Dear Mr. Nabokov

As a New York freelance writer in 1971, I seemed to spend most of my time chasing after magazine editors for article assignments. Then an amazing thing happened: I was hired as the Managing Editor of Audience, a new, lavishly illustrated, hard cover magazine of the popular arts, and suddenly writers were chasing after me–lots of them. Heady stuff indeed.

Tim Hill, the founder/publisher, Geoff Ward. the editor, and I were barely in our 30’s, not exactly seasoned veterans of the publishing world. (I’d been friends with Geoff since 4th grade, making it even harder somehow to acknowledge that we were actual grownups now.) Fortunately, greater experience was provided by our fiction editor, Rust Hills, former fiction editor of Esquire, and the designers, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast of Push Pin Studios.

Tim and Geoff worked in Boston, and I ran the New York office, a charming, one-story house on East 32nd Street, complete with patio and back yard. Early on we held a big office-warming party there, and I worked the clusters like a son of a gun–this was the way publishing was supposed to be. Writer Bruce Jay Friedman got very drunk (writing Tim later to apologize), which made it even better. I was just sorry there were no heated words, shoving matches, or fist fights.

Audience picked up momentum fast, soon publishing people like John Updike. Nelson Algren, Thomas Berger, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Herb Gold, Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and…Vladimir Nabokov.

Wanting to fully establish our editorial authority, we suggested some revisions in a story he submitted, promptly receiving back a printed postcard from his wife Vera saying that under no circumstances did Mr. Nabokov allow changes of any kind to be made to his stories, reviews, or essays.

This was the level of “problem” I dealt with–life overall was a hoot, the days packed with meetings, lunches, drinks, and dinners with writers, editors and agents–maitre d’s came to recognize me. And I regularly took trips to spread the good word, including one to the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I’d been a student just a few years earlier. I’d taken a course on writing fiction from Kurt Vonnegut–now he submitted stories to us through his agent.

Staying smug for long wasn’t easy, though. Audience had a prestigious Board of Advisers, and Geoff and I tried to meet with all of them at various points. The list included Gordon Parks, Anne Sexton, Alan Arkin, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, and Inge Morath, a well known photographer.

Morath was then married to Arthur Miller (post Marilyn Monroe), and she invited us to their country home in Connecticut for lunch. We were understandably nervous, as I drove up the long driveway and approached their handsome, stone-veneer house. We drew nearer to park, and then without warning I went into a strange, unaccountable braking paralysis–as some key synaptic connection misfired–and the car moved slowly forward…steadily forward..and crashed into the house.

Within a minute, as I desperately tried to back up, Morath and Miller appeared on the porch, shading their eyes. There was little that eased their alarm because I’d killed the engine in my haste, and the car was still rammed up against the house.

Luckily, Morath laughed the whole thing off and we had a delightful lunch. As for Miller, he was conspicuously uncharming and mostly read his mail. (To be fair, I had just crashed into his house.)

Certain memories stand out. On Jan 15, 1971, I had lunch with a writer named Merle Miller, best known for his book, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S.Truman. Though affable, Miller seemed nervous and agitated, finally explaining that the New York Times Magazine would that Sunday publish his article, “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” He feared, among things, that the article might destroy his career.

The response from readers was astounding: over 2,000 letters, the most ever received by the Times. The article was later expanded into a book, and Miller became a pioneer in the gay rights movement.

Audience published stories, articles, book excerpts, and poems, and Tim–in a remarkable burst of generosity–eventually decided poets should be compensated at the same level as short story writers. So I sent a letter to 50 or so leading poets, announcing we would pay $500 for poems, the rough equivalent today of $4,000.

Not surprisingly, I was soon flooded with submissions—literally, in one case: On a very rainy afternoon a man wearing a dripping raincoat and oversized rain hat pushed past my secretary into my office, introduced himself as Gregory Corso (the beat poet), pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, and said “Here’s a poem; could I have the $500?” I unfolded the soggy poem–many words ran together, some were illegible.

“Thanks, Mr. Corso,” I said, “But we have a tradition here of reading submissions first before deciding whether to publish.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to Greece tomorrow; can you cable me the money in Athens?”

Sadly, after 13 issues Audience ran out of money and closed, and I went back to free-lancing, just another lowly writer again (though with a far more brag-worthy rolodex now). A few months later, while I was still in mourning, the New Yorker ran a cartoon by Charles Addams depicting a ghostly newsstand at night. Looking closer, you realized that all the newspapers and magazines displayed had gone out of business in the last year, and on a front rack was, yes, Audience. Aargh!

When the magazine folded, I took with me two file cabinets bulging with correspondence, memos and early drafts, which I couldn’t bear to throw out, and stored them in my apartment. Awfully glad I did too, because 40 years later we sold them to the New York Public Library for $75,000. Perhaps one day an enterprising writer will turn those files into a book. It sure would make a good read.

Robert Strozier is a regular contributor to these pages. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications including Atlantic, Esquire, The New Times Magazine, and The NYT Book Review, and some have been anthologized. He recently completed a novel, Nothing Doing.

He’s had plays produced in NYC, and one, Joy, was made into a short film that won awards at several film festivals. A musical he wrote, There’s Something I Need to Tell You, has had five concert readings. He also helped launch five national magazines, then served as Editor-in-Chief of two and a senior editor at the others.

He co-teaches an annual OLLI class on New Yorker poetry and, several years back, presented a concert-reading of his musical as part of an OLLI class. You can find and enjoy all of his OLLI Connects articles by scrolling down and entering “Strozier” in the Search box.