The Poet's Funeral, page 4
It was about time for some shmoozing and boozing. I wandered around the house admiring art. I picked up another tumbler of single-malt scotch and a little brie and caviar sandwich, then stepped up some tile steps and wandered out into the back yard to admire the topiary juniper bushes in the moonlight. I found Maxwell Black out there sitting by himself by the swimming pool, a bottle of Bud in his hand. He looked up at me and said, “Howdy, Guy.” He didn’t stand, and I didn’t sit down; we were fairly close to eye level anyway. He looked snazzy in clean faded jeans, a lavender chambray shirt with pearl buttons, and his trademark yellow bandanna ascot.
“What do you think of the party?” I asked him.
“Hmmph,” he said.
“You don’t care for this kind of horseshit?”
“Don’t insult horseshit.”
The free drinks and canapés were inside, so we were the only ones out on the patio. “So Max,” I said, “what’s the real story on Out of My Face? Is it ever going to come out, or is it dead in the water?”
“You got me by the seat of the pants,” he answered. “The poems are all written, as you know.”
“Indeed I do.”
“So now it’s up to Mitzi. But there’s this standoff happening. One of them gals has to bend, or the world will be deprived of another fine collection of poems.”
“What’s the squabble about?”
“Two words,” he said. “Heidi Yamada. Sorry, pardner, but that’s all I’m allowed to say.”
I chuckled. “It’s always about Heidi. Everything’s about Heidi.”
“I didn’t say it was about Heidi, exactly. I said it was about two words.”
“You’re a man of few words yourself, Max.”
“Well, this is her night. She gets the prize anyway, and she spent all afternoon getting her pitcher took.”
“That must have been fun.”
“That photographer is one hot little chick.”
“Marjorie? She seems pretty taken with Art Summers.”
“Coupla sluts,” Max snorted. “Made for each other. Somebody’s going to get laid tonight.”
“Well look at you two! Two of my favorite men,” chirped Beatrice Wright, wending her way across the patio with a champagne glass in each hand. “Max, honey, you look stunning tonight. Love the bandanna.”
“Shit,” Max said. “Wisht old Heidi would let me stop wearing these damn things.”
“It’s all packaging,” Beatrice said. “You’re in good hands. Anything new coming out for you?”
“Naw. Heidi’s pretty caught up in her own work these days.”
“Maybe you need a new agent,” she told him. “You know I’d kill to get a client like you.”
“You’d have to,” I said. “Max is Heidi’s personal property.”
“Shit,” Max mumbled.
“I need another scotch,” I said, and I moseyed back into the living room, which had become more crowded with bookish bohemians. I knew a lot of them and most of them knew me. I had to dodge my way across the room to keep from being talked to or stepped on.
I met up with Carol at the piano; she was singing along with the piano player, who looked spiffy in a powder-blue tuxedo and a Hawaiian shirt. The piano was quite a piece of furniture, a huge ebony grand polished to look like a black mirror.
“You doing okay?” I asked her.
She handed me her glass and said, “Would you get me some more gin?”
I did, then went on wandering.
I said hello to Robert MacDowell of Story Line Press, Randall Beek of Bookpeople, Tree Swenson of Copper Canyon. Bobbi Rix of Consortium was laughing with Eric Kampmann of NBN, each of them outsmiling the other. Marjorie Richmond bustled among us, urging us to just act natural (“God, I’m only Publishers Weekly. Smile!” Flash!) I chatted with Howard Junker, Douglas Messerli, Jim Hepworth, all the small-press western bigshots. Forgive me for name-dropping, but let me point out that they all said hello to me, too. Maybe it was because I was Heidi Yamada’s first publisher, the one who discovered her talent for the first time. After Arthur Summers, of course. He’ll always have that honor.
