Читать книгу Risk Game - Francis J. Greenburger - Страница 10
ОглавлениеChildhood didn’t suit me.
I had to come up with a way to explain this to my high school guidance counselor sitting behind her desk. It was clear to my teachers at Stuyvesant that my attentions weren’t focused on school—I hardly ever showed up to my sophomore year classes and handed in homework even less—and now all this had come to the attention of the guidance counselor, who called a meeting in her office to discuss my performance.
“It’s a privilege to attend Stuyvesant,” the counselor said, glancing down at my appalling record. “This is one of the best high schools in the city and the country. Do you know how many kids would kill to be in your spot? You’re obviously not a stupid kid, but you seem to be throwing this away, which is pretty stupid.”
I’d been hearing the line about how great Stuyvesant was ever since I arrived. I had gained admission to the prestigious public Manhattan high school, even though I had missed part of my elementary school years, because I was good at arithmetic. Apparently, I was supposed to be eternally grateful for my good fortune, but to my mind the only difference between this school and others was the amount of homework.
“The students and teachers are the cream of the crop,” she continued.
“No disrespect,” I said, “but it seems to me that all the teachers do around here is give out an impossible amount of homework so that we’re too busy to think. It’s a colossal waste of time, which, I’m sorry, is not something I have a lot of.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, sending me a skeptical look from over her bifocals. “What more important things do you have to do?”
Actually. A lot.
Not only was I running my own business, but my duties at my father’s agency, which had expanded beyond bookkeeping, occupied quite a bit of my time. My move from the quiet sidelines of managing the finances to the middle of the action had happened about a year earlier, when I was fourteen years old.
It had all started when the agency didn’t receive payment for the touring rights to an infamous German drama, The Deputy. The 1963 work, which charged Pope Pius XII with remaining silent during the Holocaust, was probably one of the most controversial plays of the twentieth century. It had theological implications and international diplomatic repercussions. It was even alleged that the author, Rolf Hochhuth, was part of a secret KGB plot to slur the anti-communist Pope Pius.
Whatever it was, The Deputy became an international sensation after it was translated into more than twenty languages. As the representative of Rowohlt Verlag, which controlled the international rights, my father licensed the American theatrical rights to Herman Shumlin, a prominent producer who looked like Yul Brynner because of his size and shaved head. Shumlin in turn brought the show to the Brooks Atkinson Theater in a flurry of protests and press. Despite the outrage from Catholic groups, the play ran for 316 performances and earned Shumlin a Tony Award for Best Producer in 1964. Its success on Broadway brought the show around the United States after we arranged for another producer to license the touring rights with the royalties going to Shumlin.
One day while I was in the office and my father was home sick with the flu, I answered the phone to find an unhappy Shumlin on the other end; the producer of the touring show, currently playing in Chicago, wasn’t paying up.
“We have to do something about this right away,” he said in his trademark booming voice. “I want you to go to Chicago and collect the money.”
“I will talk to my father and get back to you.”
“No. I want you on a plane tomorrow.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was Herman Shumlin. I couldn’t think of any bigger Broadway producer other than David Merrick. The son of a Colorado rancher, Shumlin had worked his way up from a high school dropout, then factory and railroad yard worker, to a press agent and finally award-winning producer. He gave Lillian Hellman (who had been reading scripts for him) her start when he produced Children’s Hour in 1934—an instant hit—and launched the careers of many actors. As Hellman put it: Shumlin had “made many an actor into a star, and many a star into a decent actor.” You didn’t say no to a legend like that.
So after getting the okay from my father (“He wants you to go, so go”), I flew to Chicago the next day for a meeting with the deadbeat producer. Separating me at one end of the conference room table and the producer of the touring company at the other were seven lawyers representing both sides.
The producer, who knew my father and me personally, said to my set of lawyers, “Do you know how old your client is?”
They didn’t have a clue. I was tall for my age and had a broad chest and full beard (all the rage in the early sixties). After they turned to me with uncomprehending expressions, I responded by pulling out the power of attorney that I had gotten from Shumlin, which authorized me to represent his end of the claim. Before leaving New York, I had learned that if somebody gives you power of attorney, you have legal authority—even if you are two years old. It’s that person’s decision whether or not you’re qualified, regardless of age.
