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moment before beginning a novel, usually a couple of months before the finished book was supposed to be shipped. To this psychological burden, he added the fact that he always spent his income, substantial as it was, the moment it was received, without putting anything away for taxes. Thus, when he finally sat down to write, Robbins had given himself not only an impossible deadline but the added pressure of IRS liens—not to speak of the expenses of keeping houses full of servants in L.A. and Acapulco, plus the yacht, with its crew of four, in Cannes, and his wife, Grace. Once the wolf was at the door, Robbins would sit down reluctantly, often in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and start typing. Only after he had passed a certain number of manuscript pages under the door would Gitlin allow room service to send a meal in. Even then Robbins had been known to escape out a window to Palm Springs or Las Vegas unless Gitlin watched him like a jailer.

Compared to this, Irving Wallace seemed normal, although the subject of his novel raised eyebrows at S&S, except for those of Peter Schwed, who was hugely enthusiastic. The Chapman Report was based on a sex survey very much like that of Dr. Kinsey, a subject which seemed shocking at the time.

Whereas most agents make a point of spreading their major authors over a number of different publishing houses, Gitlin made a deliberate decision to put Ryan, Robbins, and Wallace in the same place and even, in time, in the hands of the same editor. He calculated that having three best-selling authors at one place would give him more leverage—it might even, in the long run, make the house dependent on him, so that he could pretty much get whatever he asked for. But no large publishing house can ever really become dependent on one or two authors, however many copies their books sell, and very few authors go on writing best-seller after best-seller forever. Anyway, if you publish two or three hundred books a year, other best-sellers are almost certainly going to come along sooner or later. Successful as, say, James Michener and John O’Hara were, Random House would have survived the loss of either or both of them, just as S&S and Pocket Books would have survived the loss of Robbins, Wallace, and Ryan. Publishers are, on the whole, more likely to tie themselves up in knots over the writers they don’t have but want than over those they already have, particularly when it’s a question of multibook deals spread over several years.

* It is a measure of things to come in the publishing industry that Atheneum was later acquired by Macmillan, after the latter firm was taken over by that leviathan of corporate crookery Robert Maxwell, and vanished altogether as an imprint after S&S acquired Macmillan in the wake of Maxwell’s mysterious death.

CHAPTER 10

“Television is the best thing that’s happened to kids since the invention of mother’s milk,” Bennett Cerf, ever the optimist, announced ebulliently to an audience of librarians in the summer of 1960. The librarians had been indulging in that pastime common to all those involved in books since the invention of movable type: the prediction that culture is about to go belly-up once and for all and that the next generation will be, or already is, functionally illiterate.

Considering that Cerf would shortly sell Random House to RCA, which owned a TV network, his enthusiasm for television might not have been entirely objective. He himself was not always immune to the pessimism of those who make their living from books. A few years before, struck by the fact that booksellers were always predicting that the bookshop would one day go the way of the village blacksmith, Cerf had commissioned some research into the subject that produced the alarming information that not only did blacksmiths greatly outnumber bookstores in America but the per capita purchase of books by Americans was less than that of Thailand.

By 1961, however, the age-old pessimism of book publishing had been erased by a sudden burst of confidence, prompting Life magazine to devote