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My father accompanied the writer out of his office.

“Sandy, this book is going to be a big, big best seller,” the writer said to my father. “Big. Not just in Europe but here in America too. I’m going to make us lots of money. You’ll see.”

“Yes, yes, Lazi,” my father said with a slight note of skepticism.

The Hungarian writer Ladislas Faragó had made his name as a foreign correspondent in 1935 covering the Ethiopian-Italian War, an assignment he turned into a historically important and wildly popular book, Abyssinia on the Eve. But he was as much an old friend of my father’s as a valued client of Sanford J. Greenburger, my father’s literary agency. So Dad took special care in showing him to the door, walking past my desk, where I was busy balancing the agency’s checkbook, and my mother, who was tending to her usual administrative work. Faragó kissed her hand in the old-fashioned style before he was hustled out the door by my father—just as Leo was entering.

“What brought the Hungarian schemer?” Leo, lighting a cigarette, asked once my father returned.

It was true; Faragó, who had written many best-selling books on military history and espionage (including, later on, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph), had picked up a trick or two from his reporting. An expert on propaganda and other methods of using the mind as a weapon, he was assigned during World War II to a unit engaged in psychological warfare against the Japanese. When it came to his own business affairs, he was no less stealthy. Once, he sneaked into my father’s office and helped himself to the company checkbook, writing a check to himself and forging my father’s signature. Although the sum was not large, my father was perpetually broke, so even small amounts were a problem.

“Ah, Lazi’s okay,” my father said.

“You know, one can be a good writer and still not be a good person,” Leo said.

Leo Frischauer did not mince words. In fact, offering up his opinion, solicited or otherwise, was about all Leo ever did. Each day he arrived like clockwork to my father’s small office on 42nd Street that was half literary agency and half café for a variety of European intelligentsia, even though technically he didn’t work there. In the context of the parade of writers and publishers who created a constant flow of smoke, gossip, and eccentricity, it wasn’t odd that Leo had a desk but no title or work responsibilities. Efficiency was never a priority at the agency.

I watched my father and Leo smoke and talk as if this were new and exciting territory and not how they had spent every day of their lives for the last twenty years. I never asked my father how he felt about Leo; he was kind of just a given.

Like most everything else in the office, Leo’s story was mythic, unconventional, and not at all clear. My hazy understanding was that Leo—who came from a family of wunderkinds that included Paul, a well-known novelist, and Eddie, a champion bridge player who helped Austria bring home the 1937 world title—had made a huge sum of money as a very young lawyer in Vienna. He wanted to celebrate his windfall by taking his girlfriend on a trip around the world, but his mother disapproved. His girlfriend then committed suicide, which, although something of a Viennese habit during that period, gave Leo such a virulent hatred of money that he gave all of his away. Over five o’clock tumblers of whiskey, there were tales of Leo leaving the equivalent of a $100,000 tip for his favorite waitress at his regular café in Vienna. Once the money was gone, Leo decided he didn’t want to work anymore. Ever again.

When Leo first came to New York, he went to see my father, who knew his brother Paul. He walked into the office, introduced himself, and then asked my father whether he could come the next morning to read the newspaper.

“Sure,” my father said.

He came the following day and every day for the next fifty-odd years to read the newspaper. Leo not only read the newspaper, he read each edition of every newspaper. One of his early jobs in Vienna had been working at a daily, reading the competition to see whether there were any stories they had missed. Leo had loved this job and acted for the rest of his life as if he still had it. He even had an arrangement with the newspaper delivery trucks that came to the office building so that he didn’t need to wait until the paper arrived at the newsstand. The truck driver was instructed to hand the latest edition to Leo waiting for it in front of the building.

I loved Leo, who spent his days smoking relentlessly, refusing to use an ashtray, preferring instead to let the ash on his cigarette dangle perilously until it ultimately fell onto his chest, which he patted into his suit—and he’d been wearing the same suit for as long as I’d known him, which was my entire life. His indulgent style extended to me, for which I, the son of a cautious father who was sometimes hard to communicate with, was grateful. One of Leo’s and my favorite hobbies was throwing paper planes out the window of the thirtieth floor when the agency was located on 42nd Street. Watching our planes drift into the New York Public Library never got old with us.

