Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [62]
It was then still usual to sell hardcover rights to one book at a time and to let the publisher handle the mass-market paperback rights for half (or in the case of a major best-selling writer, slightly less than half) of the proceeds. Gitlin was the first to see that if you sold a publisher three or four books by a major author and made it pay for the mass-market rights and the foreign rights at the same time, you would come up with a very substantial amount of money. With the right kind of legal and tax structure, a really successful writer might become seriously rich, instead of having to live from book to book, anxiously waiting for the next royalty check.
A glance at the correspondence between Hemingway and Perkins is enough to demonstrate that Gitlin was onto something. Hemingway never took advances against his novels and was forever pleading with Perkins or Charlie Scribner to transfer relatively small amounts of money to his bank account. The notion that a writer should have to beg for money—his money—from his publisher, as if he were a child trying to wheedle an advance against his allowance out of a reluctant and all-powerful parent, was deeply repugnant to Gitlin. He was determined to put an end to that sort of paternalism.
GITLIN ENTERED my life as the agent for Cornelius Ryan, a successful war correspondent and writer for Reader’s Digest who had just been finishing his classic account of D-Day, The Longest Day, when I arrived at S&S. Since I happened to be a fanatic student of military history, I was eventually drafted by Peter Schwed, Ryan’s editor, into the small group of people who struggled to keep pace with Ryan’s remarkable capacity for infinite military detail. Ryan’s previous career as a writer of books had been modest—he had written, among other things, a ghosted autobiography of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer, called I Aimed for the Stars, which Ryan, who had a wicked Irish wit, joked ought to have been called I Aimed for the Stars—But Sometimes I Hit London.
Unlike some people at S&S, who found him overbearing, I liked Ryan, who under a veneer of charm and a remarkably thin skin was in fact an acute historian and a man of very considerable courage. We were to grow much closer over the years—particularly since my father was the art director and one of the animating spirits of the all-star movie of The Longest Day that helped make Ryan an international celebrity and, by the standards of magazine journalism, a rich man. My main task, however, with Ryan grew to be that of a kind of British aide-de-camp, advising him on the many illogical and eccentric points of British military rank and organization (I was perhaps the only person in American publishing who knew that in the Household Cavalry, sergeants, for reasons lost in the mists of time, are called “Corporals of Horse,” or that the rank of Field-Marshal is never written without the hyphen or with two l’s), helping out Frank Metz, our art director, with the transformation of his military maps into four-color endpapers, and fact-checking German military nomenclature. Schwed remained his editor.
Since Ryan saw no reason why Gitlin could not do for him and military history what he had done for Harold Robbins and popular fiction, Gitlin’s attention was inevitably drawn toward me. I picked up the telephone one day to hear a rasping, low-pitched voice, full of menace, say, “Listen, kid, Connie