Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [82]
Tears welled up in Will’s eyes, and he grasped my hand. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Shortly afterward—I could not help suspecting that she had been listening at the door—Ariel arrived with a tray on which were three mugs of steaming herb tea and a plate of stale Fig Newtons. The tea was something special, she said—very good for the health. She and Will were great believers in it and drank several cups a day. It was without caffeine and absolutely unstimulating. The mugs were odd, heavy, gnarly things, cast by some amateur potter and glazed in a kind of jungle green. Was their daughter an amateur potter? I wondered. The taste of the tea was distinctly medicinal, with a bitter, unpleasant aftertaste. I drank mine quickly, anxious to get back out into the sunshine and tawdriness of Sunset Boulevard, as far away as possible from the Durants’ glum and Sisyphean struggle with world history. I made a mental note to myself to seek out the most trashy double feature I could find and spend the evening as unculturally as possible; unfortunately for me, Ariel’s tea had a pronounced laxative effect, and instead I spent most of the night in my hotel bathroom. I was still there the next morning, when Casey arrived from New York, and suffered off and on from severe stomach spasms all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.
Perhaps for that reason, we did not enjoy the second honeymoon that we had discussed somewhat wistfully in New York. We visited San Simeon, stopped to have a hamburger at Nepenthe in Big Sur, stayed the night in a hotel where it was possible to bathe in a warm natural spring. Despite all this, the romantic mood was lacking.
By the time we had reached San Francisco, we had decided to take what was in those days the inevitable step toward healing a marriage: to have a child.
It is hard now, almost thirty-seven years later, to remember that period before the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism when married couples who didn’t have children were looked upon with some combination of suspicion and pity and felt not to be really grown-up. Casey was ahead of the curve when it came to sex and feminism, but she too felt that a child would put everything right between us, as well as validating her adulthood in the eyes of her mother and grandmother. No doubt it would do the same to me, I thought, in the eyes of my father.
On the flight back, we discussed the future. I would cut down working every night and weekend, we would take vacations like civilized people, I would put S&S in proportion.…
It all made sense. Or would have, had I not been flying back to a series of events that was to change S&S—and ultimately the rest of the publishing industry—beyond recognition.
CHAPTER 11
“Big things from small acorns grow.” Truer words have never been written. In 1961, S&S was lurching along much as it had for several years, undisturbed except by the minor, everyday fracases and turf wars of office politics and the growing split between Leon Shimkin and Max Schuster. There is no law that says partners have to feel about each other like Damon and Pythias. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House were umbilically linked in friendship and sometimes took vacations together; Alfred and Blanche Knopf were married, if not happily then certainly successfully. No doubt it would have been nice had the two remaining owners of S&S followed that pattern, but it need not have been fatal that they did not. After all, even before Shimkin became an owner, Dick Simon and Max Schuster were beginning to drift apart. As young men they had been partners in the most exciting adventure of their lives, but whether they had ever really been friends is open to doubt.
I mention all this only to explain that S&S was by no means the simple, happy place about which old-timers were later to reminisce—no place ever is. There was a certain amount of jockeying for position among those who felt themselves qualified for higher office. Some