Another Life by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307808356
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

“I WANT the name of the girl who put me on hold,” Jackie screeched at me over the phone one day. “I want her fired! Nobody puts Jacqueline Susann on hold!”

There were tears at S&S whenever Jackie didn’t get what she wanted or was made to wait even for a moment. This was a new experience for most of the employees. Book publishing had always prided itself rather self-consciously on being a profession in which good manners prevailed. People in book publishing did not, as a rule, raise their voices or shout insults at each other. Above all, they didn’t shout at people who couldn’t shout back. It simply wasn’t done, not on either side of the Atlantic.

Most of the young women who worked in book publishing (“editorial assistants,” never secretaries) were college educated (often from one of the Seven Sisters) and drawn to publishing by either a genuine love of books or the desire to become an editor or a writer. Shamelessly exploited, they were paid miserable salaries and allowed in compensation to read all the unsolicited manuscripts—the famous slush pile. Many of them were the daughters of publishing executives or well-known authors, unaccustomed to hearing a voice raised at them in anger.

The Mansfields were deaf to these social niceties. So far as Jackie was concerned, the assistants were the help, and therefore she took her anger out on them, if only because they had the least chance of shielding themselves. It was not just being put on hold that made her angry: She didn’t like being told that someone was unavailable or in a meeting or out to lunch, and God help the assistant who didn’t know the answer to any question she might ask, even if it wasn’t her job to know or even her department. When angered, Jackie’s voice rose to the sound of a buzz saw at full throttle—worse yet, she often complained about the assistants to their bosses or even to the top management. She was always asking for people to be fired, and we found the simplest way of handling the problem was to tell her they had been and move them out of sight.

Nor did she always confine her anger to the underlings. According to Barbara Seaman, Jackie once called poor Bernie Geis at three in the morning to complain there weren’t enough books in the stores. When he pointed out the time to her, she replied: “You son of a bitch, I can’t sleep, so why should you?”

No doubt the Mansfields cannot be blamed for the erosion of manners in the book-publishing business, but they certainly heralded a new era in which the old-world charm of publishing, admittedly always a little self-conscious and bogus, gave way to the kind of behavior that had always characterized the movie business. Jackie Susann’s success unintentionally coincided with the decline and fall of the ancien régime and the rise of modern publishing, with its gargantuan mergers, its pretensions to big-business status, its impersonality, and its abrasiveness.

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