Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [76]
Wallace had come to S&S with a novel that nobody else wanted to publish called The Chapman Report, about a Kinsey-type sex survey and the effect it has on a comfortable suburban community, which aroused Schwed’s immediate enthusiasm. There was a lot of sex in the book—it was about sex, after all—but most of it was more informational than titillating. Still, as anaphrodisiac as Wallace’s novels may have been to me, The Chapman Report stirred up a good deal of controversy, much of it within S&S itself. Unlike the books of Harold Robbins, The Chapman Report bore the S&S colophon—a small reproduction of Jean-François Millet’s The Sower—on its spine and was indubitably “ours.” S&S had always had something of a reputation for publishing novels that represented, or perhaps predicted, social change, particularly the kind that couldn’t be talked about. Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement had brought home the survival of old-fashioned anti-Semitism in postwar America, just as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was the first to explore the corporate commuter of the early 1950s as a new species of American.
Publishing a novel that more or less prefigured the sexual revolution was something else again, of course, and there was a lot of opposition to doing it, despite Schwed’s urging. I found this hard to understand; the real problem with The Chapman Report was that it was boring, not that it was pornographic. Still, the mere mention of the subject was enough to give Max Schuster cold feet, and the manuscript had to be submitted to his son-in-law, Ephraim London, S&S’s house counsel, for a legal reading.
Fortunately, London was a difficult man to shock. A crusading First Amendment lawyer, London had been battling censorship successfully for years, and there was nothing in The Chapman Report that was likely to surprise him. London swiftly gave his approval, though not with any particular enthusiasm. Since Ray Schuster was a one-woman fan club for her sons-in-law, there was no way Max could oppose the book. Max, however, was an expert at Nelson’s trick and turned a blind eye to The Chapman Report, simply pretending that it didn’t exist.
The Chapman Report swiftly rose up the best-seller list, establishing Wallace as a new superstar, comparable to Robbins and at least as productive. Unlike Robbins, Wallace seemed to live only to write. When he wasn’t writing a book, he was writing endless, single-spaced letters that soon filled my small office. From time to time, they had to be gathered up, carefully packed, and sent to some university in Texas or Wisconsin. There was grumbling about the amount of work that was involved in keeping track of all this paperwork, most of which, in the normal course of events, would have been disposed of or lost.
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I HAD managed to avoid going to Cannes to work with Robbins, but there was no way I could wheedle my way out of going to California to see Wallace. Besides, having grown up in Beverly Hills from 1941 to 1943, I had a soft spot for L.A. and was not altogether unhappy to be going there at the expense of S&S. Unlike Robbins, Wallace didn’t show any signs of wanting to take over my life, so I booked myself into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where as a child I had once lived in one of the bungalows, and arranged to have Casey meet me there after I’d finished my business so we could take a leisurely drive up the coast to San Francisco.
At the time, a visit to L.A. was almost unimaginably rare among book publishers. Publishers traveled to London frequently, in pursuit of books or to sell their own wares, or to southern Florida or the Caribbean islands for sales conferences,