Another Life by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online

the grounds that we didn’t take the cold war seriously enough.
    My interviewer picked up his telephone and whispered into it. Was he calling for the police, I wondered, or for security guards to eject me from the building? We sat tensely for a moment, then the door opened and an attractive young woman entered. “Say something to her in Russian,” he said to me, with a smile of satisfaction. We spoke in Russian for a minute or so. She nodded at her boss.
    A look of gloom settled on my interviewer’s face. He had clearly expected to catch me out in a lie. He waved her away, gave me a thin smile, and made a steeple with his fingers. “You can’t be too careful these days,” he said. He stood up, to show the interview was over. “You’ll hear from us,” he said.
    I did not think that was likely, which proved to be correct. Afterquite a few similarly depressing and unsuccessful interviews, I decided that something must be wrong with my résumé, though I couldn’t think of anything I could change. Would it be better not to admit to knowing foreign languages? Was it a mistake to say that I loved reading? Did the combination of Le Rosey and Magdalen College, Oxford, sound too frivolous or snobbish? Did my curriculum vitae lack the common touch? The few people who were willing to give me an explanation for turning me down said that I was overqualified to be an assistant editor, but one or two said that I was too inexperienced. They did not suggest how I was to gain experience, however.
    Just as I was about to give up on the whole idea, I was saved by an old friend of my father’s, Morris Helprin (father of novelist Mark Helprin, who would eventually be my assistant). He had run the London Films office in New York during and after the war, and I had called him in case he had any suggestions. He had a friend, Herbert Alexander, who was a vice president at Pocket Books. Paperback publishing might not be what I was looking for, of course, but it might be a way to get my foot in the door, if I wasn’t too fussy to go into a business where sales meant more than literature. I denied any fussiness or snobbish love of literature, and Morris, the kindest of men, soon called me back to say that I had an interview with Alexander.
    “By the way,” Morris added, as he was about to hang up, a note of warning in his voice. “Herb is a real down-to-earth guy.”
    I said that I would bear that in mind, wondering just exactly what Morris meant.
    “His bark is worse than his bite, just remember that. Don’t let him bully you, that’s all.”
    Oh God! I said to myself and put down the telephone receiver with a sense of dread.
    S O FAR book publishing had seemed to me a pretty staid business, so I was not prepared to find Herbert M. Alexander, vice president of Pocket Books, lying back in a barber’s chair while being shaved. Beside him, an attractive young woman in a smock was buffing his nails. At his feet, an elderly black man was on his knees, shining Alexander’s shoes.
    The shoes, like Alexander himself, were outsize, resembling shiny black rowboats turned upside down on the beach. He was apparently abig man, with the build of a wrestler, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a full belly. He had a big head, too, crowned with a crew cut, and wore tinted aviator goggles. He looked, in fact, just like the Americans in Gilles’s famous cartoons in the London Daily Express , an Englishman’s idea of what an American ought to be, right down to the button-down shirt, the narrow bow tie, and the massive class ring of God only knew what school or college. He had a big man’s voice, too, low and rumbling, though rendered somewhat indistinct by the fact that he was speaking through a thick layer of shaving cream.
    He waved me over to sit down next to him and reached out to shake my hand hard. “Call me Herb, kid,” he growled brusquely, and immediately launched into convoluted narrative having to do, I dimly perceived, with the