Flashback, February 1966: Susann’s ‘Pink Trash’ Takes Publishing World by Storm

In writing Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann was biting the hand that wouldn’t feed her. A flop as an actress, she took revenge on the theater and film industries that scoffed at her talent with her first novel, published this month 60 years ago.

As an early 1980s undergrad, I nodded in agreement when one of my English Department professors confidently predicted that, though Valley of the Dolls had topped the bestseller lists, its lack of merit would eventually put it out of print. He turned out to be only half right.

At one point, the novel went out of print and stayed that way for 15 years. But a clamor must have gone up for this guilty pleasure, because in the autumn of 1997 it was reissued, leading to a phrase associated with it making its appearance in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Word Watch” column in April 1998: “pink trash,” defined as “the newly revived literacy” of Susann’s novel.

“Word Watch” drily noted the term’s origin: “reports that [Susann] typed her manuscript on pink paper.” The “trash” part of the phrase came from the book’s subject matter, “the seamy side of show business.”

Maverick publisher Bernard Geis took a flyer on the book when other, more reputable publishers, as revolted by its awful style and structure as by its tawdry content, passed when it was offered to them.

Little did he know that the author he gambled on would capitalize on changing sexual mores and her own tireless promotional know-how to push the novel to the top of the bestseller list—or that she would become so annoyed by him that she’d dump him when she got to her next book, The Love Machine.

Over the prior decade, readers had become accustomed, through novels like Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place and D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to more graphic depictions of sexuality. Now, Ms. Susann was not only including pre-marital and extra-marital sex, but same-sex relationships.

Moreover, with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians continually in the news for experimenting with hard drugs, all the pill-popping that the author included (the “dolls” of the title referred to valium) paled by comparison.

For readers actually paying attention to characters, Susann included entertainment figures that most, if not all, of her readers could have guessed at: a Broadway musical-comedy star jealous of her perch (Ethel Merman); a rising young star who becomes addicted to pills (Judy Garland); a blond beauty (Marilyn Monroe); and a reputed “good girl” who, at the start of her career, becomes involved with an older, married man (Grace Kelly).

Valley of the Dolls was a roman a clef (literally, “novel with a key”), a literary genre that over the years has figured in The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night, and The Dharma Bums. But Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac possessed something that Susann clearly didn’t: ability.

Maybe you are among the relative few who know something of the story of Susann from the 2000 film Isn’t She Great, with Bette Midler as the obstreperous author. I stress the word “something” because, as with so many “based-on-fact” movies, it departs from reality in some respects. (For instance, the character “Michael Hastings,” stunned by the cyclonic Ms. Susann, was actually legendary editor and author Michael Korda.)

But the movie was correct in one respect: publishing staffers who dealt with her on a regular basis probably wanted to scream “Help!” whenever they heard her on the phone or, worse, saw her entering their offices.

But booksellers from coast to coast loved her. She’d come in laden with all kinds of stuff: gifts, personalized copies of her books, and, for the truckers hauling them from the warehouse, trays of Danish pastries.

And, because, through contacts made by her publicist husband Irving Mansfield, she’d appeared on “The Tonight Show” with provocative opinions on everything, crowds would be waiting on her book tours. In fact, her great innovation wasn’t her content or style but the author promotional circuit.

More than a few critical brickbats came Susann’s way, though the ones that may have hurt the most came from Gloria Steinem (who lamented her opposition to feminism) and Sara Davidson (who, after taking advantage of her hospitality and thoughtfulness in an interview—including making a call from the house and lamenting her love life—savaged the novelist and Mansfield).

Five years ago, in an interview with Literary Journalism Studies, Davidson copped to misgivings about her article. She seemed especially apologetic about making all-too-easy sport about the couple’s lifestyle, but there was a larger flaw she didn’t admit to: invading the family’s zone of privacy.

At one point, Davidson noted, “A subject Jackie and Irving never bring up is their son. When questioned, they say the boy is sixteen and in school in Arizona.”