“I feel deeply honored,” he said, finally, after the piano player struck a large chord and the cocktail crowd hushed to hear their next Poet Laureate. He stood on the steps that led out onto the patio and addressed the assembled audience in the sunken living room. “I feel deeply honored to be here tonight, and I want to thank the Western States Arts Federation for giving me this opportunity, and on behalf of WESTAF I also want to thank our gracious, generous hosts tonight, Pete and Carla Benedetti, for having us into their lovely home.”
Gentle applause.
“This is the moment we wait for every year, the annual WESTAF poetry award presentation. There’s no surprise this year; the winner was announced two weeks ago. That was before it was announced that the book itself is on hold and won’t be published for a few weeks yet. But I think we all know about delays in this business. Authors blame them on publishers, publishers blame them on printers, printers blame them on God, and God is too busy trying to get Inland Book Company and Bookazine to carry the Bible.”
Chuckles.
“The winner of this year’s award, Heidi Yamada, is a remarkable phenomenon in the publishing world. You could say she’s a significant sidestep in the history of literature, and I only call her a sidestep because she’s taken poetry in a new direction that nobody else has dared to explore. In any case, her poems are unmistakably her poems, and all of us look forward to reading the new collection, Out of My Face. The judges who have read it assure me that we’re in for some surprises.
“The Western States Arts Federation honors western authors and western publishers by awarding a handsome check to one poet and one publisher each year, to celebrate and help promote a book properly in a business world dominated by the New York Literary Establishment. To be eligible for this award, the author and publisher must each be from one of the seven Western states, which pretty much guarantees that the award also celebrates small and independent publishing, a tradition that is older than the New York Literary Establishment, older than New York itself.
“Some authors, like Heidi, start out with the small press and use their critical achievement as a stepping stone to the larger houses. And like Heidi, many of them find that the world of big-time publishing is not so devoted to literature as to sales. A few authors who make this journey become stars. Others leave New York and leave the writing life, disillusioned. Some return to the more comfortable and artistically rewarding atmosphere of small-press independent publishing. Tonight’s honoree, Heidi Yamada, has done all three.
“Heidi and I go back quite a ways, as some of you know. That’s why it’s with affection and nostalgia as well as pleasure that I now award her this certificate and this check. Here you go, Heidi. Can’t wait to read that book, doll!”
Heidi stepped up next to Arthur Summers and accepted his chaste kiss and the check. Still holding his hand, she beamed at her audience and nodded to their applause.
“Oh God,” she breathed, when the crowd settled down. “This is so cool. I know there are a whole bunch of people I should be thanking right now, and some of them are in this room right now, and God, I’m really grateful to them, I really am, but since they’re all in my book, well, you’ll see when you read it, if you ever read it, I mean if Mitzi Milkin gets off her ass and her high horse and sends the damn thing to the printer, shit. Oops. Anyway, yeah Arthur here and I, we go back a ways like he said, in fact he gave me my first big break. Well maybe not that first break, that happened in high school in the back of Bob Snyder’s Mustang, but anyway. Art Summers, our new Poet Laureate—hey, congratulations, baby!—he gave me some great advice when I was just starting out. ‘If you want to get to the top,’ he told me, ‘you got to start on the bottom.’ And then he said, ‘Turn over.’”
Flash!
Marjorie probably gave up her one chance to sleep with a Poet Laureate by photographing Professor Summers at that moment, with such a horror-struck look on his bright red face. His wide grin turned to a scowl in what looked like time-lapse photography, and he looked over his snickering audience as if they were a classroom of misbehaving children. Then he strode down from the tile steps and the party parted as he headed for the front entrance of the Benedetti house and left without saying good-bye.
Back on the tiles, Heidi shrugged and said, “Well, he never did last very long, as I remember.”
But she had lost her audience. The party was revving up again with cocktail chatter, and the piano man began to play some pleasant ballad and I decided to go check on Carol. She wasn’t at the piano, but there were Max and Beatrice, holding hands. She clinked a champagne glass against his beer bottle and sang along with the piano: “I’ve got a crush on you.…”
“Hey, what’s going on here?” Heidi stormed over and pointed at Beatrice’s left foot, which was outside its shoe and resting on the top of Max’s blue suede boot. “You playing footsie with my man, Beatrice?”