Leo Frischauer at the literary agency

As Leo and my father continued their debate on Faragó’s merits beyond writing, I returned to my bookkeeping. I had already entered the precious few checks we had received that day, paid the office’s electric bill and a lawyer’s fee, and prepared statements for a few authors. It was rudimentary work that I could have done in my sleep. Numbers, to me, were simple; unlike my father’s clients, they either added up or they didn’t.

My father assigned value in ways that rarely made a profit. Indeed, his decisions usually translated into disaster for my ledger. It hadn’t started that way. His agency, which began in 1932, received a remarkable stroke of luck with the advent of World War II. While devastating for most of Europe, the war provided my father with an incredible opportunity. Because authors from the Axis powers couldn’t receive royalties from sales of their books in the United States, German, French, and Italian publishing houses needed someone to hold the money until the war ended.

Because of my father’s many European friends, he and a man named Marcel Aubry serendipitously found themselves approached by some of the continent’s biggest and most venerable publishers to hold their copyrights until their countries were no longer enemy territory and subject to the US alien property withholding regulations. Gallimard in France hired Aubry and my father to represent them in the United States, and almost overnight the greatest minds of the twentieth century, such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, were among my father’s first clients. He also represented the estates of Franz Kafka and Alfred Adler.

My father’s salon sensibility made him a perfect American counterpart to European publishers. After the war, he maintained his transatlantic affairs, not only continuing to represent their authors but also pioneering the editorial scouting business by advising European publishing houses on the best American writers to translate and publish for their markets. But if he had the right literary temperament, my father remained a poor businessman, constantly settling for too little compensation or loaning money to his authors, who were anything but good for it.

I had resolved to talk to my father about one issue in particular that could no longer be ignored—the agency’s longtime deal with Rowohlt Verlag. Faragó’s surprise visit temporarily delayed the discussion, but as soon as Leo agreed to disagree with my father, who returned to his office, I got up from my desk and walked the four steps it took me to arrive at his door. I had to act fast since I didn’t know who or what might distract my father next.

“Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Come in. Sit, sit.”

He put the Saturday Evening Post he’d been reading back on top of a stack of other papers and magazines, including the New Yorker, New York Times, Herald Tribune, and Publishers Weekly. When he wasn’t chatting with Leo or any of the other characters that took up his day, his nose was always in the papers or magazines, not books. He preferred the excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker to the whole works. Although he loved publishing and books, I never saw him reading one.

“I think Leo is being too hard on Lazi,” he said. “No one is saying he’s a saint. But any man who won’t give up chasing the Nazis is okay by me. Lazi continues to find new revelations about those bastards when everyone else says World War II is over. Over? Tell that to the victims. Saints are boring and so is their writing. Boredom is the root of all evil, as they say.”

I didn’t know where this was going, but with my father it could go on for quite a while, and I had business to discuss.

“Dad.” I cut him off. “Are you aware of how much Rowohlt is paying us a month?”

“Sure.”

“Three hundred a month.”

“Right, three hundred a month.”

“It’s a very, very small amount.”

“Well, it’s something, isn’t it? And it comes on time every month. That’s worth quite a lot in this business. We had a French publisher who was paying us $500, but the problem was that we never got paid. They never gave us the money they were supposed to. With Rowohlt, the paycheck is sure and steady.”

I felt my frustration level rising rapidly. Talking to Father was always complicated and roundabout. For him, choosing a morning pastry could inspire a lengthy monologue. He loved to reason things out to interesting arguments although not necessarily logical ones. I wasn’t in the mood right now to ride the endless merry-go-round.

“It might have been good during the war, but it’s not enough for the work we do—keeping track of all their foreign rights contracts here in the US and advising them on what American books to buy for their territory. We have to renegotiate our contract.”

“Oh, Francis, I don’t know . . .”

“Look, you can’t make money this way. Rowohlt is not a charity. But it’s turning us into one.”

