Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [69]
Quite the reverse was true of America, a big country, in which New York is only one of many major cities, albeit the media center, and in which people were most interested in local news. News of book publishing seldom reached the hinterlands. Even today, there is no fevered national speculation about who will win an American Book Award, unlike the interest that surrounds, say, the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom, or the Prix Goncourt in France.
Much of this was about to change and in a big way. As Wall Street became interested in publishing as “a growth industry,” there were people who actually thought that it might be made profitable as well and who observed its present arrangements with a cold eye. And even bigger change was in store with the rising popularity of television talk shows. The Today show had been going on for years, spawning imitations, before it occurred to anybody that authors were a cheap way of filling up time—in fact, they were free and only too happy to talk about their books. Television, which everybody had expected would destroy book publishing, in fact saved and reinvented it. Until television, the only way that publishers could get their books noticed was to advertise or pray for good reviews. Now, at last, they could do an end run around the reviewers and put the author in direct contact with millions of people at one time.
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FEW PEOPLE guessed at the time how significant these changes would be. Among them was one of America’s most successful novelists, whom I was at last to meet, when circumstances made it necessary for me to work with Harold Robbins personally, and I was summoned to the great man’s hotel suite by a call from Paul Gitlin.
Gitlin, not a man easily awed, talked about his biggest client in a relatively hushed voice, as a cardinal might talk of the Holy Father. Harold wanted to meet me, he said, but I should be careful. Harold could be pretty rough, especially if he thought he was being bullshitted.
I had no reason to bullshit Harold Robbins, I said. My job, like that of my predecessor, Cynthia White, was simply to tidy up his prose and to point out holes in his plot and suggest ways of filling them. The larger questions, such as how much was going to be spent on advertising, how many copies we were printing, or what television shows he should appear on were, after all, not in my province. On these matters, Robbins was known to be sensitive. Gitlin had long since secured for him “most favored nation” treatment, meaning that if anybody else should ever get a bigger first printing, advertising guarantee, or promotion budget, Robbins’s would automatically be raised to match the new terms. The same applied to his royalty rates and almost anything else Gitlin could think of.
Harold didn’t like to be talked down to, either, Gitlin went on. And Harold did not like snotty people—I shouldn’t forget that for a moment.
“I don’t talk down to people,” I protested. “And I’m not snotty.”
“He might think you are because you’re a Limey,” Gitlin said.
“For God’s sake, what’s he got against the English?” I asked. “He’s a huge best-seller there.”
“He knows they like him. But that don’t mean he likes them.”
On that cheerful note, Gitlin hung up. I was to meet Robbins at noon, and we would lunch together, the three of us, at his hotel.
I had my own doubts about the meeting on the grounds that it represented an argument lost on my part. I have always had a real dislike of editorial discussions held outside my office. I had already found that things usually went much smoother and faster on my own turf, however