The Writing Center of Marymount Manhattan College celebrated its 17th anniversary with a dinner at Doubles in the Sherry Netherland on Wednesday night, and thanks to El Directore, Lewis Burke Frumkes, I got to attend. Among the others present were Bruce Jay Friedman (who told me a funny story about how he hired Mario Puzo over Arthur Kretchmer to work at the pulp fiction he once ran), Patty Marx, Molly Haskell (whom talked to me more about Gone With The Wind, which I had seen her discuss at the Jacob Burns Center in January), Hilma Wolitzer (that’s Molly and Hilma, pictured), Malachy McCourt and Judith Kelman. The Writing Center repeated its lovely custom of inscribing the names of all the writers present in icing on a cake (I’m there somewhere on the upper left.) During dinner I sat between Hilma (author of the novels
Hearts, The Doctor’s Daughter and Tunnel of Love) and Judith, author of the novels The Session, More Than You Know and The First Stone), and they regaled me with stories of the writing life in the seventies and eighties, when publishing houses would send writers on book tours to exotic places like Seattle and Australia, and the paperback rights to books would be auctioned for fantastic sums, and and editors would arrive in limos to take writers to lunch at restaurants that were just two blocks away. Drool. “Now all I want is to be able to work,” said Hilma. So say we all.
In his book “Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America,” Thomas Weyer interviews Bruce Jay Friedman about working for Magazine Management, which published such he-man books as Men in the early 1950s. Friedman recounts how he and his staffers would make up World War II battles that never occurred. “The master of that particular genre, Friedman notes, was Mario Puzo, ‘who could create giant mythical armies, lock them in combat in Central Europe and have casualties coming in by the hundreds of thousands.'”