New York — 'You want to know what it was like working with Clinton? It was a job," shrugs Robert Gottlieb, the renowned editor who took more than 20 handwritten notebooks and shook them into 957 pages of finished prose for My Life, the former president's autobiography published this week. Gottlieb is sitting in a sun-filled office in the back of the second floor of his midtown Manhattan townhouse, a quiet breeze seeping in through an open window, insisting that Clinton was just like any other author.
"This was the same old story — with Secret Service men outside. Yes, you're aware that it's history, you're aware that this is the ex-president and that you're throwing the ball — for Buddy. And then suddenly you have a surreal moment where you think: 'What are you doing here? This is crazy.' But like all glamour, that dissipates in 10 seconds, because what you're really doing is sitting around at 1:30 in the morning eating cold fries, or saying, 'No, this really is boring.'."
Gottlieb would know from boring. In almost 50 years in the business, he has edited roughly 1,000 books. He is perhaps the most important and respected editor in the business, a man who headed The New Yorker for five years, served as editor-in-chief of the publishing houses Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, and guided everyone from Joseph Heller to Mordecai Richler, Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, Doris Lessing, Katharine Graham, Diana Vreeland, Lauren Bacall and the two-time Pulitzer-winner Robert Caro. And yet even before Clinton's My Life hit bookstores on Tuesday, some critics were calling the book dull, sprawling, and poorly edited.
Gottlieb, who could pass for Woody Allen's taller brother, listens to a paraphrased newspaper review, peers back through large glasses and says dismissively that reviews are irrelevant to this sort of book. They will not affect sales nor how people feel about My Life or Clinton. "At this moment in our history, there are millions of Americans who are distraught by where we are and he is what they have to cling on to," Gottlieb explains.
Tuesday's sales figures suggest he's right. Knopf, the Random House division publishing My Life, estimates that 400,000 copies sold in the United States alone that day, not counting all of the pre-orders taken at various bookstores and websites, a record for a non-fiction book. But there's something else: Like Clinton, Gottlieb is inured to these judgments because he doesn't believe their legitimacy.
"I told Clinton this would happen," he says. "I've become another target." Uh-oh. Has Gottlieb been drinking the Kool-Aid in Chappaqua, Clinton's adopted home turf? Does he think he would be attacked merely for being Clinton's editor?
In fact, Gottlieb has been smacked with some very odd critiques.
The moment he was announced as Clinton's editor three years ago, a conservative columnist delivered an ad hominem attack on his "strange" personality, noting his penchant for collecting kitsch, such as hundreds of Lucite and bakelite handbags of the 1950s, and for campy pronouncements, such as referring to his writers as "dear boy." A shame the columnist didn't know that Gottlieb is also a dance critic who considers George Balanchine — a Russian (!) — the greatest artist of the 20th century.
This all makes for an odd coda to an extraordinary career that he speaks of in almost too modest terms. "The real difference this is going to make to me is that if I'd died a year ago it would have said, 'Editor of Catch-22 Dies,' and now it's going to say 'Editor of Clinton's Memoirs Dies,'." he says dryly. "And I'm not going to be around to know about it."
That would seem to be a long way off. At 73, Gottlieb is spry and, though officially semi-retired, still works the hours of a hungry young investment banker. He answers the door in socks, work pants and an undershirt, makes no effort to fix his mussed hair. He is too engaged with the papers on the floor around the brown leather chair where he sits, the copy-edited manuscript of a 45,000-word biography of Balanchine he dashed off this spring while simultaneously working on My Life and co-curating an exhibit in town on Dame Margot Fonteyn.
