Risk Game - Francis J. Greenburger

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      Working at my father’s literary agency in the midseventies

      When the Nazis came to power, he fled to France where, shocked to discover how ignorant the French military authorities were of Germany’s plans for war, he wrote The Military Strength of the Powers. After sending a copy to Winston Churchill, he received a personal letter in return during the spring of 1939 that was uncharacteristic of the British leader known for his astute understanding of the dangers the Nazis posed. “I have looked into [your book] with some attention,” Churchill wrote. “I think you greatly exaggerate the military strength of both Russia and Germany.”

      A year later, Max was on the run again after the Nazis invaded France. He came to the United States, where he wrote a column that ran in ninety American papers and signed with my father’s agency. Max published a big best seller in ’43 called Attack Can Win. In the September 4, 1943, issue of the New Yorker, Harold Ross wrote, “He has been pretty right from first to last.”

      My dad, with assistance from Leo, set out to help Max profit from his predictions. The three of them would sit around the office and cook up scoops based on whatever was hot in the news and sell the stories to the newspaper. “Hey, I’ve got a tip from one of my sources,” Max told an editor from my father’s phone, completely winging it. They were kind of soft things, but not that soft. And they were right more than they were wrong, so they got away with it. (I was only a toddler when Max died of a heart attack, so I have no way of verifying if the story is true, but from what I witnessed in that office, it sounds right.)

      My father’s agency was as far from a sleepy, quiet place of literary commerce as one could imagine. Through Ledig, who had formed a small international group of like-minded publishers that were all close friends, the Feltrinelli publishing house became a client. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, son of one of the richest families in Italy, had four interests: publishing, bookstores, communism, and radical politics (which juxtaposed ironically with his father’s passion for banking and real estate, including collecting villas, many fully staffed and filled with fresh flowers despite the fact that they might not be visited for years).

      Giangiacomo published endless amounts of communist stuff, but he solidified the reputation of Feltrinelli Editore with Doctor Zhivago. More than a dozen Soviet editors, who condemned Boris Pasternak’s epic that sweeps through the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism as “counter-revolutionary, shoddy work,” banned its publication. In the summer of 1956, it was smuggled out of Russia to thirty-three-year-old Giangiacomo, who published it to epic success. Two years later, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for his book that had been published all over the world in dozens of languages. It still, however, was not appreciated in the Soviet Union, where it wasn’t published until 1987—the Soviet authorities forced the writer to decline the prestigious award.

      Staff at the Sanford Greenburger agency

      In the late fifties and early sixties, Giangiacomo was one of the regulars hanging around Dad’s agency, usually accompanied by his girlfriend, Inge Schoenthal. If Giangiacomo was a prince masking as the common man with his Groucho Marx-esque glasses and mustache (the first time I met him, at dinner at our house in Queens, he picked up a piece of lettuce that dropped on the floor and ate it, deceiving the housekeeper into thinking he was very poor), Inge was his opposite: a German Jew from ordinary means turned glamorous photographer who seemed to be everywhere and know everyone.

      She had a particularly leggy photo of herself catching a fish with Ernest Hemingway and another laughing with Pablo Picasso. She also knew Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Richard Avedon, Henry Miller, and many, many other powerful men. She also knew Ledig, which was how she met Giangiacomo.

      It was 1958 and he had just split from his second wife. On a trip to Switzerland to get a new yacht, he made a detour to Hamburg to visit Ledig, who threw a party in honor of his Italian friend and colleague. Inge, invited to the event to take pictures, came “dressed to kill” and sat herself at Giangiacomo’s table, where Ledig said they had “instantly taken to each other, and as they were leaving the party they hardly noticed anyone else.”

      Although she wore nothing but designer dresses, her political sympathies lay with the far-left Giangiacomo. He loved her and so did the Italian press, but they couldn’t marry since he was still legally married to his second wife until he received permission in Italy to divorce (apparently he sought an annulment by claiming impotentia erigendi et coeundi or erectile and ejaculator dysfunction, which is how he ended his first marriage).

      Inge quickly got used to living the high life (and her job in charge of relations with foreign publishers and authors) and didn’t want to leave her tenure up to the vagaries of Giangiacomo’s romantic interest. On a trip through North America in 1959, they got married in Mexico, but she needed something more solid than a south-of-the-border marriage certificate.

      Enter Leo.

      He became a consigliore to Inge in her quest to seal the deal with the radical publishing magnate. (Inge wound up playing a vital role in establishing and maintaining Feltrinelli Editore’s literary brand. For decades to follow, she would protect the publishing tradition they created together through personal diplomacy and loyal friendships, even amid the endless scrutiny of bankers and “advisors.” She did this first for her love of Giangiacomo but later for his heir apparent, their son, Carlo, who has been at the helm with the help of his mother since his father’s untimely death. Her diplomacy knows few limits. To this day, she knows the first name of most of the staff of the Feltrinelli bookstores that are in every major Italian city.)

      It was surprising that an international socialite would enlist the help of an unemployed émigré in fixing her love life, but I understood it. I often turned to Leo for advice about love affairs when I was a teenager. Despite the cigarette ash down his front, Leo had a way with women.

      Although he was married and had a mistress, Leo was always extraordinarily friendly with the agency’s secretaries. Fritzi, however, was one of those secretaries whose love went unrequited. Instead, she settled for Leo as an advisor. He told her to go to Europe and advance her studies in Renaissance literature, which she did. In Italy, she met a man who asked to marry her. Again, she asked Leo what to do, and he told her to marry him. So she married him. Later, when it wasn’t going so well, she turned to Leo once more. He said, “Divorce him. Come back to the States,” which she did . . . all the while carrying a flame for Leo.

      In the time Fritzi had gone to Europe, Leo’s wife, Frida (sister of Lise Meitner, a prominent scientist who was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission), and his principal means of support, had died. To make matters worse, his mistress of long standing also died, so Leo was disastrously short of money. His landlord came to him and offered to buy him out of his rent-controlled apartment, which he did, taking the money to live at a hotel for a while. But when that money ran out, he had no place to live. Fritzi, twenty-five years his junior, offered that he move in with her, but on one condition: He had to marry her. That was what she wanted and he needed a place to live, so they got married.

      Leo was the perfect person to give Inge advice on her relationship with Giangiacomo, for he took a straight-ahead approach to love as he did everything else in life. He told Inge to get pregnant—and that was exactly what she did, giving birth to Carlo in 1962.

      Giangiacomo liked to push the limits of “decent” society when it came to women and books. He was an ardent supporter of the avant-garde and politically extreme. He illegally published and distributed Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was banned under obscenity laws. He also published Che Guevara and Hồ Chí Minh.

      Like his romantic entanglements, Giangiacomo’s dangerous tastes in literature found their way into my dad’s office. The most hair-raising experience had to do with Fidel Castro. Having befriended Castro (in a photo with the Cuban leader, Giangiacomo looks every bit the revolutionary with his mustache, thick black eyeglasses, and vaguely military-style shirt), he signed him up to write his memoirs not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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