His first endeavor at “discovering” resulted in a bestseller. Driving home alone one night from Fishers Island, Howard was listening to a radio sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Hutchins. The topic was sexual dysfunction within a marriage, and Howard was (of course) listening with a great deal of interest. And then it hit him: If the radio show is so popular, and if I’m even interested in it…
He fired off a letter to Dr. Hutchins and learned that he was only one of many editors around town who had had the same idea. When Dr. Hutchins and her agent said it was not so much a question of money but which publisher best comprehended the nature of her professional goals, Howard sat down and wrote the table of contents of the book he himself would want to read. And so, on the strength of a good advance, a great marketing plan from Harriet Wyatt and the outline of Sex: How to Get What You Want and Need (with the jacket line: Without Hurting Anyone, Including Yourself), Dr. Hutchins chose Gardiner & Grayson. Sex climbed onto the Times bestseller list and stayed there for thirty-four weeks.
Howard started to experience joy. One morning he literally tore a page out of the Times and bolted from the breakfast table. “What’s wrong?” Melissa asked, running after him to the front door. “The MacArthur Foundation winners!” Howard yelled, taking the stairs down because it was faster. What fun it was writing “discovery” letters! What elation to receive a letter that said, “You have no idea what your letter meant to me. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of expanding that short story into a novel now.” Howard was even thrilled when he got a phone call from Los Angeles that said, “Miss Margaret does not wish to write her memoirs at this time. However, she asked me to thank you for your kind letter, and to tell you that, should she decide to do so, she will certainly keep Gardiner & Grayson in mind.”
First novel! Literary biography! Collected short stories! Spy thriller! Victorian anthology! Investigative reporting! Editing Saturday and Sundays! Reading from seven until midnight! Gertrude breaks 100,000-copy mark! Sex sells for 600,000 reprint! Editorial meetings! Marketing meetings! Sales conferences! ABA! Howard was on cloud nine (exhausted, thin, bleary-eyed, but up there all the same).
And then the winds suddenly shifted at Gardiner & Grayson, marked by the arrival of a man named Mack Sperry in the business department, and the subsequent hiring of several MBAs. The old sails of power started to rend, and it was soon clear that Harrison, at sixty, was losing control of the ship. Memorandums started appearing:
7 OUT OF 10 BOOKS LOSE MONEY AT GARDINER & GRAYSON. PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENTS ARE BEING RUN ON EACH BOOK AND EACH EDITOR.
Two editors were fired and two editors resigned. They were not replaced.
ALL EDITORS ARE TO SUPPLY THE BUSINESS DEPARTMENT WITH DATA FOR THE FORECAST.
The MBAs flew into editorial waving yellow legal pads. “Data for the forecast, data for the forecast!” The editors looked up the answers to their questions in their files and in a few weeks a bound report was circulated. THE FORECAST, it said, emblazoned in bold display type on the cover. Inside were pages and pages of graphs plotting the intricate lives of factors “Y” and “X” in “000’s.” The editors looked at it and then at each other, wondering who (or what) on earth “Y” and “X” were. And then a bulletin was hand-delivered—DISREGARD FORECAST—and all the MBAs were fired and twice as many were hired and back into editorial they flew, rousing the now familiar cry, “Data for the forecast!”
PUBLISHING PROPOSALS APPROVED BY HARRISON DREIDEN WILL BE FORWARDED TO THE BUSINESS DEPARTMENT. No editor can make an offer until he receives written approval from the Business Department.
Seven out of ten projects approved by Harrison were killed in the business department. (“Rejected,” the business department said about Howard’s proposal to publish a biography of William Carlos Williams. “William Carlos is not famous enough.”)
EDITORS ARE TO REPORT TO CONFERENCE ROOM 2 FOR GUIDELINES ON ACQUISITIONS. ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY.
The guidelines issued by the business department were based on a simple premise: Gardiner & Grayson would become cost conscious and commercially aware. (In plain English, they wanted editors to do thinly disguised rip-offs of everything on the bestseller lists—for cheap.)
Layton Sinclair adapted beautifully to the new guidelines. When the business department expressed the urgent desire that someone “put together” an Iacocca pronto, Layton raced out of the gate. Now, the book the business department was referring to was a brilliantly conceived and executed business autobiography published by Bantam Books in 1985. The idea for the book had been “born” within Bantam, and they teamed the hero of Chrysler with a marvelous writer named William Novak, and so carefully orchestrated the book’s debut and afterlife that, to date, it was threatening to break the two-million hard-cover sales mark. Iacocca was precisely the kind of original, breakthrough publishing Howard longed to do.
So one can imagine Howard’s disgust when Layton—sensing a powerful ally for his career in Mack Sperry of the business department—claimed that, if promoted right, the illiterate manuscript of a man who had inherited a chain of motels could be the next Iacocca. “Layton,” Harrison said at the editorial meeting, “you are an editor, not an android. This, this, this—” “Lefty,” Layton said (referring to the title, taken from the author’s name of Lefty Lucerne). “Thing,” Harrison continued, “isn’t a book. Iacocca is a book, Layton. A good book. And a book is a body of work that reflects original human thought and experience. This,” he said, pushing the manuscript away from him, “is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen let in the doors of Gardiner & Grayson.”
At the next marketing meeting, members of the business department asked how Layton’s version of Iacocca was coming and, on the strength of Layton’s verbal description, approved it on the spot. “It’s for the readers of Iacocca and The Search for Excellence.” (The latter had been a business blockbluster of a different sort.) The business department was elated and told Layton to “make the jacket look like Iacocca, but use the colors of The Search for Excellence in the background.” Harrison slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Not only is it unreadable, but I hasten to remind you that Lefty Lucerne was once imprisoned on racketeering charges, a fact that he neglects to mention in this so-called memoir.” (A murmur from the MBAs that this sounded like a good promotion angle.)And then, when Layton added that the author’s company would guarantee to buy fifty thousand copies of the book and that Gardiner & Grayson didn’t have to pay an advance if they didn’t want to, talk turned to making Lefty the lead book on the fall list.
“Promote him!” Harriet Wyatt angrily exclaimed at the next marketing meeting. “The man is brain-dead!” It was then explained that the author was so pleased to be published that he was giving a hundred thousand dollars to Gardiner & Grayson to promote the book. “Wonderful,” Harriet said, “I’ll find the best cart and coffin money can buy and launch him at Forest Lawn. Mr. Sperry,” she then said, rising from her chair, “I will be fired before I make my people work on a vanity press project. You’ll have to buy an outside publicist.”
The matter of Lefty then raged all the way to the office of G & G’s chairman of the board. There it was decided that Harriet would not be fired but an outside agency would be hired; that the book in question would not bear the Gardiner & Grayson name but would be distributed by them under a new imprint called Sperry Books; and that Layton Sinclair would receive the title of executive editor of the imprint but would remain a part of the G & G editorial staff.
And so Layton Sinclair had been promoted and Melissa was furious with Howard and Howard was sick at what was happening at Gardiner & Grayson. Oh, they were still putting up a valiant fight—encouraging one another, conspiring like members of the underground—but it was exhausting. (“Look, gang, we’ve got to get that first novel of Patricia’s through,” Harrison recently said in a closed-door meeting in his