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