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Authors: Michael Korda
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authors crazy, such as “Surely the Treaty of Utrecht was earlier than this?” or “Are you certain Wellington was a Field-Marshal at this point of his life?”)
Right from the beginning, I felt that Henry was interested in only the kind of small details that somebody else could have fixed (though not me), while I was more concerned with the big picture—that is, whether the book worked or whether it needed massive cutting, could use a better title, or contained characters whose motives and actions made no sense. In short, it was as if our roles were reversed, perhaps not the best way to start out as an assistant.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings. I spelled and punctuated badly in three languages, and it had never made any difference to me or anybody else. At Oxford, the dons cared more about the originality of the student’s ideas and his grasp of the fundamentals of a subject than about spelling—indeed, in England, a certain aristocratic contempt for the rules of grammar and an idiosyncratic approach to spelling (the more daring, the better) were marks of culture.
Perhaps sensing right from the beginning that I was more eager to find out everything I could about Simon and Schuster than to spend the day penciling in commas or changing semicolons to colons, Henry had found for me a small, windowless cubicle with a desk that faced a blank wall, so that my back was turned to the hallway. Here I sat reading through the endless piles of manuscripts that had been submitted to him and occasionally editing the manuscripts of those of his authors whom he did not feel obliged to edit himself. It was not so very different from my work at CBS, except that I was no longer a freelancer. Modest my job might be, but I was an employee at last! It did not escape my attention, however, that Henry was anxious to keep me separated from the other members of the editorial department, or that his relationship with them was touchy and marked by mutual suspicion.
A S IT happened, I had stumbled into my job at a particularly interesting time for S&S and for the book-publishing industry. S&S was a hotbed of thwarted ambitions and intrigue, much of it swirling around Henry Simon. To me, it appeared that Henry was a powerful executive, with his corner office and his list of important authors, but the truth was that he was surrounded by enemies and hanging on by his fingernails. S&S had gone through several years of upheavals, all of which could be traced back to Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster’s decision to sell their company to Marshall Field III in 1944. After Field’s untimely death, they managed to persuade his widow to sell it back to them. She agreed, on the condition that they admit Leon Shimkin as a full partner.
This was the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent. Shimkin had been close to Field and also owned Pocket Books, which gave him a certain leverage. Without Shimkin’s support, his connection to the Fields, and his access to capital, Simon and Schuster would have been unable to buy back their company; with it, they were beholden to a man who had littlein common with the scholarly Schuster or the ebullient, risk-loving Simon.
It was not a partnership made in heaven. While Max Schuster retreated to his office to plan further volumes of philosophy and of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization , Dick Simon chafed at having to deal with the cautious and often nay-saying Shimkin. Simon was a handsome, chain-smoking, hard-drinking man with an eye for a pretty woman and a sense of fun and wit that made him a vast number of friends, most of them brilliantly talented. He played tennis with a terrifying will to win, turned his interest in photography into a multimillion-dollar business, had a passion for music that made him such friends as George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and helped establish one of his daughters as an opera singer and another as a pop superstar. His energy level was such that
Right from the beginning, I felt that Henry was interested in only the kind of small details that somebody else could have fixed (though not me), while I was more concerned with the big picture—that is, whether the book worked or whether it needed massive cutting, could use a better title, or contained characters whose motives and actions made no sense. In short, it was as if our roles were reversed, perhaps not the best way to start out as an assistant.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings. I spelled and punctuated badly in three languages, and it had never made any difference to me or anybody else. At Oxford, the dons cared more about the originality of the student’s ideas and his grasp of the fundamentals of a subject than about spelling—indeed, in England, a certain aristocratic contempt for the rules of grammar and an idiosyncratic approach to spelling (the more daring, the better) were marks of culture.
Perhaps sensing right from the beginning that I was more eager to find out everything I could about Simon and Schuster than to spend the day penciling in commas or changing semicolons to colons, Henry had found for me a small, windowless cubicle with a desk that faced a blank wall, so that my back was turned to the hallway. Here I sat reading through the endless piles of manuscripts that had been submitted to him and occasionally editing the manuscripts of those of his authors whom he did not feel obliged to edit himself. It was not so very different from my work at CBS, except that I was no longer a freelancer. Modest my job might be, but I was an employee at last! It did not escape my attention, however, that Henry was anxious to keep me separated from the other members of the editorial department, or that his relationship with them was touchy and marked by mutual suspicion.
A S IT happened, I had stumbled into my job at a particularly interesting time for S&S and for the book-publishing industry. S&S was a hotbed of thwarted ambitions and intrigue, much of it swirling around Henry Simon. To me, it appeared that Henry was a powerful executive, with his corner office and his list of important authors, but the truth was that he was surrounded by enemies and hanging on by his fingernails. S&S had gone through several years of upheavals, all of which could be traced back to Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster’s decision to sell their company to Marshall Field III in 1944. After Field’s untimely death, they managed to persuade his widow to sell it back to them. She agreed, on the condition that they admit Leon Shimkin as a full partner.
This was the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent. Shimkin had been close to Field and also owned Pocket Books, which gave him a certain leverage. Without Shimkin’s support, his connection to the Fields, and his access to capital, Simon and Schuster would have been unable to buy back their company; with it, they were beholden to a man who had littlein common with the scholarly Schuster or the ebullient, risk-loving Simon.
It was not a partnership made in heaven. While Max Schuster retreated to his office to plan further volumes of philosophy and of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization , Dick Simon chafed at having to deal with the cautious and often nay-saying Shimkin. Simon was a handsome, chain-smoking, hard-drinking man with an eye for a pretty woman and a sense of fun and wit that made him a vast number of friends, most of them brilliantly talented. He played tennis with a terrifying will to win, turned his interest in photography into a multimillion-dollar business, had a passion for music that made him such friends as George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and helped establish one of his daughters as an opera singer and another as a pop superstar. His energy level was such that
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