Joseph Heller Michael Crichton

From “Avid Reader,” Robert Gottlieb on working with a few of his authors.

Joseph Heller On Catch 22, as on all other books we worked on together, Heller was sharp, tireless, and ruthless (with himself), whether we were dealing with a word, a sentence, a passage of dialogue, or a scene. We labored like two surgeons poised over a patient under anaesthesia. “This isn’t working here.” “What it we move it there.” “No, better to cut.” “Yes, But then we have to change this.” “Like this?” “No like that.” “Perfect!” Either of us could have been either voice in this exchange. I wasn’t experienced enough then to know how rare his total lack of defensiveness was.

Joe and I worked with the same focus and compatibility on Something Happened. As we were finishing up I said to him, “One last thing. Your man’s name is Bill Slocum, but it doesn’t sound right to me. I don’t think he’s a Bill.” When Joe asked me what name would sound right, I said, “Bob. He’s a Bob.” This was one of the very few times I ever saw Joe nonplussed. “He was Bob,” he said. “I changed him to Bill because I thought you might be upset.” I told him it didn’t upset me at all. “This guy is nothing like me. We just happen to share a name.” So Bill was restored to Bob. This is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling complete identification with a writer.

Michael Crichton Crichton had a keen eye, or nose, for cutting-edge areas of science that could be used as material for thrillers while cleverly popularizing the hard stuff for the general public. You got a lesson while you were being scared. What Michael wasn’t was a very good writer. The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept but it was a mess--sloppily plotted, underwritten, and worst of all, with no characterization whatsoever. His scientists lacked human specificity; the only thing that distinguished some of them from others was that some died and some didn’t. I realized right away that with his quick mind and extraordinary work habits, he could patch the plot, sharpen the suspense, clarify the science--in fact, do everything necessary except create convincing human beings. It occurred to me that instead of trying to help him strengthen the human element, we could make a virtue of necessity by stripping it away entirely; by turning The Andromeda Strain from a documentary novel into a fictionalized documentary. Michael was all for it--I think he felt relieved.

The thing I was proudest of in my editing of the book was my single contribution to the workings of the plot. Michael would years later recall it this way in the Paris Review: at the climax of the action, he said, “I had it so that one of the characters was supposed to turn on a nuclear device, and there was supposed to be suspense about whether or not that would happen. Bob said, No, no, the switch has to turn itself on automatically, and the character has to turn it off. He was absolutely right.” Chaim Potok After the usual editorial work was accomplished, there remained a major problem with Potok’s first novel: the title. I can’t remember what the original one was, but it was hopelessly fancy. No one could come up with anything plausible: the book had so many aspects that it seemed impossible to find something that reflected the whole. Very late in the day we still had no title, and a jacket had to be designed and the book announced. I was brooding on the problem as I was walking down the hall at Simon & Schuster to the men’s room when I ran into a man named Arthur Sheekman, to whom I had given an office when Groucho Marx, his closest friend, asked him to come east and lend a hand in putting together The Groucho Letters, which I was overseeing at the time. Arthur was a screenwriter--he had written a bunch of Marx Brothers movies, starting with Monkey Business, as well as movies for Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, and others--and he possessed a friendly elegance and refinement that made him a favorite on the hall. “You look worried,” he said to me as we passed each other. “What’s the problem?” So I told him I was going nuts trying to find a title for a book about boys in wartime Brooklyn, Hasidism, and baseball. “Call it The Chosen,” he said casually, and walked on. Literary history was made because I had to take a leak.

Bob Dylan I had agreed with Bob Dylan’s lawyer to publish a collection of his lyrics--to be called, oddly enough, Lyrics--that was to include his entire output of songs from 1961 to 1982. Once the text was organized and tweaked to Dylan’s satisfaction, there was a major bridge to cross: the book’s design. It was to include a number of his drawings, and he was very focussed on how they, and it, would look, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me what he had in mind. I asked Knopf’s hippest art director to come up with something and sent his elegant design for Dylan’s approval. His approval didn’t come, so I suggested we get together to talk about it, and since I didn’t want to expose him to the curiosity of the entire office, we decided he would come over to my house at lunchtime. Which he did, in his usual scruffy guise, actually not so different from my own scruffy guise. For twenty minutes or so, we danced around the subject of his visit, but he was tongue-tied--he couldn’t explain what he didn’t like about our design or articulate what direction he thought we should take next. Finally, in desperation, I told him I just had to have a clue, and after more backing and filling he managed to stammer out that maybe we could come up with something a little more “Midwestern”? … With that clue, I turned to our chief book designer, Betty Anderson, a fragile aging lady from South Carolina who wore white gloves to the office and had lunch every day at the very ladylike Women’s Exchange. Betty had heard of Bob Dylan but had never heard any of his music, so I loaned her my complete collection of Dylan LPs and she bravely took herself off to see Dont [note: no apostrophe] Look Back, the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, which was being revived at some theater near her. She loved the music, she loved the movie, she loved Dylan, and she quickly came up with simple, handsome designs that I messengered to him downtown. Two hours later my private phone rang in my office. “Bob? Bob Dylan here. I got the designs. I love them. Don’t change a thing. Thank the lady.” I didn’t tell him that Betty was Southern, not Midwestern.