Robert Gottlieb, editor of literary heavyweights, dies at 92

Robert Gottlieb, editor of literary heavyweights, dies at 92 - The Washington Post

Robert A. Gottlieb, who during a seven-decade career as the top editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker published Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Robert Caro, among other authors who could fill an anthology of contemporary literary heavyweights, died June 14 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.

The publishing house Knopf Doubleday announced the death but did not provide a cause.

In addition to publishing authors such as John Cheever, Salman Rushdie and John le Carré, Mr. Gottlieb edited bestsellers by genre authors Michael Crichton and Anne Rice, and autobiographies by President Bill Clinton, actress Lauren Bacall and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

“Bob had a kind of split personality as an editor: He pursued high culture and low culture with equal intensity and seemed to enjoy both,” Simon & Schuster colleague Michael Korda wrote in his 2000 memoir, “Another Life.” “More extraordinary, he was good at both.”

Though Mr. Gottlieb thought it was undignified for editors to seek or receive credit — “Shut up, do the work,” he would say — the literary world viewed him as a towering virtuoso at his craft. In a 1987 column praising Mr. Gottlieb’s stewardship of Knopf, one of publishing’s gemstones, Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote that “at least a half dozen people described him to me as a ‘genius’ — overstatement, no doubt, but perhaps just barely.”

An eccentric man of letters, Mr. Gottlieb bore an uncanny resemblance to Woody Allen. He dressed “like the biggest shlumpf in the world,” an acquaintance once said. He collected mid-century plastic purses, procuring them on road trips to flea markets around the country — an ideal vacation in his view (though not his wife’s). He also accumulated and displayed on his desks a wide variety of tchotchkes. At the New Yorker, he kept a toy toaster in his office “that erupted two slices of plastic toast every hour on the hour,” John McPhee wrote in 2012.

“In the longest conversation I ever had with him,” McPhee added, “the toast popped up three times.”

One quality that endeared authors to Mr. Gottlieb was his undivided attention. “I don’t do anything else,” he told The Post in 2001. “I don’t have lunches, dinners, go to plays or movies. I don’t meditate, escalate, deviate or have affairs.”

After submitting their manuscripts, some writers wait months for their editors to respond. Mr. Gottlieb, who edited with a pencil, read his authors’ work overnight and responded the next day. “It’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting,” Mr. Gottlieb said in a 1994 Paris Review interview.

A ‘service job’

Mr. Gottlieb did not hold any lofty beliefs about his role in book publishing. Editing, he would often say, was a “service job,” and each of his writers, like cars arriving at a mechanic, needed different services. With Morrison, his early interventions were in stoking her imagination.

“Bob said to me, ‘You can loosen, open up. Your writing doesn’t have to be so contained; it can be wider,’” Morrison told the Paris Review in 1994. “The consequence of the remarks was that I did relax and begin to open up to possibilities. It was because I was able to open up to those possibilities that I began to think things like, What would happen if indeed I followed this strange notion or image or picture I had in my mind of this woman who had no navel.”

Mr. Gottlieb was essentially saying, “Be reckless in your imagination,” Morrison said.

But he also knew when to narrow her narrative eye. With “Beloved,” the “original plan was for it to be the first third of a very long novel about the black experience in America, the second and third sections to take place in much later times,” Mr. Gottlieb recalled in “Avid Reader,” his 2016 memoir. “When I read the ‘Beloved’ section I just said to her, ‘Stop here. This is the novel.’”

“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Five years later, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

With Graham, Mr. Gottlieb pushed back against some advice she received from her reporters to start her Pulitzer-winning memoir, “Personal History,” with an account of the violent pressman’s strike of 1975 that was a major test of her leadership.

“But Mr. Gottlieb encouraged her to begin more simply with her [parents’] marriage and her difficult childhood,” the New York Times wrote in a 2001 profile of the editor. “The result makes the story of her whole life’s trajectory from the marginal role of daughter and wife to the center of the national political stage even more compelling, especially in the book’s spare, understated tone.”

Mr. Gottlieb’s most celebrated and enduring collaboration was with Caro.

Beginning in 1971 with “The Power Broker,” a biography of New York city planner Robert Moses, they worked together for more than 50 years, most notably on Caro’s multiple-volume biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their relationship was at times volatile, especially with cuts, many of which Mr. Gottlieb had to do — including 350,000 words trimmed from “The Power Broker.”

Many of their fights were at the sentence level. Caro loved semicolons; Mr. Gottlieb hated them. Caro tended to repeat points he made 30 or 40 pages earlier to make sure they stuck with readers, which Mr. Gottlieb thought was annoying and insulting. “He was thinking as a writer,” Mr. Gottlieb once said. “I was thinking as a reader. That’s the way it should be.”

Mr. Gottlieb became close friends with many of his writers, especially Doris Lessing and New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, but that wasn’t the case with the intensely private and admittedly stubborn Caro. “In all the hours of working on ‘The Power Broker’ Bob never said one nice thing to me — never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book,” Caro told the Paris Review in 1994.

“That was also true of my second book, ‘The Path to Power,’” he added. “But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, ‘Means of Ascent,’ he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, ‘Not bad.’ Those are the only two complimentary words he has ever said to me, to this day.”

Both men later acknowledged — grudgingly — that they had become something like friends.

