Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [77]
The age of movie tie-ins and TV miniseries had not yet arrived; in New York and Boston, publishers still regarded “the entertainment business” as the enemy, luring prospective customers away from the healthy pastime of reading books into the unthinking illiteracy of moviegoing and television watching. The notion that some connection might profitably exist between book and movie, or that television might be used to sell books, had not occurred to anybody, let alone the possibility that book publishing itself would one day become an integral part of the entertainment business, with many of the major publishing houses actually owned by movie companies.
In a fairly sluggish and suspicious way, the major studios competed to buy the movie rights to best-selling novels. They maintained “scouts” and “spies” in New York to tell them about the latest hot books, but hardly anybody in the movie business had any direct dealings with book people. It was all done through shadowy go-betweens, as if the movie and television people were afraid of rejection at the hands of the Brahmins of East Coast high culture, while book publishers and editors were aghast at the thought of being contaminated by the vulgarity and crass commercialism of the movie business. There was, in short, no good reason for book people to journey all the way across the country to see with their own eyes something they already despised, and even less reason for movie people, when visiting New York, to cultivate those who despised them.
IRVING WALLACE was a short, stocky fellow, then in his mid-fifties, with a massive leonine head of graying hair and small, rather pudgy hands. Wallace was never without a pipe, and everywhere in his house there were racks of them to hand. He and his wife, Sylvia, showed me around their home as if I were proposing to buy it—a curious custom of Los Angeles—and I was able to admire the full-size and fully stocked soda fountain they had built for their two children, complete with large glass bowls filled with miniature candy bars.
With even greater pride, Wallace led me to a small separate building in which he had his office. Air-conditioned, as silent as Proust’s cork-lined study, equipped with every modern device from dictating machines to electric typewriters, Wallace’s writing room had the look of a corporate headquarters, fluorescent lit and sleekly decorated in pale colors and blond wood, with a staff of eager, attractive secretaries. Around the walls were smooth metal filing cabinets full of research.
Through a heavy door, like that of a bank, was a kind of vault, arranged as a library, with one copy of every edition of Wallace’s books, in every imaginable language: Urdu, Finnish, even pirated English-language editions printed illegally in Taiwan. The shelves and cupboards were all handmade by old-world master craftsmen out of rare woods. It looked rather like the cigar humidor at Dunhill, on Fifth Avenue, but lacked the deep, rich aroma of Havanas. As someone with an ambition to write myself, I felt a stab of envy at this floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall display. This, I felt, was fulfillment of a kind. Wallace seemed to feel it, too. He stood, slightly humble and bowed, his hands in a prayerful position, as if before a shrine. A silence fell over us, except for the faint hum of the air-conditioning system and the hiss of whatever system kept the place humidified. Finally, in a soft voice, Wallace said, “It’s bombproof.” Well, it made sense, he said, between puffs on his pipe. This was his life’s work. His scripts were here, too, in fact everything he’d ever written, even his term papers from high school. There was no way that he could risk having all this destroyed. The vault was guaranteed by the builders to survive anything short of a direct nuclear hit.
I nodded dumbly. The notion