The money the book would make would be his justification to David Morton, and to his father he’d merely say that he had to live up to his word, though his father would feel Gerald had turned Davis & Dash into a cloaca. Gerald still needed something to pick up the fall list. Maybe with this and the movie of Peet Trawley’s first trilogy coming out he had the beginnings of a chance at squeaking by. Especially if he managed to stir up sales for his own book. He absolutely could not let David Morton and the stockholders know he had made such an egregious error on the Weston thing. He would publish the book and stand behind it.
“Gerald? Gerald, are you still there?” Jim Meyer asked.
“Certainly,” Gerald answered.
As difficult as it is for a writer to find a publisher—admittedly a daunting task—it is twice as difficult for a publisher to sort through the chaff, select the wheat, and profitably publish a worthy list.
—Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.
Fifty Years in Publishing
The only good author is a dead author.
—Patrick O’Connor
“He’s dead?” Pam Mantiss nearly yelled into the phone. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“I think the traditional definition is meant here,” Jim Meyer told her dryly. “Heart stoppage, lack of respiration, no measurable brain activity.” Spoken as a true lawyer, Pam thought.
“How can he be dead? He owes us a manuscript in less than three months.” Pam put her hand to her forehead. Peet Trawley dead. It was unimaginable. She’d been working with him for close to twenty years, and he’d been sick every day for all that time—or imagining he was. She’d just seen him. He’d looked awful, and said he couldn’t get out of his chair, but he always looked awful, and Pam had long suspected that he used the wheelchair more as a prop than a necessity. It was protection for him, a kind of exoskeleton. And he needed the protection, what with a voracious ex-wife constantly after him for money, a voracious current wife always after him for money, and a less-than-winsome collection of children and stepchildren from both marriages, all voracious and always after him for money.
“Jesus Christ, Jim. He was the only sure thing I had for the fall list.”
“Uh-huh. That and Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”
“Yeah, right.” It was an old publishing joke: that books about Lincoln sold; that books about dogs sold; and that books about doctors sold. Therefore, a guaranteed bestseller would be Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. The joke, of course, was such a title that would clearly go nowhere. Well, there might be no sure things, Pam thought, but with Peet’s track record and a movie coming out, his books were as close as it comes.
“How do you know he’s dead?” she demanded. Publishing was rife with gossip. Maybe this was just bullshit. Jim Meyer was only corporate counsel, a lawyer, not a book person.
“His attorney, the one handling probate, called. Peet died on Wednesday.”
“Probate already? My God, that was fast!” Well, knowing Edina, his wife, and the rest of Peet’s family, they’d be squabbling over the will before Peet was cold.
“Too bad about your sure thing,” Jim said, nastily.
Pam clutched at the receiver. God! Just because she didn’t want to sleep with him again, he took it personally. As if Pam didn’t know that there was no sure thing. And even though it sometimes drove her crazy, it gave her daily work the edginess she seemed to crave. Actually, when she thought about it, cravings were the major portion of her life: She’d craved booze in the seventies, then switched to sex and coke in the eighties, and had moved on to food in the nineties—until her weight gain and depression drove her to Prozac. No doubt about it, she thought ruefully, she was definitely a woman of her times.
She was also editor in chief at one of the most successful, yet still prestigious, publishing firms in New York—the world’s capital for publishers. And being the only woman who had achieved that position at Davis & Dash, she, better than anyone, knew there were no sure things in publishing. Too bad she needed one so badly now.
She went to the small refrigerator concealed in a cabinet. In it were bottles and bottles of Snapple, carefully lined up in rows. Another obsession. No one was allowed to touch her precious Snapple, though occasionally she offered some to a visiting author. She counted the bottles now and took out a raspberry iced tea, popping the top and downing a swig, though it was early. Here’s to you, Peet, she thought. And here’s to me, too.
Pam had gotten where she was because of her enormous ability, her former willingness to work long hours, her scary, edgy talent at picking winners, and the ballsiness she had in backing up her selections. It also didn’t hurt that she had what she thought of as a nice pair of tits, not to mention long legs. Those she had been willing to open for Gerald Ochs Davis when he had fallen between marriages—in the crack, as it were. Pam smiled at the vulgarity. She liked to be vulgar. And sexy. And edgy. But lately motherhood, Prozac, and Old Father Time were wearing off the edge. This news about Trawley might have, in the old days, given her a thrill of terror, an adrenaline high that would make the next steps fun. No more. She was tired. Holy shit, wasn’t there one goddamn thing she could count on?
Well, she could count on the editorial meeting that she was already ten minutes late for to be both overlong and unproductive. She’d have to listen to all the little editor girls complain about the Chad Weston book and hear Lou Crinelli, one of her younger, more macho editors—and already bucking for her job—give a forty-minute summary of a manuscript that she could read in half the time. Pam sighed. By now all of the editors were sitting around the table waiting for her.
“Listen, I have to go over a contract,” Jim said. “I just wanted you to know. Will you tell Gerald, or should I?”
Like he was the only one busy. Pam rolled her eyes. This was not good news to give GOD, especially along with the other news that his book’s opening sucked. “I’ll tell him,” she said. Christ. She wasn’t going to look forward to that.
Pam hung up her phone and moved to the window. Feets, get walking, she told herself, but she didn’t move. She sipped the Snapple moodily. If they started the editorial meeting without her, they’d only have to begin again, because she made the decisions. It was raining: a gray, thin drizzle that made all of Manhattan look like a bad French film. Pam bit her lower lip. What would she do without the Trawley book? How could she replace it? What else could generate that wave of revenue?
She thought, bitter for a moment, about all the money she had made for Peet. Twenty-four books in sixteen languages that had sold over fifty million copies. There was still the backlist, but if she lost new revenues, she lost part of her power base. Pam felt the cold window with the tips of her fingers and shivered.
Good old Peet! Despite his hypochondria and constant complaining, he had pumped a book out every nine months, and he had a million fans who would buy it in hardcover and three times that number who would buy it in paperback. And Peet had been Pam’s own discovery. In fact, it was because of Peet that Pam was where she was today.
Back in the Jurassic age, when Pam herself was a little