Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [84]
The best friend and college roommate of Rona Jaffe and instrumental in bringing The Best of Everything to S&S, Phyllis had a shrewd eye for popular fiction, great charm, a wicked sense of humor, a sharp intelligence, and a small but steady flame of ambition. The swan had, in fact, been sent to Phyllis by Aubrey Goodman, a first-time author whose hand she had been holding on behalf of Bob. Goodman’s book, The Golden Youth of Lee Prince, was a flagrantly autobiographical novel about the New York jeunesse dorée that Phyllis had brought to Bob’s attention. At Phyllis’s urging, the book had been given a dust jacket made of metallic gold foil, an innovation that failed in the stores, since all the jackets wrinkled and tore in shipment. Nevertheless, Goodman wanted to express his gratitude, and since an ice swan was mentioned in the book, he sent one to Phyllis.
He could not have imagined that the swan would get Phyllis fired, nor could she, but it did. The problem, as it transpired, was not so much the swan itself as the fact that Phyllis and Ephraim London, Ray’s favorite son-in-law, had been having a long, passionate affair—one that was to go on, in one form or another, and with many ups and downs, until his death. No doubt Ray, who could hardly have been unaware of it—who knows about Max?—had been looking for years for an opportunity to punish Phyllis, and the swan inadvertently provided it, or at least a pretext for firing her.
The immediate consequences of Phyllis’s firing caused no more than a temporary inconvenience to Bob, as well as a sense of dismay at the departure of an old friend, but it was interpreted by many as a sign of Max’s weakness. After all, everybody knew that it had been Ray who had asked for Phyllis’s head, and Max who had meekly acquiesced.
AS IT happened, it was just the kind of misfortune that was calculated to make Leon Shimkin’s day, since he was looking for signs that Max was incompetent. Though he did not harbor any strong sympathy toward female editorial assistants in general or Phyllis in particular, Shimkin felt that the matter had been badly handled. Shimkin himself was—ostentatiously—a humble family man, whose idea of an exciting time was counting the mail-order coupons as they came in and whose only known diversion from the work of increasing his fortune was a couple of martinis at lunch. Caviar and iced swans were not his kind of thing, nor beautiful editorial assistants; still, he had a sense for how to handle personnel problems, and by his standards Max had failed. Shimkin believed in doing this kind of thing quietly, above all.
Several people who had seen Shimkin at meetings or at the little tête-à-tête lunches at the Rainbow Room he favored reported that he had expressed sadness at the way things were going. His dear old friend Max was slipping, he would say, shaking his head solemnly, his opaque, dark eyes tearing as he sipped his martini. Max wasn’t the man he used to be, anybody could see that.
What S&S needed was a strong manager, somebody who could pull the place together, the way he himself had done when he became business manager, a Young Turk, somebody who knew how to keep his eye on the ball.
Shimkin had not yet chosen his man; he preferred to bide his time and let the right man fight his way to the top. Shimkin made no secret of the fact that he didn’t believe in giving anybody a job—no, no, his way was to give a man an opportunity, to see how he overcame obstacles, to find out just what kind of stuff he was