What Davidson didn’t know—one hopes, anyway—is that Guy Hildy Mansfield had been diagnosed with severe autism/Kanner’s syndrome at age three. After treatment for cancer in 1962, Susann may have believed she was on borrowed time, so she wanted to make enough money to ensure his institutional care after she was gone.

She didn’t have very much time, but she did make it count. Before she died at age 56 in 1974, Susann penned three more scandalous bestsellers: The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough, and Dolores.

Before Susann, publishing tended to be a rather tweedy gentleman’s profession. She swept in with a different attitude: "A new book is like a new brand of detergent," she said. "You have to let the public know about it. What's wrong with that?" For a publishing industry that, especially in the 1960s, began to transition from independent houses to corporate subsidiaries, her mindset fulfilled the imperative to meet the bottom line, come what may.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967 film adaptation of Valley of the Dolls, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke.)

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on a Mistake Made by Young Writers)

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”—American fiction writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Preface to How to Write Short Stories (1924)

Quote of the Day (Kate McKean, on the Changing Roles and Situations of Book Editors)

“Editors now play marketer, therapist, social media manager, and money minder.  They have to bring in the talent…, create a profit-and-loss statement that miraculously makes the finances work out, negotiate a deal that wins the day but saves some money, guide the writer through the revision process, guide the book through production and sales, cheerlead for it ceaselessly, and, oh yeah, edit it. Even as publishers release more titles, the number of employees at any given house is unlikely to have gone up in recent years. Everyone is doing more with less. What does that mean for editors? They aren’t editing at their desk but rather in off-hours, at nights and on weekends. Say ‘editors don’t edit anymore’ and you’d better be prepared to duck.”—Literary agent and author Kate McKean, “Publishing Myths—‘Editors Don’t Edit Anymore—Do They?”, Poets and Writers, March-April 2024

Well, it might be better for those people (especially inexperienced, prospective authors) who claim “editors don’t edit anymore" to say that there is more of a division of roles for editors.

I can’t speak for trade publishing, but at university presses, the types of editors that Ms. McKean has in mind are more like acquisition editors who secure and protect titles. They may make helpful and significant general comments about the content of a manuscript, but more rigorous critiques are likely to be performed by outside reviewers—academics with special knowledge of a subject.

Other types of editors go through the manuscript line by line. If these are not in-house production editors, then they are hired independently.

As a first-time author, I have no complaints about the editors who eventually signed my book and saw it through production. (Nor, Ms. McKean will be pleased to know, with our agent, a knowledgeable and tireless cheerleader for our book.)

I just wish there were more editors out there who had seen the value of the original proposal by me and my co-author.

I would also agree with Ms. McKean on this point—editors have their work cut out for them these days—but for different reasons: a public with a falling attention span—and less time to read anything, let alone books; and fewer book review outlets with less space.

In this changing environment, authors who hope for decent sales of their books can’t expect to sit on the sidelines and let the publisher do all the promotional work. They have to pitch in, too, by making appearances, talking it up among friends, spreading the word on social media, writing op-ed pieces, going on podcasts, lecturing at local libraries, and the like.

Flashback, December 1897: Wharton’s ‘Decoration of Houses’ Sets Architectural Standard

One hundred and twenty years ago this month, Edith Wharton published her first full-length book. Unlike nearly all her other works, it was nonfiction. Even more unusually, the strong-willed woman collaborated on the project. And, within a few short years, she was able to put her own ideas into practice in her own home in Western Massachusetts. 

Already, Wharton had written a couple of short-story collections when she decided she was ready to leap to a more extended work. She had a subject she felt strongly about—the hideously garish architecture she saw among her own moneyed class—and someone who shared her scorn: Ogden Codman, Jr., the Boston architect who had worked on the Newport “cottage” “Land’s End” for her and her husband Teddy.

The Decoration of Houses, the product of their thinking, did more than earn their publisher, Scribner's, good sales, or even launch Wharton firmly on the path toward her iconic status as first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence). For thousands of the well-heeled over the years not in the habit of reading much of anything, let alone her deeply ambivalent fiction about them, it set a simpler, more tasteful direction in home design. 