My father leaned back in his worn leather chair and gave me a look that was not easily discernible: part confusion and part dismay, yes. But did I also detect an undercurrent of pride? People get into the book business for different reasons. For my father, it definitely wasn’t for money. Though it didn’t seem to be about books either. It was always more about people than anything else.

Wherever he went, my father created a club. Before he married my mother, quite a number of people had keys to his apartment and stayed there unannounced whenever they were in New York. In fact, for the first year or so of my mother and father’s relationship, people were constantly showing up who had the key but didn’t know that he was now married.

There were many iterations of this hospitality: Leo, unaffordable loans to friends, and forgiving almost any character flaw. Even my father’s fluency in three languages fed his social reach. I admired my father’s generosity with his friends.

Born to Hungarian immigrants living in Glens Falls, New York, he learned to speak his parents’ native language while spending his formative years in Hungary following what must go down as the most poorly timed holiday in history: When my father was ten years old, the family went on vacation to their native country. World War I broke out, and they were stuck there until peace was declared.

Later, my father attended Columbia, where he studied German, the language he, my mother, and Leo spoke much of the time. After university, he started his career as a press secretary for the successful actor, director, and producer Leslie Howard. He then worked as a story editor in New York for Warner Brothers during the late twenties, until he hung out his own shingle in the form of Sanford J. Greenburger, Literary Agent.

My father, Sanford Greenburger

Sitting across from me at his desk, my father put his hands up in defeat. The contemplative nature that kept my father meandering through the vagaries of life and in good company with his writers invariably bowed to my bolder American directness.

“Okay, fine. You’re in charge of the numbers,” he said. “I’ll call Ledig and ask for an increase to $350.”

“Let me call.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m going to ask for $1,500 a month,” I said. “And bonuses if the books we recommend are successful in Germany.”

A look of amusement sparked in my father’s eyes and just as quickly went out. He knew I was serious and that I understood things he didn’t. So we agreed I would talk to Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt.

Although the head of Germany’s most prestigious publishing house was regarded as one of the great publishers of the twentieth century, having published everybody from Ernest Hemingway to Marilyn French (and he was friends with all of them: Baldwin, Nabokov, Havel), I was undaunted. Out of all the big names and personalities that came through my father’s door, he was the one who became a mentor and more. There was something in the fantastic story of how he came to his position that I related to.

Ledig, whose name means “unmarried” in German, was the illegitimate son of Ernst Rowohlt, the founder of the Rowohlt Verlag publishing house—a fact that he was unaware of until he turned nineteen. A year or two before that, he had approached his mother, a well-known German actress, Maria Ledig, about his dream career.

“I don’t know why, but I want to go into the book business.”

“Well, let me see whether I can help,” his mother replied.

She called the old man and said, “Look. Your son wants to work in publishing.”

“Send him over,” Rowohlt said. “But don’t tell him who I am.”

So off Ledig went to work at Rowohlt’s publishing house, thinking a friend of his mother’s got him the position. After a year or so on the job, he received a call that he was wanted at the big boss’s office. Right away. He was scared out of his wits; this was autocratic Germany, where lower-level employees weren’t summoned by the head of the company.

Once Ledig was inside the dark, imposing office, Rowohlt did not exchange pleasantries but barked out an order: “Sit in my chair.”

“What?” asked Ledig, wondering what kind of torture he had in store for him.

“Sit in that chair!”

Germans do not disobey. Ledig walked around the other side of the desk and sat down.

“How does it feel?” Rowohlt asked.

That was how Ledig found out he had unwittingly entered into the family business. He worked side by side with his father, tacking his last name on after a hyphen, until the war, when the company ceased operations after the Nazis blacklisted it for its books by communists, Jews, pacifists, and other types of untermenschen whose works were un-German. Ledig, drafted into the army with which he served on the Russian front, was the first publisher to get permission after the war from American occupation officials to resume publishing books. Although printed on low-grade paper, they were wildly popular with Germans desperate for new novels. Rowohlt the father, meanwhile, set up his own operation in Germany’s British zone, creating something of a literary father-son conflict. Eventually, though, they merged their operations into one, which Ledig took over after his father’s death in 1960.

