Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [59]
Dick was, in fact, a victim of the same forces that had persuaded Cerf and Klopfer to turn Random House public, a combination of success and undercapitalization that had led Schuster, Simon, and Shimkin to sell S&S to Marshall Field III in 1946. By 1957, when Max and Leon bought the company back, Dick was too ill and too depressed to join them. He had become a rich man, at the price of his own health, sanity, and vitality. Cerf eulogized Dick in the Saturday Review: “He talked vaguely of starting another publishing house of his own,” Cerf wrote, “but his heart wasn’t in it … and he retreated into a cheerless world of his own. He spent his last days huddled in a heavy topcoat in an overheated room, pulling down the shades on the windows and locking the doors. He had hit upon this method of shutting out death.”
There was going to be a lot of this sort of sadness going around shortly in the publishing world, though thankfully not always of the tragic sort that engulfed poor Dick Simon. Shortly afterward, the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation bought New American Library; Macmillan bought Crowell-Collier; Western Publishing, Harcourt, Brace, and Holt, Rinehart, and Winston went public; Times Books and Bernard Geis Associates were founded; and, most significant of all, Random House acquired Alfred A. Knopf for about three million dollars in Random House stock.
The Random House/Alfred A. Knopf merger astonished everyone in book publishing. H. L. Mencken had called Knopf “the perfect publisher,” and while that might have been going too far, there is no doubt that the Knopfs’ pursuit of perfection and elegant taste made their house very special. Alfred Knopf had never bothered to disguise the mild contempt in which he held other, lesser publishers, including Cerf and Klopfer, which made it all the more surprising that he and Blanche sold their firm. One reason was that their son Alfred Knopf, Jr. (“Pat”), had felt obliged to leave in 1959 to cofound a new publishing house of his own, Atheneum, at which point his father, who had never paid much attention to his heir, began to brood darkly over the fact that he now had none. Knopf was reported to have been deeply grieved by his son’s departure, although he seemed to most outsiders to have done everything possible to bring it about.*
The Random House acquisition of Knopf made it clear that from now on the real money in books was going to be made not by writing or publishing but by buying and selling the publishing companies themselves. Although Cerf remarked that he “had every intention of continuing to publish books that lose money,” Knopf, in his Olympian way, caught the spirit of the merger better when he remarked “that the level of American publishing [was] already so low that the journey to Wall Street will make no difference.” Hardly was the ink dry on that deal than Random House also acquired Pantheon, which had been founded in 1942 by Helen and Kurt Wolff and was the most “European” of New York houses, with an enviable reputation for literary quality.
Less than four years later, Random House itself was acquired by RCA, partly in the belief that there was some kind of synergy between radio and television broadcasting and the book-publishing business, setting a pattern for the future acquisition of S&S by Gulf and Western (which owned Paramount) and of G. P. Putnam by Universal-MCA. Of course, it was not show business that was driving these acquisitions at first—no movie studio has ever been foolish enough to buy a publishing house merely to get a crack at novels that they could see anyway and for the most part wouldn’t want. Instead, there was a starry-eyed belief