How could Korda get away with this? Did everyone in the book business fly in a flock like go-along-to-get-along migrating birds? Korda, I was told, wasn't just another corporate executive, he was tight with the kingpins who make the rules. But why would these people want to get rid of the editor who'd made them more money than anyone else? It didn't make sense that anyone, no matter how well connected he was, could remove the best editor in the business. Nor did it make sense that Herb Alexander would not call and let me know what was happening. I kept leaving messages and my current phone number. Was he still alive? I feared the worst.
        Korda, after zapping Herb Alexander, had to have blown away a lot of company money in order to kill my career. What was more important in the book business than profits? Or, to come at the question from a different angle, why would he blow away the record advance, the expensive promotional campaign, the number 1 bestseller spot—to destroy one lonely novelist?
        I got various scenarios, over the coming years, from various in-the-know people, most of whom concluded that if the company had dumped me, it was because I was no good. “You're unreliable.” “You're a communist.” “You're too independent.” “You're a sex maniac.” “You do drugs.” “Your politics are too far left.” “You move too often.” “Your novels are not in good taste.” “The company can't put you on TV because no talk show wants you.” “The FBI is asking questions about you so you must have done something bad.” “You disrespected Sam Goldwyn, Jr.”
        That last was intriguing. Sam Goldwyn and Michael Korda were friends, I was told. Both came from families who'd gotten rich from the movie business. So if Goldwyn felt insulted that I'd bowed out of my contract with him, and written the story as a novel, sold to Pocket Books for a record-breaking sum, maybe Korda was playing hitman for Goldwyn.
        I had met Goldwyn some years previous after he had read in an interview with me that I wanted to write original screenplays. He called and we met, talked over ideas and settled on one. I wrote a screen treatment as the first step in the movie-making process. It was titled “The House Gets Wrecked.” Goldwyn was not happy with my approach. He wanted me to fly out to the Coast and put into a posh Beverly Hills hotel and make the revisions he would “suggest.” I surmised he wanted these revisions to deliver a much different story—Hollywood glamour and glitz as enchantments, although he used the words elegance and aristocratic. My version had undermined that old Hollywood message by presenting the perspective of someone from outside the elegance-and-aristocracy realm. He and I each had the right to back out of our contract at any time for any reason, and I felt we had parted amicably when I declined his invitation to park myself in a posh hotel and have my thinking “revised.” With my proclivity for sex and drugs, I feared I'd wind up putty in his hands and the resulting movie would become another meaningless piece of celluloid bling-bling. So I'd written the story as the novel Poorboy at the Party, legally able to do this because of Abe Friedman's adroit wording of the contract.

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