“I don’t really see how that’s relevant. I think this gives me the legal authority to act,” I said, passing the piece of paper with my power of attorney around. His lawyers nodded and my lawyers nodded.
“Let’s get on to the business at hand,” I said.
The guy paid up and Shumlin was impressed. So was my dad, who soon after helped me start my own business exporting books after Karl Ludwig, a friend of Ledig’s and an employee of Bertelsmann, a major German book club, approached my father with the idea to sell English-language publications to book club subscribers in Germany, where he believed there were enough English speakers to make the venture a commercial success. My father felt the deal was a conflict with his relationship with Rowohlt Verlag but said, “Maybe my son can help you.”
It took a year or two after books came out in the US to be translated and published in Germany. That meant by the time they were out in Germany, the same books were going into paperback back in the States—and the hardcover publisher was “remaindering” its excess inventory. I saw an opportunity. Profit margins appeared in my head. I told Ludwig I’d help him out. The only hurdle left was to convince the American publishers.
During lunchtime at Halsey Junior High School, I skipped the cafeteria, headed to the pay phone near the nurse’s office, and put in a dime.
“Dick Snyder, please,” I said.
“Who may I ask is calling?”
“Francis Greenburger on behalf of Bertelsmann.”
“One moment.”
So far so good.
“Hello?” a gravelly voice said after a moment.
Going as deep into my register as possible, I launched into my pitch for Snyder, who would eventually go on to become a publishing legend. After he became president of Simon & Schuster in 1975 when it was a $70 million dollar company, he assumed a number of titles and transformed S&S into the largest book publisher in the world, with $2 billion in annual revenue. At the time of my call, however, Snyder was working in special sales and remainders.
“Look, I want to take five thousand copies of hardcovers off your hands,” I said. “But instead of thirty cents per book that the remainder guys pay, I’m willing to offer fifty cents.”
“What’s the catch?”
“They’re headed to Germany. This is a win-win. You’re remaindering the book anyway. This will get it out of your market, so it’s not going to compete with the paperback. And I’ll pay you almost double what the remainder dealers do.”
There was a pause while Snyder silently went through all the permutations of what could go wrong with this deal.
“Well, what are you looking for?” he asked, still cautious.
“Something popular. A best seller, nothing too heady. You know. The German market is saturated with that.”
Snyder laughed throatily.
“All right. Harold Robbins.”
The Carpetbaggers author was the surest bet in publishing. His track record was practically a best seller per year.
“Perfect.”
“You’re only getting twenty-five hundred.”
“I’ll take it.”
I hung up the phone and looked at the clock on the wall; there was still plenty of time before math to make another call. I dialed the second number on my list. Bernie Geis ran an eponymous publishing house, financially backed by the likes of Groucho Marx and known for putting out racy, popular titles such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. I knew the deal was good when I called S&S, but now I was doubly confident since I could tell Geis I already had half my quote from Snyder. It worked like a charm and Geis was practically pissed off that he could only unload 2,500 of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.
In math class, I tuned out the teacher’s voice and crunched my own numbers.
1.25: Bertelsmann payment per book
-.50: payment to publishers per book
-.25: average shipping cost per book
× 5,000 books
=$2,500 profit
In 1963, three thousand bucks was a fortune. It was the cost of a new car, two years of tuition at Harvard, or half the average annual American income. And the whole deal only took me an hour. Doing geometry problem sets and diagramming sentences couldn’t hold a candle to this. The feeling of mastery and accomplishment was astounding.
Bertelsmann was willing to do a similar deal with me, on average every three to six months, which meant by the time I was entering high school, I was drawing a serious salary. Especially for a fifteen-year-old. I was happy to have the money—really happy—not because I thought it’d change who I was as a person or prove anything to anyone else. Money for me was never about ambition. Even at fifteen, success for me meant not having to worry.
My dream was never wild opulence but rather the luxury of stability. The constant question mark that was my parents’ checkbook balance made a lasting impression. During my freshman year in high school, I set a certain standard of living for myself and tallied what it would cost. What were the needs of a teenager attending public school and living in his parents’ house in Queens? The answer was as urgent and direct as the desire behind it: girls.