Even among his peers of top international publishers, Ledig cut an extremely elegant figure with his tailored suit and custom-made shirt that always remained crisp no matter how long his day. Ledig brought a sense of occasion to everything. He and his second wife, Jane, were the king and queen of European publishing. Jane, who came from an extremely wealthy family (her father, a British banker, put up the collateral for a fledgling company that became England’s third largest British electronics firm), possessed a level of glamour and luxury that I thought only existed in the movies. She was always about the best of the best, buying couture dresses until they couldn’t fit into her closet and wearing a different piece of jewelry every time I saw her. She also made sure every aspect of Ledig’s existence was in high style. Later in life, when I visited them at their stunning eighteenth-century Swiss villa, Château de Lavigny, which I did often, I discovered the pleasures of the elegance with which Jane ran her household. Every morning, delicious hot coffee or tea, freshly squeezed orange juice, homemade pastries, and fine Swiss chocolate, all served on delicate china, were delivered to me while I still lay in my Porthault bedsheets. Jane gave the staff the guests’ breakfast choice the night before because she didn’t get up until noon, at best. (Jane tried her best to refine me as well; in the eighties I traveled to the château so she could introduce me to her Swiss bankers. But when I came downstairs for the lunch meeting she had planned, wearing khaki pants, a blue blazer, and no necktie, Jane took one look at me and said, “We aren’t gardening. Hurry up and change.” I ran upstairs and put on a dark blue suit and tie for the Swiss bankers, who, as it turned out, were extremely formally dressed.)

H. M. Ledig-Rowohlt launching a book in 1968

Courtesy of Foundation H. M. & J. Ledig-Rowohlt

Whenever Ledig came to New York, I would act as his aide-de-camp: ordering flowers for whomever he had dined with the night before, picking up his shirts from the laundry, or procuring tickets to the best show on Broadway. I learned firsthand the habits of a man with the ultimate style and grace. Much more enriching, however, were the long conversations we used to have. I couldn’t believe a man of such importance was willing to spend so much time talking to me. I discovered that his impeccable manners began with his extraordinary willingness to listen.

(Ultimately, Ledig and Jane became like second parents to me, helping me plan my trips in Europe right down to what were the “best” hotels to stay in in Venice, London, and Paris. The Connaught in London required a “personal” introduction, which Ledig provided me with. I learned many things from Ledig and Jane, including the difference between elegance and affluence. But most of all I learned how they valued people for their intelligence and personality.)

By the time my father and I had agreed to renegotiate our contract with Rowohlt Verlag, my relationship with Ledig had evolved into one with father-son undertones. Because of his generosity and obvious fondness for me, I had full confidence when I sat him down during his visit to New York.

“Ledig,” I said. “Look. We’re in desperate financial trouble here.”

“You are?” he responded with genuine concern.

“We can’t exist with the money that you’re paying us.”

After I showed him the numbers (for here was a man who, unlike my father, had some sense of what business cost), he agreed, and we got an increase from $300 to $1,500 a month, which helped for a while.

That was 1962. I was twelve years old.

I was a prodigy. A term usually reserved for child musicians or chess players, it perfectly described my early aptitude for business. I always had a job—or three. Money was my security blanket.

Working gave me a purpose. It grounded me in a topsy-turvy world that threatened to come completely apart when in second grade I developed a fear of elementary school. The phobia was not of crowds or cafeterias or chalk dust but of the very idea of school itself. I simply refused to go. I’d stay in bed, or sometimes my parents would coax me out of the house, saying, “We’re just going for a walk.” Then they’d walk me to the school, which was only two blocks from our house in Forest Hills, Queens. A hundred feet from the school, I’d refuse to budge.

The Board of Education assigned a child psychologist to find out the problem that kept me out of school for six months, but I guess he didn’t get too far because the principal of my school asked me to come in for a conference. I agreed to hear the man out.

“Listen, Francis,” the principal said to me in his office. “I know you had a really good time in kindergarten and were very close to your teacher. What if we gave you the job of kindergarten monitor, working with Miss Brooks? Would you come back on that basis?”

