Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [63]
In any case, he invited me out to lunch (ordered me, actually) and I found myself sitting next to him a couple of days later at the Café Louis XIV in Rockefeller Center, then his favorite hangout, being helped to a slice of Gitlin’s wisdom of life as he knocked back a scotch on the rocks. “How much are they paying you?” he asked. When I told him, he snorted, eyes squinting like a bull’s about to charge a tourist at Pamplona. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Leon, put him straight.”
Gitlin’s care for his clients was all encompassing, and later came to include me and my family. Loyalty he prized above all other virtues (actually, he had a certain contempt for the others), with the result that I was to work with Ryan (alongside Schwed) until the very end, taking the last pages of his final book away from him as he lay dying of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
GITLIN’S PURPOSE—apart from deciding if I was friend or foe—might have been to see if I was suitable material to edit Harold Robbins at some future point. Apparently, in the elaborate organization that had been handcrafted to publish Robbins, this was the only element that had not been engraved in stone. Not, Gitlin assured me quickly, that Robbins needed a lot of editing, the man was a natural writer, whatever people said of him, but from time to time it was necessary for somebody to pass a sharpened pencil over his prose.
Did Robbins take well to being edited? I inquired. Gitlin shot me a look of pure fury. Harold was no fucking prima donna, he told me. Besides, Robbins would do whatever Gitlin told him to do, and I should never fucking forget it. I had a dim perception even then that by merely lunching with Gitlin I was doing the equivalent of signing on for a voyage before the mast, with Gitlin as my Captain Bligh. “So long as all this doesn’t backfire on me,” I said, knowing that nothing was more likely, given the state of relations between Schuster and Shimkin. Gitlin looked at me as soulfully as he could manage. “You have my word, kid,” he said, and he would prove to be true to his word, as he always was.
Having settled that (it would be some time before it took effect, since Robbins would be edited for several books more by Cynthia White of Pocket Books), he leaned closer to me. “I hear you’re going to be helping out Peter Schwed with Irving Wallace’s new book,” he said. It was news to me. Wallace was a former Knopf author and screenwriter who had written a book about P. T. Barnum, which I had read more or less by accident, and whom Peter Schwed was trying to bring to S&S, which would be a major coup for him.
“What’s the book about?” I asked.
Gitlin gave me a roguish wink. “Sex.”
AND THUS I turned another corner. My career, which had been moving toward fairly serious nonfiction (the Durants, plus all of Max Schuster’s friends), Dariel Telfer’s novel notwithstanding, now suddenly moved toward mainstream best-selling fiction. I was also being drawn into the no-man’s-land between Schuster and Shimkin. Each of Gitlin’s deals had Pocket Books publish the mass-market edition of the book and S&S the hardcover edition, with the author getting 100 percent of both royalties, instead of splitting the paperback royalty with his publisher.
Gitlin and I soon became close friends, though I was careful not to be sucked into his social life, which seemed to consist largely of sitting around in restaurants or hotel suites and drinking with his clients or flying to L.A. or Cannes to hold Harold Robbins’s hand while he gestated another novel.
As for the stories about Robbins’s writing habits, I soon learned that they were, if anything, less dramatic than the reality. Robbins invariably waited until the last possible