Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [53]
The only person, in fact, who didn’t do well out of The Caretakers was Jacques Chambrun. At first, he was happy enough—even astonished—that a submission of his should have made so much money, but then he began to brood, no doubt on the fact that all he was getting from us was his 10 percent. It must have seemed to him unjust that we had given him a great success and at the same time taken away his chance to exploit it.
He invited me to his apartment for a drink—a strange place in which the elevator, run by an elderly man in shabby livery who looked as if he might be an extra in a horror movie, took me straight up to Chambrun’s apartment. The elevator opened with a crash, depositing me straight into his living room, which seemed to have been furnished with leftovers from a theatrical warehouse. Chambrun was on his feet, as nattily dressed as ever, opening a bottle of champagne; lounging on his sofa was a lush young woman—young, at any rate, in comparison to Chambrun—dressed in a kind of kimono or wrapper and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder. Chambrun introduced her as his secretary, though from the length of her lacquered fingernails I judged this to be a euphemism.
We toasted our mutual success, but there was an air of sadness to the proceedings. Now that The Caretakers was making so much money, Chambrun said, perhaps we would like to reconsider our arrangement and return to the conventional author/agent relationship? I said no as politely as I could. Chambrun was not surprised, but there was a certain lowering of the temperature in his voice, a sense that between one gentleman and another I had somehow disappointed him.
I left sooner than I had expected to and never got another manuscript from him again.
CHAPTER 8
I was soon getting them from other agents, however. Success breeds success, in book publishing as elsewhere. One book that works encourages other agents to send books—a process that is reversed when failure sets in. I was beginning to put down roots at S&S —framed photographs on the wall, pipe rack and tobacco humidor on the desk, just the kind of domestic touches that I had always despised in other people’s work spaces. Indeed, I was inadvertently in the process of doing what so many other people my age were: I was making my work the center of my life.
The process was so gradual and natural that I scarcely noticed it; like so many others, I told myself that I was working to make a living, putting in long hours to jump-start my career, doing it all for Casey’s benefit in the long run, but of course none of that was really true. S&S simply seemed to me a far more exciting and fulfilling place than home; I dreaded weekends and holidays when the office was closed and put aside as much of Saturdays and Sundays as I could to read manuscripts and edit, missing the camaraderie, impatient to get back to the office on Monday morning.
The word workaholic had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon was almost as widespread in publishing as alcoholism, and only too frequently (though not in my case) the two went hand in hand. But the people I liked and admired most were those who stayed in the office the latest, and I simply fell into the habit of being one of them. I very often found myself walking home with Bob, who lived about two blocks away from us, after the cleaners had driven us out of our offices. Our standing joke revolved around S&S’s treasurer, Emil Staral, who had been appointed by Shimkin and was in the habit of walking around the office at five-thirty every afternoon to make sure the lights were turned out. If you weren’t in your office and the lights