At Random, page 25
A good editor, I think, like a good author, has to be born with some of the necessary talents, like a good memory and some imagination. But he also needs to have acquired a fairly broad range of interests, a working knowledge of the English language and a good supply of general information—the more the better—so that he can understand what an author is trying to do and be of help to him in doing it. An editor has to have read widely enough to be able to recognize and appreciate good writing when he sees it, but he must also have some sense of what kinds of books the public will buy, since no publishing house can survive if there is no demand for its books, no matter how well written.
One of an editor’s most important functions is to try to keep in balance the interests of the authors he works with and the interests of the house he works for. These are often identical, but not always, and when they are not, the editor, caught in the middle, has to employ considerable diplomacy toward both sides, as well as patience—another indispensable quality.
An editor has to be able to get along with authors—which is not always easy. When the relationship is a good one, an editor can be extremely helpful by serving as a kind of sounding board for an author’s ideas and intentions, and by making suggestions aimed at sharpening and clarifying what the author wants to say. Also, the editor can be of value in pointing out parts of a manuscript that should be cut out because they are repetitive, or dull, or unnecessary.
Authors differ greatly in the amount of help they need or want or will accept from editors. Since some of them refuse to accept even good suggestions, there has been many a book published that the author wouldn’t allow to be edited, even though it badly needed it. What infuriates me is to read in a review: “Why wasn’t the publisher doing his job?” Usually the editor has shed blood trying to get the author to make changes, but the author has refused. When a book is sold to the movies or to television, it’s understood that they can do anything they want with it, but in publishing, the author has the last word. The only alternative to letting him have his way is to say, “I won’t publish it at all.”
If an editor offers too little help or doesn’t show enough interest in an author and his work, or if he goes too far in trying to impose his own opinions, his relations with that author are in for trouble. Of course, any good author will tell an editor where to draw the line. Sometimes he’ll demand another editor.
To my mind, the editors that go too far are usually frustrated writers themselves, and their temptation is always to try to rewrite books because they think they can do it better. We have to watch all of them on that. Saxe Commins, fine editor that he was, was a frustrated writer. When he himself wrote, it was purple prose, the kind of thing he would have laughed at if somebody brought it in to him. He infuriated John O’Hara with editoral suggestions to the point that O’Hara finally refused to work with him any longer. On the other hand, with James Michener, who came to Random House because of Saxe, the trouble was of a different kind. Jim brought in a manuscript that he regarded as an unfinished first draft and that he wanted to discuss with his editor before giving it the final polishing. When he learned that Saxe had copyedited the manuscript and sent it to the printer, he asked for a different editor. Though Saxe turned out not to be the right editor for O’Hara and Michener, he was adored and counted on by such literary greats as Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner, and—beginning with their first books—he encouraged and edited Budd Schulberg and Irwin Shaw.
Actually, a publisher or an editor can be most helpful to a young author who will listen. For instance, an unknown named Mac Hyman once brought in a manuscript to us that had been turned down by three or four other publishers. It concerned the Korean War. I took it home and read it, and I had to put it down three or four times, just choking with laughter. The book was terribly funny but much too long. Of course we grabbed it anyway, and we persuaded the author to throw out the entire last half, and I thought of a good name for it: No Time for Sergeants. It was one of our greatest successes. What a fortune young Mac Hyman made on it! First of all, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, then number one on the best-seller list for months on end; next it became a most successful play and then a long-running television series and a great movie.
Since we had done so well with No Time for Sergeants, we were on the lookout for another service comedy book, and in 1955 a group of short stories about navy public-relations officers was submitted to us. I read the manuscript on a plane going out to Cleveland. I called the office from the airport and said, “This is hilarious stuff. Get this book signed up right away. I want to talk to the author as soon as I get back.” The author was William Brinkley, on the staff of Life and a good writer. He immediately saw the validity of our argument that books of short stories usually don’t sell as well as novels, so with our help he took the stories and strung them together with an admittedly flimsy plot—like putting pearls on a string. I named this book too—Don’t Go Near the Water—and again we had a number-one book, another Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
If No Time for Sergeants and Don’t Go Near the Water had been the authors’ second books after successful first ones—and we had tried to tell them how to structure their books—they probably would have stamped furiously out of the office. But they were young, and eager to do what we suggested.
We have a rule at Random House that our senior editors can accept any book they want without question, unless an enormous advance against royalties is involved, in which case we have a discussion about it. There are two ways of doing this at Random House. One is regular meetings, committees, which I loath and detest and won’t go to.
The other method is, when I want a meeting, I call together the people I need, and we talk—which is the way I think a publishing business should be run. For example, in 1969 Diarmuid Russell, who was Eudora Welty’s agent, offered us an opportunity to bid against two other publishers for a contract for her next four books. A rather large advance was required, but since this was an auction, no one knew exactly how large. So Donald and two editors read the manuscript of Losing Battles, the first book submitted, and I sat down with them and thrashed out the problem. There was no question about our eagerness to get Eudora on our list, but we had to decide on an advance guarantee we thought was big enough to top our competitors but not too big to earn back. In short order, we came up with the right answer, and the following year we published Losing Battles, which received rave reviews and sold beautifully.