Nearly 40 years later, Wharton recalled the dominant trend in homes of the wealthy in her memoir, A Backward Glance:

“The architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gewgaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.”

Wharton had helped Codman land one of his biggest commissions, the Breakers, the Newport mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Perhaps she felt that the young architect’s restraint would mitigate the worst of the family’s excesses, since she wrote him in the spring of 1897: “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.”

The first step toward overthrowing this mindset was a counter-revolution, in a phrase that their readers would understand perfectly: Good interior decoration, they proclaimed, was a matter of “good breeding.” But paradoxically, in a bow toward social mobility, they posited that these principles could be learned, a matter of “calculating”—particularly by attending to the example of fine European style they had examined in their separate travels.

All of this sounded a bit too esoteric to the president of the company to which the pair originally submitted their manuscript, Macmillan’s George Platt Brett, who, in a testy meeting, told them he was canceling the firm’s provisional agreement to release it. The annoyed Wharton told Codman that he was responsible for the rejection, informing him that, from then on, he should leave the marketing of the manuscript in her hands. 

Thankfully for the mental well-being of the architect, at the crucial revision stage of the manuscript, Codman was sidelined by sunstroke. Wharton turned for help to a lawyer who was her friend and soulmate, Walter Berry. Heeding his keen critical eye , she made appropriate alternations and turned in a manuscript suitable enough for Scribner's consultant, critic William Crary Brownell, to suggest acceptance, which the house did.

Through summer and fall, Wharton kept up a steady drumbeat of letters—29 in all—in which she peppered Scribner’s with suggestions for the book’s cover, as well as the title’s wording, printing and placement, not to mention the binding, paper, illustrations, introduction and conclusion, according to Eleanor Dwight’s 1994 biography, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. 

Given that background, as well as Wharton’s peevishness with Codman when the relationship with Macmillan went awry, one might instinctively side with Marc Aronson, author of a 1994 New York Times Book Review article called “Wharton and the House of Scribner: The Novelist as Pain in the Neck."

In other ways, though, Wharton’s behavior was understandable. In an era when women were still at a decided disadvantage in business, such demanding attention to detail might have been the only way she could ensure that the book would find its audience and she would gain a lasting outlet for her energy and questing intelligence.

Her marriage didn’t help matters. While not yet plagued by the mental illness that would doom their relationship in the next decade, it was increasingly clear that Teddy was incompatible with her in terms of age and intellect. He was, as affluent men of the time often were, a “man of leisure” whose major occupation was managing the couple’s real estate—and he was not even particularly good at that. He was the last person that Edith could lean on for editorial or commercial advice in dealing with Scribner’s. It all fell to her.

The publishing house gave the work the kind of attention that suggested they didn’t expect many buyers beyond the authors’ circle of family and friends: a handsome, clean typeface and layout reflecting its call for artistic simplicity and taste, but also a limited print run. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the book sold out its first edition and continued to yield royalties to Wharton until her death.

The wider impact was even greater. The book, Dwight observed, “initiated a new style of decoration, drawing on classical models that combined simplicity, harmony and beauty, which was carried on by others, such as Elsie de Wolfe, in rebellion against Victorian clutter.”

The novelist’s relationship with her collaborator and publisher continued strong for a few years until persistent strains attenuated her ties with them. For Codman, the sticking point became Wharton’s planned cottage in The Berkshires, The Mount. The architect, already chafing about her incessant demands and confident enough now in his practice to feel he didn’t need her patronage anymore, used a dispute about money to effect a mutual decision that he withdraw. The break was amicable enough that he remained on good terms with her for the rest of her life.

It took a half dozen years longer for Wharton to move away from Scribner's. The publisher’s enthusiasm for her work waxed and waned with the sales of her books. In 1912, disappointed by the budget for The Custom of the Country, she turned to Appleton for The Reef. Though Scribner’s published a few of her subsequent books, Appleton became from then on her primary conduit to readers.