‘Catch-18’

Robert Adams Gottlieb was born in the Manhattan borough of New York on April 29, 1931, and grew up on the Upper West Side. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a teacher. Robert was an only child, and he read obsessively. “I could read for sixteen hours at a time,” he told the New York Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”

As a stunt to impress his friends, he binge-read — and finished — “War and Peace” in 14 hours. Though his parents were voracious readers, their son’s disinterest in anything other than books alarmed them. In “Avid Reader,” Mr. Gottlieb recalled that they “decided I needed more fresh air than I was getting on the ninth floor of our apartment building on West Ninety-sixth Street, and I was commanded to spend at least one hour a day outside.”

It was torture.

“There were a few kids on the block I could and sometimes did play cops and robbers with, but what was the point?” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. “I usually spent the prescribed hour standing next to the doorman, practicing with my yo-yo, until I could get back upstairs to my books and my radio.”

After graduating in 1948 from Birch Wathen Lenox, a private school on the Upper East Side, Mr. Gottlieb majored in English at Columbia University, graduating in 1952 — the same year he married Muriel Higgins and had a son, Roger.

Mr. Gottlieb moved his family to England so that he could pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge before returning to New York in 1954. The following year, he was hired as a junior editor at Simon & Schuster.

One of Mr. Gottlieb’s first authors was Heller, who was completing a satirical World War II novel titled “Catch-18.” Mr. Gottlieb tinkered with the structure, but his most important editorial intervention was with the title. He had two issues with it. One: Leon Uris was about to publish a novel titled “Mila 18.” Two: 18 was not a funny number. Heller suggested 14, which Mr. Gottlieb rejected as “flavorless.” Lying in bed one night, Mr. Gottlieb had an epiphany.

“Early the next morning,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote in his memoir, “I called Joe and burst out, ‘Joe, I’ve got it! Twenty-two! It’s even funnier than eighteen!’”

“Catch-22” became a massive bestseller, and the title entered the cultural lexicon as an all-purpose description for being trapped in an impossible situation. Heller praised his editor in the ensuing publicity surrounding the book, which annoyed Mr. Gottlieb but also established him as a rising star in publishing. He later worked with novelists such as Mordecai Richler, Edna O’Brien and Lessing, eventually rising to editor in chief of Simon & Schuster.

In 1968, Mr. Gottlieb moved to Knopf, which he regarded as “the great literary house of the century.” The next year, after divorcing, Mr. Gottlieb married actress Maria Tucci, the daughter of one of his authors, novelist Niccolò Tucci. They had two children: Lizzie, who became a documentary filmmaker, and Nicky. Nicky’s struggles to live on his own with Asperger’s syndrome were chronicled by his sister in the 2008 documentary “Today’s Man.”

Mr. Gottlieb left Knopf in 1987 to become editor of the New Yorker, replacing William Shawn in what became one of the city’s biggest media stories in decades. Newsstand sales were slowing amid criticism the magazine had become stale, but New Yorker writers were fervently devoted to Shawn and they threw a fit over his sacking. They sent a letter to Mr. Gottlieb begging him to not take the job.

Mr. Gottlieb’s tenure as New Yorker editor lasted five years. He had told the magazine’s owner, S.I. Newhouse, that he only wanted to be a curator. Seeking more radical changes, the owners turned to former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown. Mr. Gottlieb returned to Knopf, then also owned by Newhouse, as an editor at large, editing his old stable of writers, including Caro, and new ones such as Clinton, with whom he had a respectful, albeit playful, relationship.

“Ask any of these people who work for me, and you’ll hear, I’m sure, that I’m very good to work for,” Mr. Gottlieb recalled Clinton saying, to which he replied, “Actually, Bill, in this instance, I’m not working for you. You’re working for me.”

He treated Clinton like any other writer, even writing in the manuscript margin, “This is the single most boring page I have ever read.” (Clinton riposted: “No. Page 632 is even more boring.”)

Beyond his editing, Mr. Gottlieb had a protean interest in the arts. He called ballet his “second career” and served on the boards of the New York City and Miami City ballets and for many years was the New York Observer’s dance critic. Mr. Gottlieb published several collections of essays on authors and artists that appeared originally in the New York Review of Books and other magazines. He also wrote biographies of movie star Greta Garbo, theater actress Sarah Bernhardt and New York City Ballet co-founder George Balanchine.

“From the very beginning of his career, between the desire and the act fell no shadow,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote about Balanchine, though he also could have been describing himself. “He didn’t wait for divine inspiration — when there was something to be done, he just got to work.”

Survivors include his wife, children and two grandsons.

In 2022, Lizzie Gottlieb released “Turn Every Page,” a documentary about her father’s relationship with Caro. At the end of the film, the editor and writer visit Knopf’s offices to discuss Caro’s long-awaited final volume of his Johnson biography. Caro has a stack of manuscript pages. Neither has a pencil. Like Lewis and Clark, they embark on an expedition looking for one.

Editors of a different era — Gen Xers, millennials — look through their desks.

Nobody has one.

Finally, someone produces a mechanical pencil.

“Is that okay?” the discoverer asks Mr. Gottlieb.

It is not.

The editor and his author keep looking, eventually stumbling on a real pencil — rubber eraser and all.

Caro sharpens it.

“Okay,” he says, “we’re ready to go.”