Another important editorial function, of course, is adding new authors to a publisher’s list. This can be done in a variety of ways, but an editor who has a large number of friends in literary and academic circles who like and respect him obviously has a far better chance than one who, even though he might have the other necessary talents, doesn’t get around much. Some highly successful editors devote most of their time to bringing in new manuscripts that are then worked on by others.
There’s a big distinction between a working editor and the editor who goes out combing the sticks looking for properties and wining and dining authors and agents, though some are able to do both. The editor who dreams up “ideas” for new books is often more spectacular and might end up making much more money than the one who slaves over manuscripts and does the dirty work of publishing. He’s like the poor fellow who’s shoveling coal into the furnaces in the hold of the ship while the captain is sitting on the top deck making up to the prettiest girl on board. It’s part of the mechanism of life today that few people have the time or the inclination to do painstaking work—like the man who used to make beautiful furniture by hand, the man who took pride in his craftsmanship.
From left: editors Jess Stein, Robert Linscott, Saxe Commins, Harry Maule, David McDowell (39.1 illustration credit)
Back during the thirties Donald and I and, later, Bob Haas had brought in the new authors, and though the company was getting bigger every year, most of the editorial work could still be handled by Saxe Commins and Belle Becker, who had come to Random House in 1930 as a receptionist. With some help from Saxe and her own natural talent, Belle taught herself to be an editor; she became an extremely skillful one and was helpful to many writers. When Quentin Reynolds and Sam Adams came to us, Belle became editor and good friend to them.
Since our growth continued during the war, it became clear that the editorial staff had to be expanded, and though we had already added Harry Maule, he had his hands full taking care of the many authors he brought in. In 1944 I finally succeeded in luring Robert Linscott down to New York. He had for a long time been a top editor at Houghton Mifflin, where I had met him in the days when I was selling books in Boston.
It was Bob Linscott who called my attention to Truman Capote. One blessed day he read or somebody told him about a story that had appeared in Mademoiselle: “Miriam,” by an unknown writer called Truman Capote. That was the first thing of Capote’s I ever saw, and what a fine story it is! It has such depth and such a haunting quality. We asked Truman Capote to come and see us.
Well, that was a day when Truman arrived at Random House! He had bangs, and nobody could believe it when this young prodigy waltzed in. He looked about eighteen. He was bright and happy and absolutely self-assured. We said we wanted to publish anything he wrote. He said he was writing a novel, and we drew up a contract for it immediately. It was Other Voices, Other Rooms, which we published in 1948, and it was an immediate success. Everybody knew that somebody important had arrived upon the scene—particularly Truman! Phyllis adopted Truman immediately. He was already exhibiting the charm which proved so irresistible that he soon became a society favorite.
(40.1 illustration credit)
When Other Voices came out we used the now-famous photograph of him, with his bangs and checkered waistcoat, reclining on a couch. It was great publicity, but it’s ludicrously simple to get publicity for Truman. For example, about a week before Other Voices was published, my friend Richard Simon called me up and said, “How the hell do you get a full-page picture of an author in Life magazine before his first book even comes out?” I said, “Do you think I’m going to tell you? Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” Dick said, “Come on. How did you wangle that?” I said, “Dick, I have no intention of telling you.” He hung up in a huff; and I hung up too, and cried, “For God’s sake, get me a copy of Life.” That was the first I knew about the whole affair! Truman had managed to promote that full-page picture for himself, and how he did it, I don’t know to this day.
Truman Capote (40.2 illustration credit)
After Other Voices was published, Truman came wafting into the office one day and told me that Vogue wanted him to go to Hollywood for two weeks to write the impressions of a young writer who had never before been there. They offered him two thousand and expenses for two weeks, and Truman had demanded the cash immediately—twenty one-hundred-dollar bills, which was probably more money than he’d ever seen at one time. Truman brought them in, rolled up with a rubber band around them, to show me. So he went to Hollywood for his first time, and I couldn’t wait to hear his story.
When he came back after his two weeks, he reported to me: “I spent the first week with Greta Garbo and the second week with Charlie Chaplin.” It was absolutely true. He had gone to Hollywood with a letter of introduction to someone who had a party that first night. Greta Garbo met Truman there and took him right home with her. She said, “You’re not going to a hotel. You’re going to stay with me.” After a week, at another party, Charlie Chaplin kidnapped him from Greta Garbo, and he spent the second week with Chaplin.
As Truman became more and more popular and knew more and more famous people, he was so busy going to parties and being the town’s most desirable extra man that we had to keep after him to make him write. He is talented beyond belief, a born writer, but he must have the perfect word and will spend a whole day brooding over it. I’ve known him to do just that, and when he has a book finished, it’s a polished gem. It needs hardly any editing. He proved that he was not only a good novelist but one of the great reporters when he wrote The Muses Are Heard—another great success—the often hilarious story of the production in Russia of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Two years later his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s hit the really popular note.
