The Editor as Playboy - Review

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Adam Bellow

Mr. Bellow, executive editor-at-large for Doubleday, is writing a book in defense of nepotism.

Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, by Michael Korda (Random House, 530 pp., $26.95)

Few publishing memoirs deserve to be widely read, but Michael Korda's captivating account of his long and varied editorial career will reward those who never even glance at the spine of a book or skim an acknowledgements page.

Traditionally editors are anonymous figures, but Korda is exceptional on several counts. Other editors with literary aspirations have had to retire from publishing in order to pursue them. Such proletarian restrictions do not apply to Korda, who has not only been a hugely successful trade editor for over 40 years, but a bestselling author as well, publishing no fewer than ten books in a variety of genres. Korda is also exceptional in having spent his whole career at a single publisher, Simon & Schuster. This effective life-tenure position has provided a uniquely stable perch from which to observe the transformation of publishing during his lifetime.

On one level Korda's book provides a useful history of these changes and a thoughtful assessment of their impact. Well known to insiders, they include the advent of mass-market paperbacks, public ownership of publishing companies, the rise of professional management, the displacement of editors by sales and marketing executives, the decline of independent booksellers versus chains and superstores, the increasing importance of television as the engine of mass culture, and the dawn of "celebrity" publishing.

His new book is simply a reader's delight. Korda is a first-class raconteur with a keen eye for detail, wit drier than fine sherry, and a great deal of surplus intelligence. Though not a stylist, he writes effortless, transparent prose that is pleasantly informal and intimate. Delicious and gossipy, Another Life reminds me of nothing so much as a thick slice of halvah-a pressed brick of sweet, crumbly dough held together by a sprinkling of pistachios.

Korda has already chronicled his famous family in Charmed Lives, a memoir of his father and uncles-talented and ambitious Hungarian Jewish immigrants who dominated the British film industry in the years before and after World War II. Here he briefly describes his privileged upbringing in his parents' cosmopolitan circle. Family friends included Marc Chagall, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and Graham Greene, who introduced young "Miki" to martinis and the brothels of the Cote d'Azur.

Korda was schooled in Switzerland and studied history at Magdalen College, Oxford. He rode horses from an early age, enjoyed shooting and hunting, spoke fluent French and Russian, vacationed aboard his uncle's yacht at Cap d'Antibes, and hung around the sets of classic films like The Third Man and The Four Feathers. After a boyish jaunt to Budapest in 1956 to lend a hand in the Hungarian Revolution, he came to New York where he landed an entry-level job at Simon & Schuster.

S&S would later be built by CEO Richard E. Snyder-regarded by many as the Darth Vader of American publishing-into a $5 billion conglomerate. But in the days of Korda's editorial apprenticeship it was run like a family business by founding partners Richard Simon and Max Schuster. Korda's portrait of the old S&S, with its cast of Dickensian characters, recaptures an era of lost innocence in publishing.

The bulk of Another Life offers genial portraits of Korda's more notable colleagues and authors, intercut with scenes from his own rise to fame and fortune as an editor and writer. Korda's list is an editor's (or should I say publicist's?) dream: Will and Ariel Durant, Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace, S. J. Perelman, Larry McMurtry, Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins, Carlos Castaneda, Joan Crawford, Graham Greene, and Tennessee Williams. He has also worked with political figures, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Jackson. His portraits are amusing and affectionate, managing to give an impression of tact and restraint while slyly exposing his subjects to good-natured ridicule.

A generation is passing in American publishing and Korda is in many ways its leading representative. It is a generation that rose to unprecedented wealth and power on the postwar expansion of the mass market and the wave of corporatization that transformed publishing from an isolated backwater into a branch of the modern entertainment industry. Riding the crest of this wave, Korda and his colleagues (some of them anyway) lived out the Harold Robbins corporate-playboy fantasy, strutting around in red suspenders, talking tough and making million- dollar deals, taking chauffeured cars to fashionable expense-account lunches, and preying on female assistants.

Concurrent with these developments (though apparently less evident to Korda) is the weakening of moral and esthetic taste in publishing. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his book is the cultural history he recounts, wherein the revolution of the young that began in the 1950s against the constraints on frank speech and sexuality proceeded to break barrier after barrier until reticence and modesty were no longer thinkable. This ineluctable trajectory led Korda himself from freewheeling sex in the '50s and radical politics in the '60s to books by mafiosi and celebrity murderers in the '70s and '80s. While he might like to draw the line at (for example) Louis Farrakhan, he offers no principled objection to publishing a racist demagogue beyond that of personal taste. But in an age when publishers vie to prove how tasteless and unshockable they are, this resistance seems inadequate and comes about 30 years late.