Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [93]
There was a certain tension in the air between the two men. Everybody else in the room was silent. Then the meeting resumed at a much faster pace. Schwed’s only ambition now was to get us all out of his office. Snyder kept his mouth shut during the rest of the meeting, merely scribbling an occasional note from time to time on his piece of paper.
At the end of the meeting, Snyder left before anyone could talk to him, creating—as he no doubt intended—the impression that a new power had arrived on the scene. Schwed may have been tempted to complain about being second-guessed by a young man he didn’t even know, but since he was very quiet about the results, it was possible to guess that somebody—probably Shimkin—had told him this was the way it was going to be from now on, like it or lump it, though knowing Shimkin, he was perfectly capable of wrapping up the message in mumbled flatteries and promises to control young Snyder, so that Schwed may have regained the twenty-eighth floor more cheerfully than was warranted. But the writing was on the wall for all to see, and shortly afterward Snyder took the first of the many jobs and titles he was to hold until he eventually became CEO of a much larger S&S.
Soon his initials were cc’d on almost every significant memo, and people were straining their eyes to interpret his almost unreadable handwriting, a powerful, hurried, energetic scrawl that was usually demanding more information right away.
I had not had a real opportunity to meet this wunderkind. For the moment, he was busy elsewhere and seldom appeared in the editorial department. (His office was still “downstairs.”) From the area of sales and marketing there came rumors of firings, reorganizations, coups, and new alliances, like news from a Renaissance Italian city-state. These departments, which were hard for an outsider to separate in the first place, had always been run like feudal fiefdoms, and like most publishing houses we had one person, Tony Schulte, whose job it was to act as the liaison between all these vital services and the editors, who were either too busy or too lost in their own precious little worlds to involve themselves in the grubby business of actually selling the books.
Schulte was forceful, clean-cut, cheerful, handsome, and athletic. Reputedly heir to a cigar-store fortune, he was one of those rare people who actually understand the whole publishing process, not just one small part of it, and was as much at home perched on Bob’s sofa in the evenings, talking about books, as he was downstairs, schmoozing with the guys in sales and marketing.
Snyder, as I was soon to discover, also had the ability to fit in anywhere he wanted to, together with a truly remarkable gift for not getting stuck in any one department or at any one level. His promotions and moves from one department to another took place at such a dizzying rate that it was hard to keep up with him, with the result that his business cards were always out of date. He seemed to soak up useful knowledge like a sponge, according to Schulte, who was at once admiring and dismayed, perhaps because he already saw in Snyder a potential and formidable rival.
The truth was, however, that they were oil and water. Schulte was laid-back, calm, and good-humored, a kind of New York Jewish patrician who did not as a rule take the trials and tribulations of publishing too seriously. Snyder was fiercely concentrated and totally focused on what he was doing, with the kind of steely determination that comes precisely from not having anything to fall back on. He could be very funny and enjoyed a joke as much as the next person, but it could not be said that he was calm or good-humored by nature. On the contrary, he was like a tightly wound spring, and to those who knew him he seemed often to be holding himself back from an explosion of temper by sheer willpower. One guessed, too, that his