Truman became famous not just for his books, but for two stories, Christmas Memory and Thanksgiving Visitor, which he and Eleanor and Frank Perry turned into award-winning television shows. Because of his personality, Truman is a gossip columnist’s delight. He is always up to something that makes good copy. The party he gave in 1967 was the social event of the decade. The New York Times printed the entire guest list, and to be invited to that party was to be considered as having arrived. People who weren’t invited were very disappointed. Guests came from Italy, France, Hollywood and all over for this affair, which was the greatest of its kind ever given, and Truman was ecstatic. It cost him a fortune, but he couldn’t have cared less.
By a strange coincidence, I played a small part in the history of Truman’s great book In Cold Blood. I had lectured at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. I was there for two days, and besides lecturing, I had spent a day with the English classes, as I do sometimes. I became a great friend of the president, James McCain, the successor to Milton Eisenhower, who had made Kansas State a top university. I had made a lot of friends in those two days, and when I left, Jim McCain said, “We’ve enjoyed having you here, and if I can ever do anything for you, just let me know.” I laughed and said, “What can you ever do for me in Manhattan, Kansas?” and gaily, off I went.
Shortly after that came the murder of the Clutter family—a man and his wife and two children murdered in cold blood—in Garden City, Kansas, and the case became known all over the country. Local police were frustrated because they had no clues. It seemed to be an inside job, since the murderers knew where to hide their automobile, how to get into the house and exactly where the wall safe was located. So they figured it must be somebody in Garden City. The whole town was suspect.
One day Truman walked into my office and said, “The New Yorker is sending me out to cover that murder case.” I said, “You? In a Kansas hamlet?” That was the first reaction of everybody—the elegant Mr. Capote going to a small town in Kansas. He was quite indignant at my surprise, then said, “I don’t know a soul in the whole state of Kansas. You’ve got to introduce me to some people out there.”
That’s what a publisher is for, I guess, and this was one time I could deliver the goods. I immediately remembered my friend Dr. McCain at Kansas State. I called him up and asked if he had known the Clutter family in Garden City. Jim said, “The Clutters were my close personal friends. I know everybody in Garden City, Kansas.” I said, “One of our authors is coming out to write a series of stories for The New Yorker, and I hope it will also be a book. Can he stop off on the way and visit you?” He said, “Who is the author?” I said, “Truman Capote.” Jim MacCain echoed me, “Truman Capote? Coming to Kansas?” I said, “Yes.” He thought for a minute, then said, “I’ll make a deal with him. If he’ll spend one evening talking to the English department, I’ll give him letters to half the people in Garden City.” I said, “I accept for Truman right now. Great! He’s bringing a young assistant with him, I’ve never met her, but I think she may be a distant relation of Truman.” The girl was Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Truman and Harper Lee went out to Kansas, and two days later Jim called me up. He said, “I want to report on the visit of Mr. Capote and the girl with him. They’re both great. Truman came waltzing in with a pink velvet coat on and announced, ‘I bet I’m the first man who has ever come to Manhattan, Kansas, wearing a Dior jacket.’ And I said, ‘I’ll go you one better, Mr. Capote. You’re probably the first man or woman who ever came to Manhattan, Kansas, wearing a Dior jacket.’ ”
McCain continued, “I took him to meet the faculty, and when Truman and Miss Lee left at six-thirty this morning on the Santa Fe to go to Garden City, the entire faculty got up to see them off. Mrs. McCain and I got up too.”
They went to Garden City, where Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had been put in charge and was going crazy trying to solve the murders. He had turned up nothing, and people were getting angrier and angrier at him. Suddenly, to add to his troubles, Truman Capote arrived to cover the case. Two weeks later Truman was living in the Dewey house, and the Deweys and everybody else in Garden City adored him.
The minute the two killers were captured, who became their best friend in the world? Truman Capote. Before Perry, the one who was a poet, was hanged, he gave Truman his whole collection of books and all of his poetry. Each man was allowed one witness at the execution, and Perry insisted that Truman be his. Truman had to go back West for that double hanging, and Joe Fox, who became his editor at Random House after Linscott retired, and is one of Truman’s closest friends, went with him. Just before going into the execution room, Perry asked that Truman come over and say goodbye to him, and he threw his arms around Truman and kissed him and said, “I’m so sorry.” Truman collapsed, as anybody else would have.
In Cold Blood was an enormous best seller from the day it was published, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and in the first month sold about fifty thousand copies a week. We’d never seen anything like it. Some time after it came out, Truman brought the whole Garden City contingent to New York City. Being Truman, he arranged a series of parties for them. The people from Garden City were in an absolute daze. They were meeting everybody from the President of the United States down. Kay Graham, head of Newsweek and the Washington Post, gave a big party for them in Washington, where they met every VIP under the sun.