I thought that was an okay deal, so we shook on it and I returned to school, where I spent a couple of weeks assisting Miss Brooks until one day when the principal came into our classroom.

“It’s time for you to go upstairs,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve gotten over your fear. It’s time for you to go to your regular classes.”

“No way!”

He grabbed me and dragged me upstairs to my other horrible class where he forced me into my seat. At lunchtime, I escaped, ran home, and took matters into my own hands. Using the phone book, I found the number for the central Board of Education and called. After I asked for the president, I was connected to his secretary.

“I’ve been abused by the principal of my school,” I explained.

People were sensitive to that word even back then. The secretary immediately patched me through to the president and I told him the story. My principal was investigated, but it didn’t change anything; I still had to go to school.

I don’t know what precipitated my strange relationship with school. Later in life, a therapist posited that I was insecure about my relationship with my mother. There certainly was a lot to be insecure about.

My mother’s great desire in life, as far as I could tell, was to be a writer. It seemed to me she wrote for my entire childhood, although during that time she only published one book in 1973. A Private Treason was a memoir detailing her war years and why she chose to reject her native Germany when the Nazis came to power.

There was nothing in my mother’s background to suggest such a rebellion. Born Ingrid Grütefien into a solidly bourgeois Berlin family (her father was a journalist and her grandfather an architect), as a young woman she made the bold decision to leave Germany in the thirties because she found the specter of Nazi politics anathema. Her leaving, and where that took her, defined the rest of her life.

After a short stop in Vienna—just long enough to start studying medicine, get married to another medical student, and divorce him—she left medical school and moved on to France, which by then had been invaded by the Germans. In a house in the Brécourt near Grenoble at the foot of the French Alps where Resistance fighters were hiding out, my mother fell in love with one—André Dubreuil. Their affair was the stuff of big-screen romance. Separation and reunion. Heroism and the constant threat of death. “We saw in the other’s eyes that the fears each tried to keep to himself lay bared,” my mother wrote in her book. “We reached for each other, but our embraces could not comfort, because they were forever perhaps the last embrace.”

Their affair ended when André was tragically killed in the mountains of the Vercors while waiting on news of the invasion of Normandy right before the end of World War II. Still, he remained the love of my mother’s life. And the father of her first child.

My half brother, André, never met his father, who died while my mother was in her first weeks of pregnancy. Still, the man remained a permanent shadow lurking around our house the entire time I was growing up. My mother and father fought constantly with, or over, my brother, whom she aptly called André since he was in her eyes the reincarnation of her dead lover. (My brother’s legal name, written on his original birth certificate, was Patric-André. As explained to him by our mother, Patric, the K-less French version of Patrick, was chosen to represent the British-French armistice. But after my father adopted him, his name was officially changed to André Patrick Greenburger.)

My brother was a difficult kid, acting out all the time, but if my father tried to assert discipline in any way, my mother wouldn’t have it. “He didn’t mean it” was her constant refrain. One Sunday afternoon at the end of a weekend in the country, André, who was thirteen at the time, didn’t want to leave, so he kept us captive by hiding the distributor cap from the car.

“He didn’t mean it,” my mother said as we sat hostage for hours while André refused to return the necessary part.

“What do you mean, ‘He didn’t mean it’?” my father shouted. “He could run us all over with the car and you’d still say, ‘Oh, he didn’t mean it.’”

Everyone knew what the fight was really about; André was the only remnant of a doomed and noble love. When my father attacked him, it was like he was attacking her dead Resistance fighter. In turn, my mother protected my brother at all costs.

As the sun fell to the tree line, sparkling through the reds and yellows of fall’s leaves, my parents started to go after each other in the usual fashion. I couldn’t stand when they argued and believed I had the magical ability to resolve the conflicts that popped up constantly. “Don’t fight,” I said with all the earnestness of my nine-year-old self. “Dad just needs to get home because he’s got a big meeting tomorrow with someone from Gallimard. And Mom knows how André likes to fool around. I’ll go tell him we need to get back and to bring the part he stole back.”