The Decoration of Houses has naturally taken a back seat to Wharton’s fiction, but it represented an important milestone in her life. Its unanticipated commercial success made Scribner’s more open to her later ideas for novels and short-story collections, and it gave her increasing self-confidence. 

Moreover, the need to articulate her principles made her more conscious of the house that she would create in The Berkshires. The Mount embodied many of the principles of The Decoration of Houses, from its downstairs marble gallery (“the design, like those of the walls, should be clear and decided in outline”) to her library (its general decoration should “form a background or setting to the books, rather than to distract attention from them”).

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Publisher’s View of Authors)

“ ‘Funny egg, my uncle,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I think he’s a little mad.’

‘Not at all,’ I assured him. ‘I have dealt with authors all my life and he’s quite the sanest one with whom we’ve ever dealt. He never tried to borrow money from us; he never asked us to fire our advertising department; and he’s never assured us that all his friends were unable to get copies of his book in Boston, Massachusetts.’”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.,” The New Yorker, Mar. 20, 2017

As soon as I saw on my newsstand copy of its March 20, 2017 issue, that The New Yorker had a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I knew that I had to read it immediately. And so I did. The story, written in 1920 but rejected by Harper's Bazaar (and only recently rediscovered by the author's estate, more than three-quarters of a century after his death), wasn’t a finely wrought mature masterpiece on the order of “Babylon Revisited,” but I wasn’t expecting anything like that, anyway. If you start reading it with modest rather than great expectations, you’ll be rewarded.

The one aspect of all this that surprised me was that there even remained any unpublished work by my favorite writer. Nothing like this situation existed in the case of his frenemy, Ernest Hemingway: in the last 15 or so years of Papa’s life, his physical and mental decline led him from false start to abandoned project again and again, resulting in as long a period of posthumous as regular publications.

In contrast, Fitzgerald had largely abandoned short-story writing after 1937, when desperate financial straits led him to Hollywood, where he concentrated first on screenwriting, then, when a drunken spree led him to be fired from that job, on his half-finished novel of Tinseltown, The Last Tycoon. But now, enough previously unpublished pieces have been unearthed from archives and family papers to fill out a new collection, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories, due out next month.

In one sense, it’s an anomaly that this Fitzgerald piece appeared in The New Yorker. Of his 164 stories that appeared in magazines, only three—plus two poems—came out in this publication. The primary vehicle for the work that sustained his and wife Zelda’s extravagances was The Saturday Evening Post, whose Middle American readership was far removed from The New Yorker’s more Manhattan-centric sensibility.

But The New Yorker is one of the last general-interest magazines where short, non-genre fiction still appears on a regular basis, and the saucy tone of “The I.O.U.” is just the type of piece that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, might have felt in keeping with the mission he proclaimed in the publication's prospectus: “Not for the little old lady from Dubuque.”

Fitzgerald was only 24, one year after writing his first major success, the novel This Side of Paradise, when he created “The I.O.U.” Already, however, he was somewhat used to the vagaries of publishers who would reject his pieces for less than good reasons, so his satire here was informed by experience.

In time, Fitzgerald grew more and more like the insane authors he parodied in the above quote. The publishing figure who may have endured his eccentricities and manias most stoically—certainly most repeatedly—was Harold Ober. This agent was canny enough to earn Fitzgerald $193,300 for 64 Saturday Evening Post stories alone, and he was kind-hearted enough to let the financially hard-pressed author’s teenage daughter Scottie live with him and his wife while she attended school on the East Coast.

But there was a limit to what even this man could tolerate. At one point, Ober wept in showing a visitor the illegible, beer-stained corrected sheets that his client had sent him. For nearly a decade, at one point or another, he had acceded to Fitzgerald’s endless requests for advances. But when he had finally begged off doing so again, Fitzgerald severed their relationship.

