Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [99]
People who work in publishing houses, and by no means only editors, are always throwing off ideas, some of which get turned into books. One S&S employee’s dance lessons led him to suggest Arthur Murray’s book on how to dance that became a staple best-seller, year after year, just as Shimkin’s knowledge of bookkeeping led him to the discovery of J. K. Lasser, whom he persuaded to write an annual income-tax guide that has been a best-seller for many decades. Cerf turned a taste for corny jokes into a succession of hugely successful joke books (some of them published by S&S), while Alfred Knopf’s passion for good wine and food led him to the creation of countless books on the subjects and Dick Simon’s fondness for cards led him to publish book after book on card games, including Charles Goren’s best-selling bridge guides. The line between self-indulgence and commerce is nowhere thinner than in publishing. Fun made money.
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IN THE meantime, book publishers were missing the biggest change in American culture since the twenties. The age of rock and roll had begun, and the big party of the sixties was under way, with London as its swinging capital. Nobody, not even Bob Gottlieb, whose antennae for trendiness were reputed to be tuned so finely, seemed to notice what was going on across the Atlantic, nor, increasingly, even under our windows on Fifth Avenue. Teen culture was about to take over the world, while book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic continued to worry about “high culture” and to publish books aimed at the parents and grandparents of the people who were making news and having fun.
I was very slightly ahead of the game because I genuinely liked the music, which was anything but fashionable to admit in publishing circles in the early 1960s, where most people were busy circling the wagons to defend “traditional” culture (of which the book was thought to be a bulwark) against the onslaught of sex, drugs, and rock and roll led by crazed and presumably illiterate teenagers. The notion that they not only might be literate but might even buy books if we took the trouble to publish any that interested them had not yet occurred to anybody.
The thought that the new youth culture was going to change most of our lives in all sorts of unforeseen ways had not yet penetrated either. We were still living the great middle-class dream, unaware that the ground was already shifting beneath us.
OF COURSE, the future did not seem clear at that time, not to me nor to Dick. It never does. One thing, however, was clear enough to me: So long as major agents weren’t sending me books, I was going to find it hard to build up a personal list of authors important enough to make the company take me seriously—more seriously than as a hardworking book doctor and jack-of-all-trades. This clearly wasn’t going to happen by combing the fringes of the listings for agents in Literary Market Place or cultivating the Jacques Chambruns of the world.
The major agents (nearly all men) in those days were hard to reach and notoriously capricious. But a few women, themselves the survivors of countless battles on the publishing front of the war of the sexes, were more tolerant of newcomers, more adventurous, and themselves contemptuous of the older male agents. Some of them had come out of the tough world of major movie-studio story departments, such as Phyllis Jackson and Helen Strauss. Both of them were—no other phrase will do—“tough broads,” more than capable of holding their own with the movie moguls who had once been their bosses, let alone with easy prey like book editors and male literary agents. Jackson, in fact, when she had been a movie company “scout” in New York, had been the first person to bring Gone with the Wind to David Selznick’s attention—it was still in manuscript—and urge him to buy it. She