And with that I ran off to make peace as I always did, my way of creating a role in a family where my place was always on the periphery. If I wanted to make my mother happy (and what boy doesn’t), I should have just left her to her writing. The happiest I ever remember her being was on the publication of A Private Treason. Although she worked part-time at the agency doing clerical stuff, her raison d’être was her story and her writing. Because English was her second language, she spent many years writing and rewriting it with my father’s help.

My mother, Ingrid Grütefien

My parents were at their best while revising my mom’s manuscript. A team with a common goal. Otherwise, they were at one another over André, money, and other disappointments. If I intuitively understood that my mother married my father because when she came to America with a young child she didn’t know anyone, but that she wound up feeling compromised by the bargain, then my suspicions were confirmed by a comment she made to me over the lunch table when I was six years old.

“I have some adwice for you,” she said, her German accent turning her Vs into Ws. “Don’t let some woman marry you for your money.”

That didn’t seem too difficult since I didn’t have any money.

“And,” she continued, “never have children.”

Even though my parents left me pretty much alone, choosing to focus their futile energy on arguing over how to handle André, I quickly got sick of our family dynamic. By the time I turned twelve, I had missed most of the fourth grade, preferring to devote my energies to the agency during the day and billiards at night. Still, the tumult of our neighborhood pool halls was no match for the Sturm und Drang among the members of my family.

I was lying in bed one night when I made a decision to give up trying to be an emotional part of our family. Nothing special happened, no apocalyptic fight, just the inevitably ordinary moment that always precipitates a big change. I’m not going to do this anymore, I vowed to myself. These people are nuts, and if they want to drive themselves even crazier, they’re doing it without me.

I divorced myself from my family emotionally but not financially.

My father was terrible with money. His knack for mismanaging it, losing it, or not making it in the first place was an incredible source of stress within our family. He never gave my mother enough allowance to run the household, so after André, money was their second biggest source of argument. My mother would always go up to my father and say, “I need another twenty dollars.” And he’d either have it or not. She never knew where she stood.

I had already taken charge of the bookkeeping at the agency, so organizing the family finances was a natural outgrowth. Setting my mother up with a fixed amount of money every week was the easiest thing in the world for me to do. I had always been phenomenal at arithmetic, not really higher math with its abstractions, but real numbers. They appeared in my head as clearly as objects in a room, making up a coherent interior. Because I created a picture in my mind, I could see the relationship between the basic data and the conclusion, and I knew when the conclusion was wrong.

“Look. I can manage the money,” I proclaimed to my parents, whether they were listening or not, about my new role. “The rest, you guys have to take care of on your own.”

No more Francis the peacekeeper or Francis the child. Francis the worker was the role I much preferred. The only time I was really truly happy in school was during sixth grade because my teacher, Mr. White, in charge of a lot of the school programs and also a bit of a drunk, was more than willing to hand over his responsibilities to me. I ran the audio-visual department, setting up the projector anytime a class showed a movie. As Mr. White’s boy, I was the lunchroom monitor and ran the milk crew, organizing the deliveries of milk to the lower classes. I didn’t get paid. Being in charge was enough for me.

What I decidedly wasn’t interested in was homework. By 1963, when I was an eighth grader at Halsey Junior High School, my schoolwork was something I relegated to the daily ride on the F train after school from Forest Hills to 57th and Madison, the offices of Sanford J. Greenburger, where I arrived at four o’clock and remained until six thirty when my father, mother, and I would go home to eat dinner.

I loved the agency and literally grew up there. Even when I was a little kid, I would hang out for hours in the incredibly shabby office on 42nd Street my father had before moving to his spiffier digs fifteen blocks north at 595 Madison. During the thirty years my father spent on 42nd Street, the place never had a paint job. He used to sit in his leather tilt chair, cracked to the point where stuffing protruded, but when he tilted it back it would eat away at the plaster on the wall behind him. So by the time we left, there was a big hole in the wall.

The décor suited the agency’s revolving door of characters, who were always scheming, breaking rules, and dreaming about the big payday. My father had one client, Max Werner (real name: Aleksandr Mihailovich Schifrin), who was famous for his prescience when it came to military matters. Exiled from his native Ukraine after the Bolshevik revolution, the self-taught military analyst landed in Germany, where he became widely known as the political editor of a socialist paper and author of more than a thousand articles.

