Dish, Not Dirt

Disclosure first: I spent 30 years in publishing, all of them in the period covered here, and I knew many, even most, of the people who appear--vividly and accurately--in these pages. I did not, however, know Michael Korda, Simon and Schuster’s editor in chief, aside from occasional sightings at big parties or across the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, where he held his power lunches (reportedly a baked potato drizzled with olive oil). Now I wish I had. “Another Life” is not only the most entertaining publishing memoir I’ve ever read, it’s the ultimate publishing lunch, alive with anecdotes, gossip and enough serious business to justify the fun. The only thing missing is the doomsday hand-wringing that usually preceded the check. None of that here. The glass is always half-full at the Korda table, and why not? He’s had a wonderful time, and he’s got the stories to prove it. You’ll want to linger over coffee.

His longtime boss at Simon and Schuster, Dick Snyder, was fond of saying it was better to be lucky than smart, and Korda was both. Born into a movie family of transplanted Hungarians (art director father, producer and director uncles--the subjects of his first memoir, “Charmed Lives”), he had an early familiarity with the difficult and the famous and an unabashed affection for rogues. When he arrived at Simon and Schuster in 1958, fresh out of Oxford and a few odd jobs, he had found the right place (he is still there, itself a kind of record in the musical chairs of publishing) and at certainly the right time.

The pokey, half-asleep world of book publishing, which had changed little since the 1920s, was about to start the roller-coaster ride of the next three decades: Private firms went public, then were taken over by conglomerates; bestsellers became blockbusters; a business once so small it could be accommodated on a single floor developed layers of management with perks, options, flow charts and outside consultants. In short, publishing companies whose “key decisions were made by the equivalent of spitting on one’s forefinger and holding it up to the wind” became big business, the poor stepchildren of the entertainment industry. Not all of this happened overnight, but most of it happened fast, and Korda was of that generation young enough, and ambitious and agile enough, to flourish as a player even as the game kept changing.

No house embraced this go-go era more eagerly than Simon and Schuster (in turn embraced by Gulf & Western, then Viacom). The numbers tell the story: Founded in 1924 with $8,000 to publish crossword puzzle books, Simon and Schuster was sold to Gulf & Western in 1975 for about $11 million but was worth more than $5 billion by the time Viacom took it over in 1994, largely through Snyder’s shrewd, empire-building acquisitions. As a company man who has known no other, Korda inevitably tends to see things through Simon and Schuster eyes (Jacqueline Susann “changed the course of popular fiction,” “the Snyder / Evans relationship ushered in a new era in book publishing” et cetera). But it’s a harmless myopia, and as a memoirist once again he is lucky, for if Simon and Schuster wasn’t quite the center of the publishing universe in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was certainly the center of attention. The hirings. The firings. The titles so inflated no one knew what they meant. The office politics (a publishing veteran once remarked, “we fight so hard because the stakes are so small”). The personal chef. The office affairs. Dick and Joni. Where would we have been without Simon and Schuster? For an industry that loves gossip but ironically generates so little, here, finally, was our own soap opera, with gruff moguls, sex and money. As one publisher said at the time, “Simon and Schuster is becoming a Simon and Schuster novel.”

Korda was there for all of this (and, presumably, much more), and if he doesn’t exactly tell all, he offers enough dish to make his book lively reading, a nicely barbed step removed from the usual corporate hagiography. Dish, however, is not dirt. This is a friendly, even generous, book, never mean-spirited and remarkably fair. He can show Snyder’s well-known tough, often brutal, style but also his energy and considerable charm. His thumbnail sketches of industry figures are discreet but still on the money, and his descriptions of the publishing process have the accuracy of someone who’s been around the block once or twice. He has enough smart things to say about editing, agents, sales conferences and the care and feeding of authors to make this required reading at the Radcliffe publishing course.

Still, nobody ever wrote a bestseller about editing (a subject as famously unsalable as Antarctica and Northern Ireland) and Korda, who has written a few, luckily keeps his eye firmly on the paying customers. “Another Life” may be on one level a popular history of the publishing business, but its readers will come for the stories, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Korda is, simply, a wonderful raconteur, with an almost Dickensian eye for physical detail. The cranky Ariel Durant wears her hair “in a kind of pageboy that looked as if she had done it herself at home with nail scissors.” Gulf & Western’s Charles Bluhdorn has teeth that “filled his mouth like bathroom tiles.” Former President Richard Nixon, who disconcertingly referred to himself in the third person, begins conversations with “When Nixon was president and leader of the free world.” Korda is good on Graham Greene, obsessed for years with an FBI file that turned out to have nothing in it; good on Tennessee Williams; Irving Lazar; Ronald Reagan (visibly desperate for the last cookie on the plate but too polite to ask); and even better on Nixon, whose eerie dinner party for some Chinese visitors is as fascinating as it is funny. And then there’s “Isn’t She Great?,” his New Yorker profile of Jackie Susann that is the centerpiece of the book and is soon, as they say, to be a major motion picture starring Bette Midler. This is irresistible stuff--vulgar (“Nobody puts Jacqueline Susann on hold!”), profane (when asked if she would meet a deadline, “She looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You bet your f------ ass,’ she said.”), oddly touching and hilarious. By the time you get to the Preston Sturges-like party for Susann’s “The Love Machine” at the American Bookseller’s Assn. convention, with drunk booksellers making paper airplanes out of promotional materials and bumping into flambe torches (“with the occasional smell of singed hair”) and publicists falling over into the cake--well, I thought I’d die.

The stories in “Another Life” are so much fun that for many they will obscure the larger story Korda has to tell--about an industry that got so big it lost its way--but no matter. Korda would rather entertain, and he prides himself, rightly, on going with the flow. If he regrets the sober new world publishing has become, he’s careful not to say so. But there’s no mistaking the rueful chill that sets in at the end of the book, as colleagues depart and people talk about “the end of an era.” And certainly he’s at his best describing the earlier years, before the money and the divorces and the number-crunching, when people still used typewriters and carbon paper, and lady agents knocked back two stiff ones before lunch and some department heads never made it back to the office at all. Better times? Hardly. Only a deluded sentimentalist would think so, not the editors who worked for peanuts, nor the authors whose sales were lost in inefficiency and fusty eccentricity. But funnier times, surely, filled with “characters” (see his priceless portrait of Fay Schuster as she accepts a marriage proposal intended for her daughter) and a sense, however grudging, that books were still at the center of popular culture. Korda may not miss all of that world--who could?-- but he brings the best of it affectionately back to life in this valentine of a book. As a seasoned pro, he has been scanning, I feel sure, this column for the sell punch line, so here it is: “Another Life” is catnip for insiders and a delight for everyone else.