My love of women started early. But even with my inflated sense of maturity, I was thrust into action earlier than I expected—eleven years old, to be precise. My family and I were spending the weekend at our second home in Colrain, Massachusetts, near the Vermont border, and had brought along the seventeen-year-old daughter of my mother’s German friend, who had also been in France during the war. Mara, a friendly girl with a box bob and reddish cheeks, had been living with my parents for about a month while she studied in the States.
The house in Colrain was truly a place of magical lawlessness. The charming but dilapidated farmhouse that my parents bought for $225 didn’t have running water or electricity for the first few years. Although our life in Queens was by no means confined, the country offered other freedoms. Pool halls and edgy friends were replaced by mountains and trees. My dad and the usual assortment of strays he collected did a lot of the construction work themselves with me and my brother helping out whenever permitted.
As the sun went down on a long Saturday of home improvements and getting lost in the woods during Mara’s visit, my parents and a few friends poured themselves cocktails in the living room while my brother suggested the three of us go up to his room to play strip poker. His interest was clearly seeing Mara undressed.
After enough rounds that we were more naked than dressed, Mara said she wanted a drink. Who could blame her? It was decided that I should be the one to fetch it. So I put on whatever I had taken off, went downstairs where my parents were hanging out, and stole a bottle of Teacher’s scotch. After I reentered my brother’s room with its two single, plywood beds propped up by books, we returned to the game and got drunk. Mara and I lost our clothes; my brother was more successful in keeping his. But of course in strip poker, depending on the circumstances, being the loser can also mean being the winner.
My brother wanted to win Mara, but for some reason she chose me, and the two of us, still naked, wound up in one of the beds in the cabin-like room. While my brother laughed from the other bed, Mara gave me instructions and we began to have sex. I lost my virginity while my brother cackled from the corner.
As if that wasn’t enough family involvement, there came a knock at the door. It was my mother.
“Go away,” I shouted.
But she kept banging on the door. “Open up!” she shouted back. “Open up!”
“No!”
My father, in bed and with no plans of getting up, shouted from the background, “I’m going to fine you five dollars a minute if you don’t get out of there!”
Finally, my brother got up to let our mother in; Mara and I bolted under his bed. My mother yelled and demanded to know what was going on. We couldn’t hide out there forever, so I decided to just go for it and ran out from under the bed and into my bedroom—totally naked. I got under the covers and prayed to die. Instead, I lived. The minutes felt like hours as I waited for my mother to enter my room and kill me, but she never came. I continued to live. Eventually I fell into a deep sleep aided by the drop in adrenaline and the Teacher’s scotch.
In the morning, though, I woke up petrified. My embarrassment from the night before was magnified a hundredfold. What was my mother going to say? My fixation on that kept me from thinking about the even more terrifying prospect of facing Mara. I had no idea what to do. Unable to deal with what lay in wait for me downstairs, I stayed in bed until noon, an eternity. But I couldn’t stay there forever, which seemed to come and go twice during that time.
After I headed downstairs, the first person I saw was my father lying on the couch. “You owe me for that bottle of scotch,” he said without looking up from the local newspaper he was reading. I slunk toward the kitchen, the sick feeling in my stomach growing as I neared. But no one was there after I pushed the swinging door open. Room after room, there was no sign of my mother or Mara.
When later they returned, chatting busily as they unpacked the groceries from their shopping trip, both women hardly seemed to notice me. That disturbed me almost as much as my fantasy of a Viscontiesque melodrama. How could my mother be being so friendly with Mara after catching us naked and guilty? I was more mortified than I had been upstairs in bed.
We returned to New York and that was that. There was no follow-up, romantic, punitive, or otherwise. It was like nothing had happened. A lesson in love. While it wasn’t the greatest sex in the world, in my book it was a perfectly fine start; I was pleased to have broken the ice.
