Nothing was wrong with him, he thought, except that he couldn’t bring himself to be the kind of editor Layton Sinclair was. Because, you see, after his marriage, Howard had truly become a good editor. No one, after 1980, after Gertrude Bristol, had ever called Howard Prince Charming again.
Gertrude Bristol had been writing bestselling romance suspense novels for thirty-five years. Her editor at G & G retired and Harrison, at an editorial meeting, queried the group as to who was interested in taking Gertrude on. To be more specific, Harrison was looking directly at his new young woman protégé, sending the kind of signal that Howard used to get from him (and foolishly ignore): Trust me, this is an author you should take on.
Howard—who had been floundering in terms of acquisitions—found himself cutting Harrison’s protégé off at the pass. “Harrison—I’d like to work with Gertrude Bristol.” The whole group had stared at him in amazement. Howard? Romance suspense? It’s-Not-as-Good-as-Cheever-So-It’s-Not-Good-Enough-for-Me Howard? “Uh,” Howard had added, “that is, if she wants to work with me.”
And so Howard had taken home ten of Gertrude’s books to read (“Hallelujah,” Melissa had said, picking one up, “someone I’ve finally heard of”) and received the first of many pleasant surprises to come. Since Howard had never read a romance suspense novel, he had always assumed they must be…well, not serious and certainly not literary. But Gertrude was both.
He flew up to Boston to meet the great lady and did so with great humility. Gertrude needed his editorial expertise about as much as Jessica Tandy needed acting lessons, and Howard was not foolish enough to make any promises to her other than that he would do his best to make sure she continued to be happily published by Gardiner & Grayson. Gertrude seemed rather bored by all this and was much more interested in whether Howard could stay over another day and speak to one of her classes at Radcliffe.
Howard stayed over another day and the single most important event of his career occurred—he listened to Gertrude’s fifteen-minute introduction to her class, in which she explained what editors do. “People working in the editorial process of book publishing today,” she said, “generally fall into two camps—the agents, who ‘discover’ new talent, and the editors, who introduce that talent in the best light possible.” But, she went on to say, the truly great editors would go mad if they did not, on occasion, make personal discoveries of their own. “How do they do this? Every newspaper they read, every magazine, every film they see, every person they meet, every short story, every poem, letter, billboard they read—everything an editor experiences in his or her life is unconsciously or quite consciously judged in terms of a possible book. Isn’t that right, Howard?”
Howard, pale, nodded.
“Editors looking for fiction attend writers’ conferences, read literary magazines, journals and short-story collections—or, if they are in the upper ranks of editorial, they make sure someone on their staff is. Editors looking for nonfiction habitually shoot off telegrams and letters in response to news stories. Editors often choose a particular city or part of the country to concentrate on, making themselves known there, getting to know the literary community. Some editors concentrate on the academic community, or the religious community, or the business community, professional sports or the recording industry…”
(Howard’s head was spinning.)
“It is the great editor’s job,” Gertrude had finished with, “to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture, and to be on the cutting edge of discovering our past. It is an impossible job, but, as they say, someone’s got to do it, and with us today is someone who does. Class, Mr. Howard Stewart of Gardiner & Grayson.”
Oh, God. Howard had got up and fumbled and stumbled through a recitation of anything and everything he could remember Harrison having ever said to him. Gertrude’s little talk had completely thrown him; he had never done any of the things that she had talked about. Not one.
He returned to NewYork as Gertrude Bristol’s editor. And something clicked into place as he reported his trip to Harrison. A connection was made—as he stood there, watching Harrison’s smile grow wider and wider—between his old scorn for certain kinds of books and the fact that he had never read those kinds of books to find out what they were like in the first place. And so he started reading differently. And at lunch, with agents, he stopped saying he was looking for F. Scott Fitzgerald and started saying that he was looking for a new talent, someone with promise, someone whom he could work with, build with, over a period of years.
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”