The piano player played on. Beatrice gently put the champagne glass on the piano’s shiny top and put her foot back into her shoe.
“Huh?”
“Aw, sugar, old Beatrice is just trying to show me how to flirt at a cocktail party so I can keep up with you, baby,” Max said, grinning. He took a swig of Bud. “Okay, baby?”
Heidi ignored Max. “You keep your hands and your feet to yourself, Beatrice. Max is my property. Everyone knows you screw your clients. Well, Max is not your client, and you’re not screwing him. Is that understood?”
“Aw, Heidi,” Max persisted. “She wasn’t doing any of that.”
“Oh shut up, Max,” Heidi said. To Beatrice she said, “Make yourself useful for a change. Go get me a glass of champagne.” She turned to the piano player and said, “Quit playing that stupid song.”
Flash!
Marjorie was back among us. Heidi quickly dropped her fury and smiled sweetly at the camera, then at me, then at Carol, who had returned to the scene with a fresh glass of gin, then at the piano player, while Marjorie kept pointing and clicking her camera. The grande finale was a big kiss on Maxwell Black’s lips. Lovebirds, you gotta love ’em.
“Come on, Maxwell,” Heidi said. “I’ve had enough of this. Take me gambling.”
Carol and I got away from the piano and walked around the perimeter of the living room and out onto the patio. “Well,” she said, “welcome to the ABA. Having fun?”
“What a crowd,” I said. “That old gang of mine.”
“Not to mention that little redhead.”
“What do you have against Marjorie?” I asked. “So New Yorkers are a little different from us, big deal. I can’t wait to see her pictures of this party in Publishers Weekly.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Carol said. “Marjorie Richmond is a phony.”
“You keep saying that. You’re just jealous.”
Carol chuckled. “She’s too short for you, chum. Anyway, I want to get back to the hotel.”
“What if Marjorie isn’t ready to leave?”
“Maybe the doorman will call her a cab.”
Back inside, the party had thinned out, and uniformed caterers were picking up glasses around the room. We found Marjorie on the bench next to the piano player. He was a good-looking man even if his taste in clothes was a bit odd, even for Las Vegas. The two of them were playing, and replaying, and replaying, the first eight bars of “Heart and Soul.”
“We’re ready to go,” Carol told her.
“Big day tomorrow,” I added.
Marjorie took her hands off the keys and lost her smile, then found it again as she turned to her piano partner and said, “Casey, can you give me a ride home?”
Casey grinned. “Sure. My place or yours?”
“Whatever. Now, where were we?”
They got back into “Heart and Soul,” and Carol and I got back into the warm desert night outside the Benedettis’ ranch mansion. I gave the valet ticket to one of the teenage goons standing around in white shirts and clip-on bow ties.
As we waited for our car, Carol ruffled my hair and said, “Tell me again, Guy. Just what is it you found so charming about Heidi Yamada?”
Beatrice Knight
Opening the Door for a Star
Unlike a lot of you here today, I am not a poet. I don’t even read poetry for pleasure. When I read poetry, it’s all business.
I am in the business of recognizing talent. I am also in the business of opening doors. I am a literary agent. I’m good at what I do.
But the humbling truth is that if I am considered the best literary agent west of the Hudson River it is not simply because I know how to open doors. No, if I am successful—and let’s face it, I am successful—it is because of the talent I choose to represent. I do not sell schlock. I sell only the best writing and represent only the top writers. The stars.
For the most part, Heidi Yamada managed her own career. She found her first publisher without my help, and she found her last publisher by herself also. But in a move that was fortunate for both of us, she allowed me to advise and direct and represent her when she made the giant step from the noble but obscure world of small-press publishing to the major leagues. The New York Literary Establishment.
