Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [36]
An emotional predicament more calculated to drive Max to his beloved files can hardly be imagined—all the more so since Ray was a ruthless domestic tyrant, of whom poor Max lived in fear, desperate to please her but apparently unable to. She was a pint-size, Eastern European Jewish version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, and her occasional visits to the office threw not only Max but everyone else into a state of panic, since she was quite likely to insist on having him fire any attractive young woman who happened to cross her path. Ray was apparently under the illusion that Max’s appearance made him a magnetic attraction for women, or, even more improbably, that Max himself might lust after them.
MAX’S FORGETFULNESS was well noted by his colleagues and spawned many stories, some of them true—indeed, it was one of the bonds he shared with Dick Simon, who lost manuscripts, contracts, letters, and his personal possessions so frequently that everyone who worked for him knew the phone numbers of the major lost-and-found offices in New York City and the surrounding counties. Max usually managed to hang on to his coat, hat, and briefcase, but he was unreliable when it came to names and faces.
At one point before the war, S&S became the publisher of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mystery novel, The G-String Murders. Gypsy had always fancied herself to be an intellectual (hence the song in Pal Joey in which one of the supporting players does a Gypsy Rose Lee imitation and sings, as she strips, “Zip!—I’m an intellectual”) and writing a book had long been her dream. Her long-term lover Billy Rose took on the task of getting the book published, and when S&S bought the rights it was major news. Gypsy was by then well past her stripping days but was still a formidable woman, tall, voluptuous, and somewhat overpowering. Billy was tiny (he came up to about her waist), so they made an odd couple.
Rose got his start as a boy by taking shorthand from the famous financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, made his fortune in show business, and inspired a good many other short, dark, energetic, and ambitious Jewish boys to follow in his footsteps, including Mike Todd. He was enormously wealthy by the time Gypsy plunged into authorhood—he was perhaps the only man in New York to have a malachite urinal in his downstairs guest bathroom (and a malachite sink to match it, too)—and made it clear that he expected Gypsy to get first-class treatment, which Max and Dick agreed happily to give her, given Gypsy’s celebrity status.
Alas, like most publishers, they were more interested in Gypsy before they bought her book than they were afterward. In publishing as in love, the really heady period is during the courtship, when the author is still being wooed. Once the deal is consummated, the love affair ends, a certain indifference sets in, and the marriage begins. Since neither Dick nor Max were greatly interested in murder mysteries, Gypsy was handed over to S&S’s mystery editor and promptly forgotten by the two owners.
As the publication date approached, Gypsy became more and more anxious about the big party that she assumed would be given to launch her book and increasingly upset to hear nothing about it from her publishers. When it became evident that no party was planned, she was distraught, but Billy Rose cheered her up. Fuck ’em, he told her, if the lousy cheapskates weren’t going to give her a party, he would take her out to dinner to celebrate instead. So Rose booked a table upstairs at “21” and took Gypsy there for dinner. About halfway through the meal, Gypsy looked up and realized that Max Schuster was sitting a few tables away with his wife Ray and another couple. Should she get up and say something to him? she asked Rose. Rose was against it, but finally he could see that nothing was going to hold Gypsy