By the end of his career, then, “I.O.U.” had become freighted with all too much meaning for the author. But, despite containing all the hallmarks of apprentice fiction, this piece is still filled with what Fitzgerald biographer Andre le Vot called “the giddy spontaneity, the burlesque fantasy of his early work.” He was already displaying  the powers of close observation  that so marked his greatest work, including the following:

“I had come quite close, half hidden by the magnolias, and was about to address him when I saw a girl in a purple morning dress break, stooping, through the low-branched cluster of apple trees that made the north end of the garden and move across the grass toward the house. I drew back and watched her as she came directly up to the open window and spoke unabashed to the great Dr. Harden.

“ ‘I want to have a talk with you,’ she said abruptly.”

Quote of the Day (Andre Schiffrin, on Books and ‘Control on the Spread of Ideas’)

“Books today have become mere adjuncts to the world of mass media, offering light entertainment and reassurances that all is for the best of all possible worlds. The resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have thought possible in a free society.” —Author-publisher Andre Schiffrin (1935-2013), The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2001)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on a Magazine’s Meager Expense Account for Author Lunches)

“Dr. [Lewis] Thomas and I had our business lunch. He was erudite, charming and gracious. Not, as I recall, a great enthusiast of stuffed grape leaves or mutton kebab. The good news was that he didn't drink at lunch. If memory serves, he declined dessert (could it have been the baklava?). This much I do remember: He never wrote a single word for us, probably out of fear that his fee would be a voucher at the Balkan Armenian. Thus did I learn at an early age Business Lunch Lesson No. 1: You get what you paid for.”—Christopher Buckley, recalling the Spartan business-lunch account permitted him as a “tadpole editor” by an unnamed national magazine, in “Etiquette: What’s the Golden Rule of a Business Lunch?”, The New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2011 (Food and Drink issue)

This Day in Literary History (Richard Simon, Carly’s Dad and Publishing Founder, Dies)

July 31, 1960—In a way, the third, fatal heart attack of Richard Simon came as a mercy. Suffering from heart disease, depression and delirium for the last several years, the co-founder of Simon & Schuster had found himself sidelined not just in the firm that had published Albert Einstein, Pearl Buck, Will and Ariel Durant, and Sloan Wilson, but also in his own household, where his wife was conducting an affair with a man 20 years her junior who’d been hired as a companion for her pre-adolescent son.

Simon’s decline fascinates me, not merely because it powerfully influenced one of my favorite singers, his daughter Carly Simon, but because it foreshadowed the takeover dramas that his firm (under new management) and the entire publishing industry would experience a couple of decades later amid the mergers-and-acquisitions frenzy. In addition, the Simon psychosexual drama would also provide material for a sometime guest in his household, Irwin Shaw, who drew on it for his novel Lucy Crown.

(This whole story has also been set out, in nonfiction form, in several accounts: Marie Brenner’s August 1995 Vanity Fair account of Carly’s relationship with her mother; Timothy White biography of the singer’s former husband, James Taylor; and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation.)

Even many people who never picked up a book by Richard Simon’s firm—or solved a crossword puzzle, a hobby given greater prominence when S&S published the first best-selling crossword-puzzle book in 1924—know the publisher, at least obliquely, through songs by Carly, the youngest and most famous of his three musically inclined daughters. (The other two were Joanna, an opera singer, and Lucy, composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden.)

“Hello, Big Man” took its title from the response of her mother Andrea, a telephone operator at S&S, when she first heard her future husband’s opening greeting: “Hello, little woman.”

But the relationship between Richard and Andrea had declined sharply by the time of his death two decades later, as chronicled in Carly’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” released in 1971.

In this first major hit of Carly’s career, friend and lyricist Jacob Brackman helped her depict, in a simple but stark opening, the atmosphere of alienation, emotional unavailability, and death-in-life that prevailed in her Riverdale (N.Y.) home as an adolescent—a household that sounds like an upper-middle-class Ethan Frome:

“My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.”

