The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (20 page)

And yet I remember very well that what I mostly felt at the time was boredom. Especially after the war in Europe ended, there was very little reason for me to be there that I could see.

And I was still in love, and Tina was in Paris.

I wanted to see her. I knew there had to be a way to cross that invisible barrier between her T/O and mine, and I looked for it. And I found, surprise! there
was
a way. Somewhere in the regulations it said that if what we wanted to do was get married, permission to cross the theater boundaries could be obtained.

We were married in Paris on the third of August, 1945.

The ceremony was conducted in French. I didn't understand a word of it. My "best man" was a French WAC lieutenant, and she nudged me when it was time to say
oui
.

The Army gave us a room in a very Parisian honeymoon hotel just a block or two from the Place de 1'Étoile. They also gave us
tsoris
. Tina was a first lieutenant, and I was an enlisted man. As we were not supposed to "fraternize," except presumably in bed, we were not allowed to eat in either the officers' or the enlisted men's mess. Since there were no civilian restaurants, except for the scarce and high-priced black-market establishments, it seemed we were not meant to take any meals together. But Tina had a friend, and the friend had both intelligence and influence. We wound up in a private dining room of the mess for major generals and up. The generals ate very well, and we ate better than they.

And on the last day of our week together I went to get a haircut in a little barbershop just off the Champs Élysées and, waiting my turn, tried to puzzle out the headline in the newspaper of the man next to me. It said something about
le bombe atomique
. I laughed to myself, careful not to offend my neighbor. These crazy French and their crazy, sensation-seeking newspapers, I told myself. What won't they print next?

But it was all true, and a couple of days later the Japanese surrendered.

Six months later Tina and I were back in New York, looking at each other in our hotel room off Times Square. Not only were we civilians again, but that lark in Paris had taken effect and we were married.

8 Ten Percent of a Writer

When I get up before an audience to speak, there is usually someone to introduce me, and that person almost always mentions, among other tidbits of biography, that at one time I was a literary agent.

That part of my life is a quarter-century past, and besides, it ended badly for me. Everything considered, I would just as soon forget it, but it still fascinates the introducers and the blurb copywriters, and I think I know why. Everyone at all involved with writing has heard of agents. Hardly anyone knows what they do or who they are. They are shadowy figures who seem to wield great power, but who do they wield it on? and how?

I'll tell you all that, never fear. But I didn't actually get into the agency business until 1947, so there is a little chronology I'd like to catch up on first.

The Army gave me my freedom on my birthday, 26 November 1945. I spent most of the next couple of months waiting for my new wife to get out to join me, and I spent them with my father.

He was at the height of his prosperity just then. There was big money in war. He had made a lot of it.

He would have made even more if the war had been kind enough to keep going another year or two. The Japanese surrender was a body blow. If they had only had the consideration to keep fighting as advertised until every island of the homeland was overrun, he could have soaked away a million or two, easy.

He had already begun the soaking-away process, and one of the soaking places was a thousand-acre farm abutting Camp Upton, Long Island. I spent a couple of solitary weeks there that winter, listening to the farmhouse turn itself on and off—the refrigerator, the oil burner, the water pump in the basement, all sorts of friendly little machines keeping themselves busy just for me. I did a little writing, and a lot of loafing, and experimented with the idea of being the son of a gentleman farmer. It was going to be quite a farm, one day. Pop had had two hundred acres cleared and planted in apple seedlings, put a few hundred more into cauliflower, a few hundred into potatoes, and a small but very expensive patch of a few acres into strawberry vines. He had bought a riding horse for his friend Lillian's daughter. I tried to ride the beast to keep him sweet, but it was too late; he was already so hog-fat and lazy that my best summer-camp horsemanship could not get him to move in any direction except toward the barn. I regret the absence of that farm. If it were still in the family we would be multimillionaires for the land alone, but it's the farm itself that I miss. In the event, it went down the tube because my father had soaked too much money into too many different ventures, and the Army's niggardly way with contract cancellations caught him short.

I watched some of that money seep into the ground, leaving nothing but a stain, one night at his apartment. He was entertaining some financial friends at a dinner party, and they sang him the siren song of Cosmopolitan Records. Cosmo was a tiny war-born competitor to such biggies as RCA and Columbia, but it had lucked out in a big way with an oddball disk called "Tubby the Tuba." All America was mad for "Tubby the Tuba." The orders poured in. Cosmo could not press the records fast enough. What Cosmo needed, the sirens sang, was a manufacturing genius like my father, someone who could rev up the antique machinery and get production up to demand . . . and, oh, yes, of course he would be expected to bring in some couple of dollars to help pay for the expansion.

My father's eyes were aglow. I recognized the signs. I kicked him under the table as hard as I could, but he was firmly on the hook and with no interest at all in wriggling free.

So he signed aboard Cosmopolitan Records, and it was a disaster. We went out to the plant to study the production process, lumps of black biscuit tossed into a steam-heated press that squeezed them and molded them and cured them and baked the labels onto them. My father mastered that easily enough and got the rate of production up to competitive levels. But then what would we do with all that production once the madness for "Tubby" died? Obviously there was a need to diversify. So they recorded some hot new prospects and put some of the presses to making the new ones, and "Tubby"'s production figures slipped back. The capricious American public despised the new records. "Tubby," contrarily, kept blossoming, but as we were shipping so few we lost the exclusive rights, and my father lost his shirt.

He still had plenty left. Remained the machine shops: But the War Department was being unexpectedly hard-nosed about paying off for contract cancellations, and what had looked like millions of dollars in income materialized at barely enough to pay the notes.

