Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [54]
Looking back now, I am not so sure that Staral, who was in every respect a character straight out of the pages of Molière, was not right after all. Most of the people I knew in the late fifties and sixties ended up divorced in the seventies, and by the time the eighties rolled around they were busily trying to find in a new marriage the domestic happiness they had fled from when they were just starting up the career ladder. I was no exception.
It was, in retrospect, a strange period, the sunset of the Fifties, before rock and roll, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and women’s liberation changed all the rules we were living by. One’s own photograph from that time now seems to be one of a complete stranger. It is hard to summon up a world so different in so many ways from the present and yet so close, a world where manual typewriters were still in use, in which the orders were counted by a couple of gray-haired ladies, the accountants still used ledgers, and there was a real, live telephone operator with a switchboard on the premises. In the age before the photocopy machine, carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner’s blackened skin.
Wives still stayed home while their husbands went off to work, and they went away with the kids for the summer while their husbands stayed in town during the week, and everyone tried as hard as they could to lead the same kind of lives their parents had, or at least one of which their parents might approve. Rebellion was unthinkable, and what little there was of it took place furtively, in the form of heavy drinking and the office affairs that often accompanied it. Men still ran the world, unquestioned (except at home), and although there were more women executives in book publishing than in most other businesses, real power remained in the hands of men. There were exceptions—a couple of the more powerful agents were women: Helen Strauss of the William Morris Agency, Phyllis Jackson and Kay Brown at the Ashley-Famous Agency (eventually to become International Creative Management), as well as a handful of important publishing executives.
S&S had a few of what were then known as “ballsy” women, including the head of the production department, who, when Emil Staral’s even more penny-pinching deputy tried to end an argument with her by stepping into the men’s room, followed him in and continued it, while he stood in the urinal, fly halfway unzipped, shocked into silence. On the whole, though, it was still thought of as a man’s world, even though much of the useful work in it was done by women.
A publishing firm like S&S or Random House or Knopf was still small enough physically that all its major components except warehousing and shipping could be contained in one place, sometimes, as in the case of S&S, on one floor. This meant that every department was within reach, and that department heads were constantly in and out of each other’s offices. In the days when Dick Simon had been active at S&S, he liked to open his door and shout when he wanted to call his troops together for a quick meeting, and Max could still have done so, had he been of a mind to, which he wasn’t, being more concerned with hiding from his troops than gathering them. The advent of big news—a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a new best-seller, the delivery of an important or eagerly awaited manuscript—was signaled by a sudden burst of noise