Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [44]
Alas, in his retirement, the Times’s famous copyediting desk was no longer at his disposal, and much of his manuscript made hardly any sense. Working with such raw material was a pleasure in its way, particularly since Laurence didn’t appear to mind or even notice that I was rewriting his book from stem to stern. The fact was that I had at last found something I could do at least as well as anybody else, and maybe better, even if it was something nobody else really wanted to do at all. Besides, I was taking the first stumbling steps toward becoming a writer. What I was doing was perhaps the lowest form of writing—or at least the most unremunerative—but I still felt a sort of dim creative pride, a foretaste of writing my own material.
Editors, of course, are not supposed to become writers, or at any rate they’re not supposed to practice both professions at once, thus crossing over the invisible but very distinct barrier that separates the two. There had been exceptions, but most editors with a yen to write traditionally retired to do so, as Justin Kaplan, Ed Doctorow, Cass Canfield, and Richard Kluger, among others, did, with varying degrees of success.
My next task was to Simonize the prose of a much tougher nut than Bill Laurence: none other than Robert Moses, New York’s “master builder” and one of those with whom Max claimed a close friendship—one not, so far as I could tell, reciprocated by Moses himself, who was then at the height of his power as New York City’s parks commissioner and head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which he ruled like a czar, only more so.
Moses had written—or caused to have written for him by his minions—a slim biography of Governor Alfred E. Smith, his mentor in public service. Thanks to years of begging the great man to write a book and promises to publish it, Max Schuster was stuck with it when Moses sent it to him. Of course, what Max had been hoping for was an autobiography, not what amounted to a monograph on a man whose memory (and reputation) FDR had all but eclipsed, but Moses was shrewd enough to take Max up on his promises, and poor Max was too deeply committed to them to object. This particular hot potato was a good learning experience, if only because it taught me that pursuing the great, the near great, or the once great is fraught with peril, the worst of it being the possibility that they will actually deliver a book. Most presidential memoirs—and virtually the entire lists of certain publishers—can be explained this way.
As I was soon to discover, the real difficulty of dealing with Robert Moses was not his vast ego, nor even his abrasive manner, but the fact that his staff had ghosted the book for him, which Moses couldn’t bring himself to admit. It was hard enough to deal with the ordinary author’s ego, but dealing with the ego of a man who hadn’t even written the prose he was defending was a new experience (though one that was to eventually pay dividends when it came to dealing with the memoirs of presidents and CEOs).
Accustomed to dealing with the world as if he were a potentate and responsible to nobody but himself—though his wings were shortly to be clipped—Moses responded to even the smallest editorial question as if it were a challenge to his authority, and he frequently complained about me to Max. Max was a master at soothing hurt feelings, though Moses was no more easily soothed than his patriarchal namesake. At one point, he actually wrote Moses a fulsome letter apologizing for my rewriting the great man’s prose and wrote at the top of the copy he sent me: “MVK—Pray pay no attention to this at all. Proverbs, 15:1. Go on with the good work. MLS.”
I looked up the reference and it read, “A soft answer turneth away wrath,” which was actually as good a formula for a publisher’s letter to an irate author as I know and the kind of note that made it hard not to like Max. Max was well aware that Leon Shimkin