if you were going to survive in it. Having fun—particularly in public—was clearly no longer a good career move.
IT SHOULD have come as no surprise, however. He had been memorably preceded by Dick Snyder, who had been largely responsible for taking S&S from a company worth $11 million to a global corporation worth in excess of $5 billion and nevertheless had been unceremoniously fired by Viacom, shortly after they acquired Paramount.
It would be hard to imagine anything better calculated to demonstrate that the best way to survive in publishing is to not stick your neck out. Dick had been outspoken, quick to make enemies, hugely ambitious, and determined to continue S&S’s rapid pace of growth. However, he had supported his friend Barry Diller when Diller tried to take over Paramount, thus adding further fuel to Martin Davis’s dislike of Snyder, for Davis was determined to see Paramount sold to Viacom.
Thus Dick repeated the costly mistake he had made in 1983, when he had supported Jim Judelson instead of Davis. There was in Dick a streak of romantic loyalty, and it cost him dear, since he twice backed the loser in a major corporate fight. It cannot be said of him that he ever wanted to be on the losing side—that was not an element of his personality—but he liked a good fight and wasn’t afraid of the odds against him. What is more, once he was in a fight, he didn’t hold back or try to play both sides.
I had no idea at all of what had happened when I was called to his office, shortly after lunch, on June 14, 1994. By that time, Dick was far more involved in corporate management than in the day-to-day affairs of trade publishing. After a series of stopgap experiments, he had at last found a team whom he trusted—just barely—to manage S&S, and as a result I no longer saw him as often, though we still remained friends. Even so, like most people summoned unexpectedly to his presence, I quickly tried to imagine what mistake of mine had attracted his attention.