Read You or Someone Like You for Free Online Page B

Providence.
    I’m so sorry!
    In a carful of Frenchmen, “Ah, you’re English!” said Bennett.
    Well, sort of, I said.
    Howard: “She’s half American.”
    â€œWell, you,” Bennett turned to Howard, “ you’re American.”
    We wound up moving to the dining car. Bennett went and fetched his wife, Phyllis. “Phyllis, this young man is a newly minted Ph.D. in English literature.” “Anne will be one soon,” said Howard quickly. (It would take me an extra year; I’d been supporting Howard.) “Ah,” said Bennett. Howard was quite thin then, and Bennett had a fatherly hand on his shoulder and, clearly, an idea forming in his head. Almost immediately, unbidden, he brought it up: There was a job in—well, it didn’t really have a name, not yet, Cerf was thinking about it (he looked at Phyllis as he said this), but he had this idea of having a Random House person work directly with the movie studios, selling books to them.
    I did not dare look at Howard. I could feel him holding his breath while his brain was shouting. Howard was twenty-five.
    The only question Bennett asked directly, indeed almost immediately, was: “You two are married?”
    â€œOh!” said Howard. “Yeah!” He indicated France with a chin. “Delayed honeymoon.”
    Cerf nodded warmly at me. (“Such a lovely English girl,” said Phyllis to Howard.) I found them very sweet. I held up my poor little diamond ring, which I adored, so they could admire it.
    We got home and started packing up our cramped apartment in Greenwich Village and moved to West 70th and Amsterdam. My mother flew across the Atlantic to help. She thought our brownstone “kind of dark , Anne.” She looked around with raised eyebrows. She was from the East Side. She helped me cover everything in drop cloths and plan the tiny patch of soon-to-be garden out back as I rollered the walls with a daffodil cream I’d seen in a Macy’s catalog.
    Howard walked to Random House’s offices in the Villard Mansion on Madison near 50th Street. Within days he knew them all—Donald Klopfer (who trained him), Jason Epstein, Jim Silberman, Bob Loomis, Sally Kovalchik, who did the “how to” books. They allhad two-digit phone extensions then. He used to play kick-the-can in the hallways with Howard Kaminsky, who helped him develop the movie sales. Kaminsky was Mel Brooks’s cousin, and Howard worshipped him. He met people at Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf. He basically lived on the phone—it was considered a bizarre job, neither publishing nor movies, a hybrid of the two that at first only Howard and Bennett understood—and he had to earn people’s trust. Bennett gave Howard the phone numbers of a few of the studio heads to start him off and introduced him to the writers, who didn’t exactly know what to do with him. Philip Roth actually thought he was an agent. Saul Bellow thought he was an editorial assistant and would call to ask him to run a manuscript down to Saul’s friend so-and-so on Bleecker, which of course Howard did.
    And he met Shawn of the New Yorker at a party on East 88th, and from Shawn to the writers, and then Bob Gottlieb and the writers Gottlieb hired. They were interested in Howard because Howard, as Mark Singer once put it to me, “kept the writer’s entrance to Hollywood, like Cerberus. But,” said Mark, “with only one head.”
    I loved that image. Howard guarding some fiery hole on East 50th leading to Paramount.
    Through Mort Janklow, Mike Ovitz heard of Howard, and called him, and Bennett, after thinking it over, said absolutely, Howard should interface with Creative Artists Agency. CAA was constantly searching for material for the movies, and Howard would ensure that material would come from Random House. He prepared his pitches, walking into their meetings holding a book in his hand. “Your next