The emotionally broken and defeated man of these lyrics was a different person in the early 1940s. A later S&S editor, Michael Korda, recalled that in his prime, Richard Simon displayed an instinct for marketing that complemented friend and bookish partner M. Lincoln Schuster. (Schuster is the bespectacled one in the accompanying image.) Several of Richard’s brainstorms—feeding the cravings of newspaper cross-puzzle fans with a full-length book (with a pencil attached so they could start working on it immediately), igniting the contract-bridge craze by publishing Charles Goren, and encouraging amateur photography with his own book on the subject—made his firm a growing force in commercial publishing by the early 1940s.

It all started to come apart in 1944, when Simon, Schuster and their hard-driving partner, Leon Shimkin, sold the firm to retail giant Marshall Field. Following the sale, the trio stayed on under long-time management contracts.

But Simon’s initial opposition to the buyout left him marginalized in the new order at his old firm. The new owners’ attempt to placate him with an imprint of his own, New Ventures Books, did little to mitigate his restlessness and frustration.

By 1953, Simon’s growing infirmity provided an opening for Andrea Simon to take a belated form of revenge for the unusual situation he foisted on her at the start of their marriage. Beginning with their honeymoon, Andrea had watched in dismay as Richard, nettled by not having consummated the relationship, a) daily cabled his family’s longtime surrogate mother, “Auntie Jo” Hutmacher, on the progress of the relationship; b) installed “Auntie Jo” and Andrea’s mother in a rented apartment together, for no apparent reason of compatibility; and c) named his and Andrea’s first child Joanna—an amalgam of “Auntie Jo” and his own mother, Anna. At some point in all of this, Andrea figured out the truth: “Auntie Jo” had been the teenage Richard’s first lover, and two decades later she was still a part of his life.

With Richard increasingly sullen, remote and frail, Andrea could claim, relatively plausibly, that six-year-0ld son Peter needed a playmate. At some point, however, Columbia University student Ronnie Klinzing became Andrea’s, too. When Joanna discovered a passageway between Andrea’s room and Ronnie’s, her mother did not deny the obvious implications.

This bizarre psychosexual drama affected Carly more than her socially assured sister. She was already suffering from one emotional deficit: lanky and gawky at the time, Carly did not fare well at all in any competition with Joanna and Lucy for the affection of her father, who pretty much ignored her. Her realization of her mother’s affair, however, pushed her into a web of phobias (including stammering, agoraphobia and stage fright) that would plague her into early adulthood, and even beyond.

The atmosphere of the house, permeated by Andrea's eroticism and Richard's close-mouthed acquiescence, also, in a way, contributed to Carly’s future career. Now, you might argue that she came by her artistic inclinations through heredity (brother of a jazz drummer, Richard had reluctantly, at his father’s urging, put aside his dream of a career as concert pianist), or even by environment (the Simon girls sang “A Real Nice Clambake” for its lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, a house guest). But I think it’s more plausible that the pressure of her own circumstances did so.

As Carly's stammering worsened, Andrea advised her on a remedy: “Sing it.” Her daughter did so. The future Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee took the first halting steps toward fame as one of the great “confessional” singer-songwriters of the 1970s as an attempt to ferret out truth and her own self-esteem in a family environment that denied her both.

That career has also been the real foundation for whatever affluence she has had in adulthood. Simon & Schuster long ago left behind the world of its co-founder, and Carly, because of her father’s agreement to sell it, has not benefited from its earnings since then.

The company would, in any case, be a vastly different place from the one Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster built in the 1920s with only $8,000 of relatives’ money. Its culture had changed for good in the 1980s, when it took over my old company, Prentice-Hall. Simon & Schuster's corporate parents over the years (including Gulf + Western and Viacom) have exerted pressure on the firm to produce profits. Not only has that resulted in shifts toward blockbuster titles rather than blacklists and toward marketing rather than editorial sides of the business, but it has also placed additional stress on the publishing arm's subsidiaries. Prentice-Hall, for instance, went from a paternalistic orientation to one increasingly swept up by the nostrums of the day (e.g., "synergy") during my years there. I imagine it has only worsened in the two decades since.