The New York Literary Establishment can be a frightening jungle. Heidi was a sweet young poet just crawling with talent, just waiting to be taken advantage of. I was her guide. I opened some doors. I made sure the powers that be took notice, paid attention, paid respect, and paid well.
I am grateful to Heidi, not only for the fifteen percent—I worked for that—but for the gift of her loyalty and friendship, and for the honor of having polished such a bright, shining star.
The first time I ever talked to Beatrice Knight was when she called me up from the Miramar Hotel during the Santa Barbara Writers Conference back in 1981. I had never heard of her before, which she found difficult to accept.
“Oh come now, Guy dear, you are a publisher, are you not?”
“I am.”
“Well, sweetie, every publisher knows who Beatrice Knight is, so don’t pretend not to be excited and intimidated by this phone call.”
“What do you want, Ms. Knight?”
“I want to give Heidi Yamada the jump start she deserves,” she told me. “Do you have any objection?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you have an option on Heidi’s next book?” she asked.
“No way.”
“Good. I’m going to make her a star.”
***
People have asked me if I resented the fact that Heidi Yamada deserted Guy Mallon Books after her first book and went on to sign with Random House for her second.
Hah. The truth is, I didn’t even want to keep And Vice Versa in print, but I couldn’t very well get out of it, after the first printing sold out so quickly.
Fluke or phenomenon or fraud? All I know is she pulled it off. She still had a key to Summers’ office on campus and shortly before the book was due back from the printer she spent a weekend there, typing his entire Rolodex onto Avery labels. And she stole a full box of English Department no. 10 envelopes.
We ordered a thousand extra covers to be printed, trimmed, and shipped with the books, and when the shipment arrived we had the backs of the covers printed with an order form. Heidi wanted to print one of her poems on the back too, but I argued her out of that. The picture, the blurb, that was enough, I told her, and reluctantly, mercifully, she went along with it.
We sent the mailing out into the world to the Summers list and to my own catalog list. I didn’t want to use my catalog list, but Heidi accused me of being ashamed of her book, and of course I couldn’t admit that. She told me Summers was proud to have us use his list, which turned out to be a total lie, but by the time I learned that, the orders were coming in like bees to the hive, and I was too astounded to care.
The first printing of five hundred copies sold out in three months, all to full-price mail-order customers. Lawrence Holgerson ordered ten copies. The price was ten bucks. I gave ten percent to my author, which left me with $4500. I had doubled my money.
So I couldn’t very well say no to a second printing, even though by then I was beginning to wish I had never met this prima donna.
I take that back.
I’ll never regret and I’ll always be joyfully grateful for those first six months with Heidi, when we were in production on And Vice Versa.
For one thing, she transformed the front half of my business from a junk store to an elegant bookshop, bright and colorful, with fresh flowers on the table and customers lined up at the register. She did that all herself, leaving me free to work in the back room, cataloging my postwar American poets and learning how to be a publisher.
Second, she made me a publisher. Because she expected me to do things right, I read all the books and learned the vocabulary. I signed up for the CIP program, got my ISBN prefix, joined COSMEP and PMA, and subscribed to PW. Most people don’t know what any of those initials stand for, and maybe they’re lucky, but I was having fun.
Third, Heidi restored my sexual self-confidence, which had taken a nearly fatal beating with the death of my second marriage. She made me feel tall again—or at least she made me feel as I imagine tall people feel all the time. I won’t go into details, but let me tell you it was worth it all, even the embarrassing success of And Vice Versa.
While it lasted.
It formally ended in the back room, when I wrote her the check for five hundred dollars, her ten percent royalty for the sale of And Vice Versa.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“You earned it.”
“What, for the sex?”
“The what?”
“You don’t have to pay me for all the lovin’, Guy. You paid me plenty by publishing my book.”
“Are you telling me that you slept with me just to get me to publish your book?”
