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