Working at my father’s literary agency in the midseventies

When the Nazis came to power, he fled to France where, shocked to discover how ignorant the French military authorities were of Germany’s plans for war, he wrote The Military Strength of the Powers. After sending a copy to Winston Churchill, he received a personal letter in return during the spring of 1939 that was uncharacteristic of the British leader known for his astute understanding of the dangers the Nazis posed. “I have looked into [your book] with some attention,” Churchill wrote. “I think you greatly exaggerate the military strength of both Russia and Germany.”

A year later, Max was on the run again after the Nazis invaded France. He came to the United States, where he wrote a column that ran in ninety American papers and signed with my father’s agency. Max published a big best seller in ’43 called Attack Can Win. In the September 4, 1943, issue of the New Yorker, Harold Ross wrote, “He has been pretty right from first to last.”

My dad, with assistance from Leo, set out to help Max profit from his predictions. The three of them would sit around the office and cook up scoops based on whatever was hot in the news and sell the stories to the newspaper. “Hey, I’ve got a tip from one of my sources,” Max told an editor from my father’s phone, completely winging it. They were kind of soft things, but not that soft. And they were right more than they were wrong, so they got away with it. (I was only a toddler when Max died of a heart attack, so I have no way of verifying if the story is true, but from what I witnessed in that office, it sounds right.)

My father’s agency was as far from a sleepy, quiet place of literary commerce as one could imagine. Through Ledig, who had formed a small international group of like-minded publishers that were all close friends, the Feltrinelli publishing house became a client. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, son of one of the richest families in Italy, had four interests: publishing, bookstores, communism, and radical politics (which juxtaposed ironically with his father’s passion for banking and real estate, including collecting villas, many fully staffed and filled with fresh flowers despite the fact that they might not be visited for years).

Giangiacomo published endless amounts of communist stuff, but he solidified the reputation of Feltrinelli Editore with Doctor Zhivago. More than a dozen Soviet editors, who condemned Boris Pasternak’s epic that sweeps through the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism as “counter-revolutionary, shoddy work,” banned its publication. In the summer of 1956, it was smuggled out of Russia to thirty-three-year-old Giangiacomo, who published it to epic success. Two years later, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for his book that had been published all over the world in dozens of languages. It still, however, was not appreciated in the Soviet Union, where it wasn’t published until 1987—the Soviet authorities forced the writer to decline the prestigious award.

Staff at the Sanford Greenburger agency

In the late fifties and early sixties, Giangiacomo was one of the regulars hanging around Dad’s agency, usually accompanied by his girlfriend, Inge Schoenthal. If Giangiacomo was a prince masking as the common man with his Groucho Marx-esque glasses and mustache (the first time I met him, at dinner at our house in Queens, he picked up a piece of lettuce that dropped on the floor and ate it, deceiving the housekeeper into thinking he was very poor), Inge was his opposite: a German Jew from ordinary means turned glamorous photographer who seemed to be everywhere and know everyone.

She had a particularly leggy photo of herself catching a fish with Ernest Hemingway and another laughing with Pablo Picasso. She also knew Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Richard Avedon, Henry Miller, and many, many other powerful men. She also knew Ledig, which was how she met Giangiacomo.

It was 1958 and he had just split from his second wife. On a trip to Switzerland to get a new yacht, he made a detour to Hamburg to visit Ledig, who threw a party in honor of his Italian friend and colleague. Inge, invited to the event to take pictures, came “dressed to kill” and sat herself at Giangiacomo’s table, where Ledig said they had “instantly taken to each other, and as they were leaving the party they hardly noticed anyone else.”

Although she wore nothing but designer dresses, her political sympathies lay with the far-left Giangiacomo. He loved her and so did the Italian press, but they couldn’t marry since he was still legally married to his second wife until he received permission in Italy to divorce (apparently he sought an annulment by claiming impotentia erigendi et coeundi or erectile and ejaculator dysfunction, which is how he ended his first marriage).

