Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [88]
George seemed to be running through his abilities in his mind, but then he gave a seraphic smile and beckoned Ryan closer to him. “My dear Connie,” he said pleasantly, “it’s very simple.” He spoke clearly and slowly, as one might to a child. “You see,” he said, “in certain circles I am known”—he paused dramatically—“as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”
It was the one thing I hadn’t considered.
Whether it was true or not, George had trumped Connie, who gave a forced laugh and crept off to get drunker as the evening wore on. I looked at George. He gave me a knowing wink, then stepped back into the crowd of friends and hangers-on, as splendid as Harun al-Rashid, leaving behind him a fragrant trail of cigar smoke and cologne.
You couldn’t help admiring a man like that, even if he had just sold you 25,000 copies of a book you didn’t want.
WHEN I told this story to someone at lunch the next day, she nodded gravely, as if to confirm that this was a well-known fact in British publishing circles. The London publishing world was (and still is) far smaller than ours, and people in it much more closely knit, “clubby” in a way that ours is not. That perhaps explains a certain bawdiness that is largely lacking in New York publishing circles, as well as numerous eccentricities of personal behavior, so beloved to the English mind.
It was impossible not to envy the British publishers. They seemed to be having a far better time than their American counterparts, and while they undoubtedly made less money, they often had more interesting or controversial lists, in those innocent days before the American houses bought up so much of the British book-publishing industry.
It was easy enough to understand why senior American publishers clung to their prerogative of making the London trip. In the various power struggles that had taken place at S&S since the death of Jack Goodman, this gradually became the jealously guarded privilege of Peter Schwed, who had risen from manager of the rights department to publisher, though in fact he was a busy and prolific editor, specializing at first in sports books.
Schwed, a wisecracking man, with a wide knowledge of sports and a good head for numbers, had more or less elbowed aside the somewhat more literary and less aggressive Henry Simon, not without some residue of bad feelings on both sides. Henry was a Columbia graduate and a scholar turned editor, while Schwed was a Princeton man (and vocally proud of the fact) who had worked at the Provident Loan Society (basically a genteel pawnbroker) before becoming a decorated artillery officer in World War Two and then joining S&S. Henry was gray-faced, melancholy, tall, rail-thin, and stooped, while Schwed was deeply tanned, assertive, short, stocky, a fiercely competitive athlete whose passion was tennis. Henry Simon was on his third marriage, while Schwed was outspoken about the happiness of his marriage. They were opposites in every possible way.
Schwed made his annual trip to London a kind of public event, in the nature of a royal progress, with an elaborate hour-by-hour, day-today itinerary, distributed in advance to everyone of note in the company. So far as it went, this was OK—one could ignore it or not. More difficult to ignore was the Dictabelt full of notes he mailed every day, which was typed up by his faithful secretary and circulated. These transcripts ran to many pages, from blow-by-blow accounts of Schwed’s tennis games to the menus of his dinners with authors and publishing luminaries. Since, in those days, British agents invariably used an American counterpart to sell their books in the United States, those of us who had remained at home were obliged to call the American agent for every book or book outline that Schwed mentioned. We then had to read and report on whatever it was with scrupulous attention because Schwed, who had a statistical