I vowed, however, that when I had my first girlfriend things would be a little more romantic than doing it while my brother watched. I got my chance a little more than a year later when I met Marie. Like so many other things, she came through the agency—her mother was a literary scout for a Dutch publishing company. When we started dating, I showed Marie the town. I would travel into Manhattan, pick her up at her Upper West Side apartment, and then together we’d head to one of the places I’d noted from Ledig’s agenda of drink meetings when he came to town. I took her to the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and the Oak Bar at the Plaza because I knew that if the place was classy enough, they wouldn’t card a thirteen-year-old who looked more like seventeen, and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend who looked just that. Out of all our haunts, our favorite was Top of the Sixes, a restaurant on the very top floor of 666 Fifth Avenue.
Walking into the restaurant’s steely office building between 52nd and 53rd Streets felt important in itself. Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Landscape of the Cloud, fluid and lithe lines in the ceiling followed by a floor-to-ceiling waterfall, ushered us to the elevator where we traveled forty stories up to the top of the skyscraper. Top of the Sixes, or rather its view, was popular. The place was filled with couples on dates, and it wasn’t unusual to cheer a proposal of marriage on any given night. I ordered the good stuff—champagne—in a romantic gesture that Marie rewarded me for with a marathon make-out session.
I had a big summer planned for the two of us. Her father had moved to Georgia after splitting from Marie’s mother, who had to travel a lot for her work as a literary scout. All of that added up to a lot of alone time at her apartment.
That was where we were one warm June afternoon, tucked away in the back of the rambling West Side apartment, when things got a little heavier than usual. We hadn’t yet slept together, but we seemed to be heading there when her mother suddenly appeared in the door. Whether we were so engrossed in what we were doing or the apartment was just so big we didn’t hear the front door open, Marie and I were caught completely off guard—and naked.
As her mother screamed in Dutch at the top of her lungs, we both ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Unfortunately, I left my clothes outside. There was a lot of yelling back and forth in a language I didn’t understand until Marie finally brokered an agreement where we could have the dignity of putting our clothes on without the presence of her mother. And then I left, quickly.
I called the next day, but, understandably, her mother wouldn’t let me talk to her. When I tried back a couple of days later, I learned that Marie had been sent to Georgia. My summer of bliss was canceled.
After mourning the loss as much as any thirteen-year-old could, I moved onward and upward to a girl way out of my league. Benedetta Barzini—the daughter of Luigi Barzini, Jr., author of the giant best seller The Italians, and Giannalisa Feltrinelli, mother of her stepbrother Giangiacomo—was not just Italian royalty. She was a top model.
Luigi and Giangiacomo had a relationship based on mutual hatred. After his mother, the richest widow in Italy, married his new stepfather, Giangiacomo experienced unimaginable punishments, including being locked in a cellar for days with only bread and water (the experience caused a lifelong case of claustrophobia). His mother, Giannalisa, was no pussycat herself; she enrolled her son in the Italian Fascist Youth Movement and once scared her chauffeur by felling a deer with a shot from her gun taken from the backseat of her Rolls-Royce.
Despite the bad blood, I met Benedetta through my father’s connections to Giangiacomo after she arrived in New York to start her career as a model. Although named one of the “100 Great Beauties of the World” in Harper’s Bazaar for her black, almond-shaped eyes and mile-long neck, Benedetta was friendly enough. She was so approachable that I found the courage to ask her out, and for some reason beyond my comprehension, she said yes. I instinctively knew Top of the Sixes wasn’t going to cut it. Champagne was like water for this girl. I had to take her to a real New York City pad.
Not long after I started my business exporting books to Germany for sale by Bertelsmann, I found myself with money that I didn’t know what to do with. So I rented a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. It was a rent-controlled apartment for $45 a month on 73rd Street between Second and Third avenues. The deal was good, but the place was a wreck. I spent many weekends not sleeping there but fixing it up so it’d be habitable in case I ever did want to spend the night.
I finished painting and even bought a little furniture by the time Benedetta agreed to come over for an aperitif. Her slender arm linked through mine, we battled a chilly October wind coming off the East River. Each gust heightened my anticipation of walking into my modest yet cozy lair. I hadn’t been there in about a month and, in my memory, the apartment had grown into a cross between James Bond’s place and the sex den of The Apartment.