Inge quickly got used to living the high life (and her job in charge of relations with foreign publishers and authors) and didn’t want to leave her tenure up to the vagaries of Giangiacomo’s romantic interest. On a trip through North America in 1959, they got married in Mexico, but she needed something more solid than a south-of-the-border marriage certificate.

Enter Leo.

He became a consigliore to Inge in her quest to seal the deal with the radical publishing magnate. (Inge wound up playing a vital role in establishing and maintaining Feltrinelli Editore’s literary brand. For decades to follow, she would protect the publishing tradition they created together through personal diplomacy and loyal friendships, even amid the endless scrutiny of bankers and “advisors.” She did this first for her love of Giangiacomo but later for his heir apparent, their son, Carlo, who has been at the helm with the help of his mother since his father’s untimely death. Her diplomacy knows few limits. To this day, she knows the first name of most of the staff of the Feltrinelli bookstores that are in every major Italian city.)

It was surprising that an international socialite would enlist the help of an unemployed émigré in fixing her love life, but I understood it. I often turned to Leo for advice about love affairs when I was a teenager. Despite the cigarette ash down his front, Leo had a way with women.

Although he was married and had a mistress, Leo was always extraordinarily friendly with the agency’s secretaries. Fritzi, however, was one of those secretaries whose love went unrequited. Instead, she settled for Leo as an advisor. He told her to go to Europe and advance her studies in Renaissance literature, which she did. In Italy, she met a man who asked to marry her. Again, she asked Leo what to do, and he told her to marry him. So she married him. Later, when it wasn’t going so well, she turned to Leo once more. He said, “Divorce him. Come back to the States,” which she did . . . all the while carrying a flame for Leo.

In the time Fritzi had gone to Europe, Leo’s wife, Frida (sister of Lise Meitner, a prominent scientist who was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission), and his principal means of support, had died. To make matters worse, his mistress of long standing also died, so Leo was disastrously short of money. His landlord came to him and offered to buy him out of his rent-controlled apartment, which he did, taking the money to live at a hotel for a while. But when that money ran out, he had no place to live. Fritzi, twenty-five years his junior, offered that he move in with her, but on one condition: He had to marry her. That was what she wanted and he needed a place to live, so they got married.

Leo was the perfect person to give Inge advice on her relationship with Giangiacomo, for he took a straight-ahead approach to love as he did everything else in life. He told Inge to get pregnant—and that was exactly what she did, giving birth to Carlo in 1962.

Giangiacomo liked to push the limits of “decent” society when it came to women and books. He was an ardent supporter of the avant-garde and politically extreme. He illegally published and distributed Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was banned under obscenity laws. He also published Che Guevara and Hồ Chí Minh.

Like his romantic entanglements, Giangiacomo’s dangerous tastes in literature found their way into my dad’s office. The most hair-raising experience had to do with Fidel Castro. Having befriended Castro (in a photo with the Cuban leader, Giangiacomo looks every bit the revolutionary with his mustache, thick black eyeglasses, and vaguely military-style shirt), he signed him up to write his memoirs not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli with Fidel Castro

Because we were representing Feltrinelli in the United States, that meant we had become the American agents for Fidel Castro, which was like being Saddam Hussein’s agent after September 11. People thought our country was going to be destroyed because of this guy. So when we were putting together a deal with the legendary publisher Mike Bessie (who had edited writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel as well as founded Atheneum Books, the last major literary house started in the twentieth century), we had to do everything in code.

These were the days when business was done by easily monitored cables and telegrams. We couldn’t have anyone figure out what was going on. If the word “Castro” appeared anywhere in the contracts, we would have been firebombed or who knows what else.

Fidel Castro’s code name at the Sanford J. Greenburger agency became Jesus Barth, which is German for “beard.” The contracts were signed by Feltrinelli and everything was going smoothly until one Saturday morning when my father and I got out of the elevator in front of the office, only to be met with ten men in dark suits, trench coats, and buzz cuts. These guys were definitely not looking to publish a book.

“FBI,” one said, flashing the biggest badge I’d ever seen. “Are you Sanford Greenburger?”

My father nodded his head. Clearly, they had cracked the code.

“We’ll need entry into your office.”

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