Remained the farm.

That was blue-chip, gilt-edged; my father had thought it out carefully, and he had done everything exactly right, with one little mistake. He had planned for the long haul. The haul turned out short, and so did he. The apple trees would not produce a crop for four years. The strawberries not for two. It was a bad cauliflower year; a cold snap froze it in the ground, a total loss. Potatoes—ah, they were superb! Tens of thousands of bushels, plump and perfect. But so were everybody else's potatoes that year, and they were hardly worth the trouble of carting to the market to sell. The government stepped in for Long Island potato growers, bought them in the field, chopped them up, dyed them purple, and sold them for hog feed. He made a few bucks on that, but the rest was all ashes. Within a year he was broke again.

I really think my father was some sort of financial genius. He took risks, cut corners, laid it all on the fall of dice; in his life he earned more than a dozen ordinary men, but he lost more, too. He made a couple more modest coups in the remaining decade of his life, but when he died his estate did not cover the price of the funeral.

I think this fiscal idiocy runs in the family. The one talent I am certain I do not have in any measure at all is the orderly cultivation of assets. I know a lot about the theory of money management; what I don't know is how to apply it to real money.

This must be so. How else can one account for the fact that over the next six or seven years I managed to repeat my father's feat by going broke as a literary agent?

Consider the facts. Running a literary agency is about as low-capital, low-overhead as a business enterprise can get. I was really very good at it. I managed to establish a near-monopoly position in science fiction, then the fastest-growing area of the publishing business. Of all the writers who were any good at sf, I represented probably two out of three: John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov and Cliff Simak and Bob Sheckley and Frank Robinson and Jack Williamson and Cyril Kornbluth and Jim Blish and Fritz Leiber and William Tenn and H. Beam Piper and—oh, hell; of the top fifty sf writers of the early 50s, I represented at least thirty-five. The biggest markets in the field,
Galaxy
and
Analog
and Doubleday and Ballantine, all bought more from me than from all other agents and individual writers combined. Not just sf; I had successful clients in half a dozen other fields as well, Westerns and mysteries, regional novels and how-to-do-it books; I sold to film and to the fledgling TV markets, and I had a network of foreign representatives abroad. And after seven industrious years I had managed to lose thirty thousand dollars I didn't have.

I didn't set out to be a literary agent after World War II. I set out to be a novelist. In order to do that, I decided to become an advertising copywriter.

Tina got out of the service in February of 1946. We stayed for a short time in a hotel near Times Square, and then Dave Kyle came along with an idea. He had also just got his civilian clothes back, and his brother had a brand-new postwar car he was willing to lend Dave for a while. So the three of us drove down to Florida, Dave to look up an old girlfriend in Lakeland, Tina and I to visit her parents in Orlando, then a comfortably lazy community of lovely warm orange groves and avocado farms surrounding about a million tiny lakes. We lived on lotus for a restorative month and then came back to New York to find an apartment in (where else?) Greenwich Village. There didn't seem to be any great pressure. We were young, and pleased with ourselves as honorable veterans of the last of the just wars, and we had plenty of money. Neither of us had spent much during the war. We had pay accumulated, and my mother had left me a little when she died. We could have lived frugally without working at all for at least a year or two.

I didn't much want to live frugally, and the apartment was far from frugal. It cost $175 a month. That doesn't seem like a lot after thirty years of inflation, but it was rather more than my monthly income had ever been in my life up until then. And it was really a nice apartment, modly furnished top floor in an old building on Grove Street, just down the block from where Tom Paine had written one of his
Crisis
feuilletons and around the corner from several of the favorite hangouts of the Mafia. A roof garden went with it. Tina and I carried brown-paper bags of topsoil all the way in from my father's farm to fatten the garden up, and on summer nights it was a marvelous place to sit and observe the world below. Our building was owned by a prosperous and art-loving dentist. He encouraged talent, especially musical, and one of his protégés was a young pianist named Constantine Stronghilos. Tina and I were invited to his first recital, and there was no doubt that he had the touch for Chopin and Liszt. For years afterward I kept watching the pages of the Sunday
Times
to see when he would make his breakthrough into fame, but he never did.
*
Tina was as gregarious as a pretty puppy and we quickly made friends—notably Kathleen and Joe Skelly, in the building across the back yards from us, and through them we met people like Ayn Rand and others who floated through their cocktail parties. Tina began taking courses at the New School, in subjects like theater and paranormal psychology. We built mazes and tried to telepathically command mice to follow one path rather than another—it never worked; and she wrote endless scripts for plays and musical reviews, which didn't work very well, either. (She subsequently published half a dozen good books, but the theater never opened its doors to her.) It was a fine way to live, but I could see that our resources were not going to survive it indefinitely without replenishment. Besides, I was about ready to go back to work. I hauled out the novel I had written in the tufa-block EM club in Stornara. It was evident at once that it had a great flaw. It was about the advertising business. I didn't
know
anything about the advertising business, and it showed.

That was a problem, but for that problem there was an easy solution. I bought a Sunday
Times
, looked under the help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters, and answered three of them. And on April Fool's Day of 1946 David Altman put me to work in his little Madison Avenue agency as chief (and only) copywriter.

Advertising writing should be under constant surveillance by the narcs; it is addictive, and it rots the mind. When you spend your days persuading Consumers to Consume articles they would never in their lives dream of wanting if you didn't tickle them into it, you develop fantasies of power. No, not fantasies. Power. Each sale is a conquest, and it is your silver tongue that has made them roll over and obey. If you do not end your day with a certain contempt for your fellow human beings, then you are just not paying attention to what it is that you do.