I opened the door cockily and walked straight into a fog machine. Benedetta protectively touched her hair. The place was filled with more steam than a sauna. While renovating the apartment over the summer, I had disconnected the radiator to paint behind it and apparently forgotten to reconnect it. Steam had been pouring out for a week, causing the paint to bubble and peel. The cheap furniture hadn’t fared much better. My pied-à-terre was a worse wreck than what I had started with.
We laughed off the whole incident and went elsewhere. But that was the end of Benedetta . . . and the apartment. The Italian beauty started hanging out at the Factory and moved on to an Andy Warhol acolyte. As for my bachelor pad, two weeks after its meltdown, the landlord called to buy me out of my lease, which I agreed to do because I just couldn’t face repainting it.
I had a confidence with women that well surpassed my age (the stewardess whom I met outside my building in Queens was pretty pissed off to find out, after a summer romance, that not only was I fourteen but I also lived with my parents). Like with business dealings, I assumed an air of maturity that had no correlation to experience. But girls were nothing like the numbers that popped into my head in neat rows. They were confusing but wonderful. I loved women, and I loved sex. However, it was never about flings or conquests. I considered it an honor when someone was willing to offer to me the emotional and psychological discoveries that came through the physical. My gratitude for this intimate female acceptance knew no bounds.
I wanted to be devoted to a woman, but this was the sixties and I was fifteen, so that goal was not easily achieved. The first to give me any kind of shot at boyfriend status was a lovely girl named Hanna. I had met her at Austen Riggs, a famed psychiatric facility. The perfect place to meet your first girlfriend.
I found myself wandering around the bucolic grounds of the open treatment center on account of my friendship with a young writer, David Berelson, whom I met through my father when he sold his coming-of-age prep school novel, Roars of Laughter. David was a complicated character. He had a lot of very strong opinions, all of which stemmed from either the New York Times or Johnny Carson. Anyone who dared to differ was considered a complete idiot. One had to forgive his foibles, considering his stepfather had murdered his mother and then killed himself while a seven-year-old David slept in his bed.
David’s stepfather, Sheldon Dick, had been many things—literary agent, polo player, and photographer—but he could never escape his main title: heir to the A. B. Dick Company fortune. Even while traveling through the most destitute regions of the country to take photographs on behalf of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Sheldon, whose father founded the world’s largest manufacturer of mimeograph equipment, “worried about the fact that he was a checkbook.”
Later, he made a documentary on mining, but his biggest moment came in the spring of 1950 when Sheldon shot his third wife and David’s mother, Elizabeth, and then telephoned the state police barracks to say, “We have just killed ourselves. Send an officer right away to the Sheldon Dicks.”
Needless to say, David was scarred. But an inheritance of several million dollars meant that when he cracked up, he could easily afford the extremely expensive therapeutic program at Austen Riggs. He had already left when I agreed to make the relatively short drive from my parents’ weekend place in Colrain to the stately facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting his girlfriend.
As I entered the institution’s white mansion, affectionately known by its residents and staff as “The Inn,” I quickly understood this was no mental hospital. This looked like the right place for James Taylor to kick heroin and Judy Garland to recuperate from a nervous breakdown. There was a formal dining room with iced tea in an urn in case your lithium made you parched, and the living room boasted enough square footage for twelve couches and a grand piano. It was the kind of place with chintz drapes, tennis courts, deck chairs, and a grand curving stair-case that descended into the central hall.
That’s where I first saw Hanna. We didn’t speak but the image of her walking up the sweeping staircase, a serious and hesitant face lightened by a dimple on her cheek, was like a snapshot filed away in an album of memories. It remained with me.
A couple of weeks later, David called to ask for my help moving furniture for his girlfriend, who had arrived in New York with her roommate. I arrived at the apartment on 73rd and York to discover that the roommate was the girl on the staircase, Hanna. She was both intense and cute, a strange and fascinating combination. In return for carrying their stuff up the stairs, the girls invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at their place. I agreed on the spot, although I wasn’t sure how my parents were going to take the news that I wouldn’t be joining them for the holiday.
As promised, I returned on Thanksgiving to the tiny one-bedroom that was crammed with a dozen or so guests. Hanna hopped up to greet me. I hadn’t eaten all day, but the buffet she pointed out was the last thing on my mind. She looked so lovely in her minidress.
