Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [37]
Embarrassed and a little nervous, she walked over to Max’s table and interrupted the conversation to say hello and ask Max how her book was doing. Max beamed up at Gypsy, and before she could say a word, stammered out to her: “Gypsy, how nice to see you! You know, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.” He paused. “One of these days, you ought to write a book.”*
IN MY own small way, I soon had direct contact with the manic-compulsive side of Max’s personality. The notes I took once a week at the editorial-board meeting had to be typed as a draft on dark yellow paper, triple-spaced, so that Max could rewrite and expand upon them, often until they bore no relationship at all to what had actually been said or decided. This was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener, first to the fact that Max was living at least part of the time in a dream world, and second, that what passed for facts at S&S were often not facts at all. I knew what had been said and by whom, I had even written it down pretty much verbatim, so it was odd to see how it changed under Max’s relentless blue marks as he expanded his comments, downplayed Schwed’s, and often eliminated Henry’s altogether. Anybody reading the minutes would have supposed that Max talked nonstop throughout the meetings, whereas, in fact, he was usually silent, lips pursed as if blowing bubbles, while Schwed and Henry argued things out between themselves. Max’s revisions gave him a certain statesmanlike air, though for a long time I had some difficulty in deciding why he cared enough to go to this trouble. Most people who got the editorial-board minutes merely looked to see which books we had bought and how much we had paid for them; it was a practical tool, not intended to leave S&S. When I mentioned this to Henry he sighed deeply, his face looking paler and more world-weary than ever. “The only copies Max cares about,” he said, “are the ones that go to Leon Shimkin and to Ray Schuster.”
Shimkin, of course, I could understand. Max was anxious to show his partner that he was in charge of things. Since Shimkin had known Max since the mid-1920s, I doubted that he was taken in by Max’s mild and harmless deception, but it was really Ray whom Max was trying to impress. Having chosen Max over any number of other suitors (at least if she was to be believed), Ray was obliged to present her Max to the rest of the world as a “genius”—an eccentric genius, perhaps, but a genius all the same. Seldom have two people worked so hard to appear devoted to each other.
More than anybody else, Ray had been responsible for the hostility between Max and Shimkin. Many years ago, before the war, Max had prevailed upon Ray to invite Shimkin and his wife, Rebecca, to one of their parties in their apartment at the old Pulitzer mansion. In Ray’s eyes, Shimkin was still “the bookkeeper.” Deeply resentful of being obliged to invite him, she deliberately neglected to tell the Shimkins that it was a black-tie affair, so that they were the only couple not formally dressed, to their great embarrassment. Shimkin never forgave this insult (particularly to his beloved Rebecca), and it went far toward dividing the ownership of S&S into two implacably hostile opposite camps.
By making it obvious that her husband was terrified of her, Ray succeeded in making him seem foolish to his own employees—particularly the more talented and ambitious among them. This is not to say that she was a stupid woman—on the contrary, there was a side to her that was notably shrewd and smart—but her energy and ambition exceeded her husband’s. Unfortunately, she had been brought up in an age when there was no outlet for those qualities except through poor Max.
This was, in those days, a far more common phenomenon than it is now. Indeed, the model on which Ray based herself was that of Blanche Knopf. Alfred and Blanche Knopf presented themselves as something of a publishing team. Elegant and sharply intellectual, Blanche Knopf was what Ray would like to have been seen as, the loving and equal partner of a famous husband, but unfortunately