Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [58]
“There, there,” her husband said, patting her hand. She withdrew it sharply, not to be mollified. “If they think giving us a party will make up for it all,” Ariel continued, her voice rising steadily in volume, “they can forget it.”
Her voice was low and guttural and her expression that of Madame Defarge and her tricoteuses friends demanding the guillotine for an aristocrat. “You should see him,” she said, “working until midnight, past midnight often, sitting in his chair with a pad on his lap, writing, writing, writing, while I look up the references for him.… And they go on world cruises in the meantime.… They suck his blood.”
I was about to point out that the Durants had earned formidable amounts of royalties over the years, which, to judge from the way Ariel dressed, they must be hiding in their mattress, but it seemed wiser to humor her. Neither Durant drank, nor did they touch the hors d’oeuvres, Will because he was a vegetarian and Ariel because she would rather have put molten lead in her mouth than the Schusters’ miniature Swedish meatballs and tiny wieners on toothpicks.
We chatted about history for a while—Ariel’s view of it was darker and more Manichean than her husband’s, which possibly explains the tone of pessimism that crept into the later volumes of the series as she took on a more active writing role and won her place as coauthor—until Ray Schuster, apparently determined to play out her role as hostess, offered to take us on a tour of the apartment.
Ariel submitted to this unwillingly, her expression one of furious resentment, which reached its peak when we paused to view the Schusters’ Chagall. “Bought with our sweat and blood,” she hissed loudly, at which point Ray wisely decided not to continue the tour. (God knows what Ariel would have said at the sight of Ray’s dressing room or her closets.) Shortly, word came back that Mrs. Schuster wasn’t feeling well and that I should take the Durants out to dinner, together with whatever S&S personnel I might think it appropriate to invite, and the cocktail party ground to a merciful end.
Perhaps because I had taken them to dinner, the Durants came to the conclusion that I was on their side. They found me frivolous, insufficiently attentive to details, and reactionary in my view of history and made no secret of it, but all of this they could and did forgive so long as they could grumble about the Schusters to me and count on me to get Shimkin to release their royalty checks a few days early. Had I known that this relationship was destined to continue for another decade, I might have tried to correct their opinion of me, but I let it go and thus became stuck with my role.
Occasionally, over the years, they came to New York, but the cocktail party in their honor was never repeated. Ray absolutely forbade it.
* Booksellers had threatened not to carry the first crossword-puzzle book with which Simon and Schuster had launched their company, on the grounds that because it had a pencil attached to it on a string it was a novelty item, not a book, something Max had neither forgotten nor forgiven.
CHAPTER 9
The real news in book publishing wasn’t about books. In fact it passed most of us by, probably because we were looking in the wrong direction.
In October 1959, a revolution of sorts had occurred when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public at $11.25 a share (it rose to $14 the next day and was soon selling for $45), setting off a boom in publishing stocks that quickly drew other companies, including S&S, into the stock market. It is probably coincidental (though ironic) that the moment when book publishing became the darling of Wall Street, ushering in a long period of mergers and acquisitions which is not yet over nearly forty years later, began with the death of Dick Simon.
Dick Simon,