Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [33]
Kaplan’s impending departure eventually moved me toward the enviable position of being more or less independent of any real authority. I worked for Henry, to be sure, but since I was also going to be working for Max, I could pretty much set my own priorities. A man with two bosses effectively has none. In addition, I was to take over Kaplan’s role as “secretary of the editorial board.” The editorial board of S&S met on Thursday mornings in Max’s office and at that time consisted of Max, Henry, and Peter Schwed. On very rare occasions, one of the other editors might be called in to describe a book he or she wanted to buy, but Schuster’s shyness and his determination to have eye contact with as few people as possible meant that most editorial business was based on written reports and memos. It was a source of some bitterness in the company that the editors, however successful they might be, were excluded from the weekly meeting, but Schuster clung to the tradition stubbornly.
It was my job to attend the meeting and take the minutes, but there was no vow of silence involved. Schuster, I at once discovered, was as likely to ask me for my opinion as anyone else’s. Since the minutes of these meetings were central to his claim that he was truly running the business, the person who took the notes and drafted the minutes played an important role, from his point of view (though not from anybody else’s).
MY FIRST serious meeting with Max (he put us almost immediately on a first-name basis) had been interesting but unsettling. Henry and I sat facing his desk, as his right hand tapped out a speedy rhythm with the business end of a ballpoint pen. On close inspection, Max’s toilette left something to be desired: There were bristly patches on his neck and cheeks that he had missed while shaving, small tufts of Kleenex clung to a couple of places where he had cut himself with his razor, he had neglected to put stays in the collar of his shirt, and several of his buttons were unbuttoned. He looked ever so slightly unkempt, despite the expensive, tailored, three-piece blue suit and the Sulka shirt and tie. One of his eyes strayed toward the side—he was a bit walleyed, as if searching, like a flounder, for danger on the periphery of his sight. His whole demeanor, for a man sitting in his own office in a company he half-owned, was remarkably nervous and edgy. In fact, I toyed with the notion that it was I who was making him nervous, but that didn’t seem to be the case. His desk was littered—quite literally—with clippings, memos, notes, three-by-five index cards in various colors, bulging files full of Thermofaxes (those pale pink, curly, shiny precursors to xerography) and smudged carbon copies, all of them marked with his energetic, restless pencil.
On the walls hung a number of framed photographs, obviously designed to impress: Max and Ray at I Tatti with Bernard Berenson; Max and Ray in Jerusalem with David Ben-Gurion; Max and Ray with Bertrand Russell at Plas Penrhyn, his Welsh castle; Max and Ray with Sir Max Beerbohm at Rapallo; Max and Ray with Nikos Kazantzakis somewhere in the Mediterranean. In all these photographs Ray Schuster—a firm-jawed, compact, stylish, and good-looking woman of a certain age—stood close by the famous personality, sometimes even touching, smiling directly into the camera, while Max stood shiftily to one side, as if he suspected that his presence was an intrusion. In most of them the famous personality looked old and bewildered, as if uncertain about why he was being photographed with this energetic American