Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [298]
When he told me that he had been fired, I found it hard to believe—Dick fires people, I told myself, he doesn’t get fired!—and it took a few minutes for it to sink in. We sat there for a few minutes—we were joined shortly by Alice Mayhew, trying to make small talk, but there was really nothing to be said, except that it was going to be hard to imagine S&S, after so many years, without Dick. Then, gradually, the reality of it sank in. Later on that night, I remember joining him somewhere for a noisy dinner—Bob Woodward had flown up from Washington with his wife. Dick’s third wife, Laura, was also there and a lot of other people whom I don’t remember. But I do remember stepping out onto Madison Avenue with him after dinner, as we embraced in tears, and saying to him, “It’s the end of an era.”
And so it proved to be.
THE REMOVAL of two of the more interesting and ambitious figures in book publishing—albeit for very different reasons—in fact set the stage, had one but known it, for an even bigger series of events. In 1998, Random House was bought by Bertelsmann, while Putnam and Berkley Books had been acquired by Pearson in 1996 and merged with Viking and Penguin. The vogue for publishing giants seemed to have reached its peak—or, as some thought, was only just beginning.
Perhaps more ironic, Viacom eventually sold the educational and textbook empire that Dick Snyder had assembled at S&S for nearly five billion dollars and held on to the S&S “consumer unit” itself, thus reducing S&S back to the company that it had been in 1984, when Dick made his first big acquisition with Esquire. It was as if we had started small, grown to unimaginable size, then shrunk back to what we had been at the beginning—the reverse of the American dream.
IT IS possible to look back and see when and how this transformation began. When the Knopfs sold their beloved publishing house to Bennett Cerf in 1960 and Cerf then took Random House public, then sold it to RCA, the die was cast. After that, it was only a matter of time before publishing houses with whose names everybody was familiar—Macmillan, Harper, Atheneum, Scribner, Prentice-Hall, to name a few—fell one by one like trees to a logger’s ax. Scribner, for example, the house that employed the fabled Maxwell Perkins and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, was gobbled up by Macmillan, then Macmillan was bought by S&S, and Scribner became an “imprint” (albeit a successful one) of S&S, while its famous bookstore on Fifth Avenue, perhaps the most beautiful bookstore in the country, became (O shame!) a Benetton store!
Dick himself, by concentrating on acquisition as the quickest way to growth, had set in motion forces nobody could control, not even him. He made S&S so valuable that Viacom, in need of money to pay off the debt it had incurred to buy Paramount in a fierce bidding war, had almost no choice but to break up what he had so painstakingly built. He was—the ultimate irony—the victim of success.
ON THE other hand, the essentials of the profession haven’t changed at my level. Only today, the florist in the small country town where I live handed me a manuscript—a novel—and asked if I would mind reading it, if it wasn’t an imposition. No, I said, as I took it, it’s never an imposition. It’s how I make my living. My curiosity to open up a new manuscript and read it remains—strangely, after all these years—undiminished. Not that I’m a Pollyanna. I am prepared to be disappointed and very often am—this is in the nature of publishing. Last week, I received a vast manuscript from an agent, a highly touted contemporary novel about the West, and before I had read more than a few pages I knew it was merely ersatz McMurtry, nothing like the real thing—a zircon, not a diamond. Probably somewhere out in the West, however, at this very moment, some kid with dirt under his fingernails from looking after his father’s stock is sitting down at the kitchen table, or in his room, to write a novel—on a computer, no doubt,