Then she introduced me to her boyfriend.
I was upset, but only for a moment. The boyfriend, another Austen Riggs alum, was a chubby little nerd. Lording all six feet of myself (and full bushy beard), I thought I ought to be able to handle this. Sure enough, at the point that the crowd started to thin, Hanna asked me to stay a while longer.
“What about your boyfriend?” I asked.
“He left,” she said.
I called my parents.
“I’m staying in the city with a friend. I’ll be home tomorrow.”
It was a wonderful night. And then a wonderful next day that turned into another night. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I called my parents again.
When I called my parents on the third night, I got my mom.
“I’m spending the night in the city. But I’m not coming home anymore.”
I had decided to move in with Hanna.
“I’m in love.”
“What do you mean, you’re in love?” my mother cried.
Despite my mother’s initial alarm, my parents put up a small protest, consisting of me coming home to “talk about it,” which was basically a good excuse to collect my things. My mother and father had always given me a lot of latitude.
When I was twelve, I accompanied my parents to a party held by a prominent literary couple in honor of a visiting English publisher at their posh Upper East Side apartment. A live trio played soft standards while members of New York’s cultured elite mingled, drank, and laughed. I jumped undaunted right into the fray, no stranger to this kind of scene because of many a night spent socializing at the home of my parents’ good friends Dagobert and Maria Teresa Runes.
Bob, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire expat was known in America, founded the Philosophical Library to publish the works of great European intellectuals, particularly in the fields of psychology, philosophy, history, and religion, after their displacement by the Nazis and World War II. He palled around with the likes of Albert Einstein and André Gide and once got into a fistfight with Picasso over the publication of the artist’s only play, Desire, which contained pornography with vegetables. When Picasso asked Bob to print it on blue paper because “anything on ‘Picasso Blue’ will sell,” Bob, a true man of letters, was so incensed at the crass comment it came to fisticuffs. Needless to say, there was always a great guest list at the Runes’ parties, which were enhanced by the venue of their spectacular twelve-room triplex with double height ceilings at 44 West 77th Street. Partygoers enjoyed fine Viennese cooking (schnitzel, potato latkes, linzer torte, and gurkensalat) prepared by a Russian chef under the apartment’s enormous windows that overlooked the Museum of Natural History. (In a true Viennese standoff, Bob and Mary never could agree on which curtains to buy, so they lived for fifty-one years without them.)
So I was perfectly at ease when I found myself at this Upper East Side party, sandwiched on a couch between a Channel Thirteen broadcaster and a very attractive woman. In fact, I was having such a good time that when my parents announced around eleven o’clock that it was time to leave, I responded, “I’m not ready to go.”
Twenty minutes later, they reappeared.
“Time to go.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Well, we’re leaving.”
And they did. At around two o’clock, when the party was wrapping up, I asked the hostess to “tell me where my bedroom is.” I was not only under the assumption that somehow arrangements had been made for me to stay the night but also completely drunk. She apologized that there was no room for me but explained that a few of the guests leaving would drop me at the subway. I got on the subway and spent the rest of the night riding the E train from Manhattan all the way to Jamaica Center, the end of the line, then back to Wall Street. I bounced from end point to end point in a barely conscious state. By the third or fourth time around, the conductor pushed me off the train—thankfully in Queens—and I found my way home just as the light was coming up.
Why did my parents leave me at a party, drinking, while they returned home to bed? Perhaps they thought I could handle it. Maybe I was too strong-willed to fight. Or they were just too worn down by André. Years later, when I was old enough to realize that bad things can happen to you, I asked my mother how she could have let me do that.
“We didn’t know what to do with you.”
She was right. I was the definition of precocious: fifteen years old, my own business, and a live-in girlfriend. And that was why school did not fit into the equation. I just had to make my guidance counselor at Stuyvesant understand that.
I made my case. “My classmates and I are just in different places,” I said. “I think I should leave, drop out.”
She listened, took a thoughtful drag of her cigarette, and then said in her thick outer-borough accent, “You know what? I think you’re right.”
It wasn’t vindictive or insincere; as a counselor and advocate, she recognized that, as insane as my story was, it was true. I respected her for having the guts to do her job. And I dropped out.
