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By Root 214 0

ées or frites, and so on, of which the Fleur de Lis on the Upper West Side was typical. Here two could spend a long evening, with a carafe of wine, for under ten dollars. For grand occasions there was Chambord, on Third Avenue, with its trolley of hors d’oeuvres, its soufflés, and its chocolate truffles to take as you left. Here you could spend forty dollars for dinner for two with a decent claret. When Chambord disappeared to make way for what would become the Random House Building, Roger Chauveron, the owner, opened a place around the corner in his own name, which lasted a few years, until it, too, was displaced, by the new Citicorp Building. One by one, Manhattan’s other high-style so-called Continental restaurants followed Chauveron into oblivion, including the very chic Colony. It was there one night that I witnessed an old woman in blue sneakers, who had been canvassing the other diners for Richard Nixon earlier in the evening, pass out and apparently die at her table. Whereupon four waiters swiftly appeared, each lifting a leg of her chair tilted slightly back so that she would not slide off, and carried her out of sight on this improvised palanquin, while the surviving patrons, having glanced at this memento mori, returned to their pheasants and quenelles de brochet. Eventually, even the great Le Pavillon, and finally its offspring, La Côte Basque, gave up, as a wave of culinary fads, led by la nouvelle cuisine, supplanted these monuments to Escoffier and Monsieur Point.

The business of book publishing is done mainly in restaurants, at lunch and occasionally at dinner. Staff meetings are held, calls are made, and paperwork is shuffled in the office. Lunch and dinner reservations are made there, but the real work is performed with knife and fork. It was, for example, over lunch in 1925 at “21,” then an elegant speakeasy on East Fifty-second Street in New York, and still a high-testosterone hangout for burnished Wall Street ninjas, male and female, that Bennett Cerf, a young vice president at the firm of Liveright and Company, offered to buy from the brilliant but wildly improvident Horace Liveright the Modern Library, which provided the stability on which the company and its staff depended. Bennett had bought his vice presidency with an investment of twenty-five thousand dollars in the chaotic firm, and now, having learned the business, wanted his own company. Liveright was desperate to repay money he had borrowed from his father-in-law, whose daughter he wanted to divorce. The deal was made over lunch, and Random House was launched, with Bennett and his friend Donald Klopfer as partners and the Modern Library as its cash cow.

PINOCCHIO AT “21”

One evening in the 1980s at “21,” a fellow Random House editor and I were awaiting Roy Cohn, a regular at that place, who was dying of AIDS and wanted to publish his memoirs while he still had time. Like so many others, I had dreaded and despised Cohn for his cruel red-baiting as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel. Later, when I got to know him, I found myself surprisingly at ease with him. Roy, I discovered, was born without a conscience, a Shakespearean birth defect that he shared with Edmund and Iago, for whose frailty S. T. Coleridge invented the exquisite term “motiveless malignity.” Roy believed in nothing and had no concept of truth. His condition may explain but hardly excuses his atrocious behavior, or redeems the harm he did to his country and the countless people he had gratuitously hurt as McCarthy’s chief counsel. I was fascinated by him as a moral grotesque like Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, the fictional twin of Karl Rove. After a lifetime in the book business, I tend to see people as fictional characters, as Humpty Dumpty, Dr. Casaubon, Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab: a professional deformation. For me, Roy exemplified star-quality wickedness. It was Norman Mailer, Roy’s Provincetown neighbor, who introduced me to him. I believe that Norman saw in Roy possibilities like those he had seen in Gary Gilmore, the heartless killer who with a slight moral adjustment might have