The only remaining particular memory I have as a result of publicity-cllerkin' in the then-Times-Mirror corporate media conglomerate-owned New American Library [NAL] paperback publishing skyrcraper office in Midtown Manhattan is an afternoon when the writer of the sexist and macho male-oriented series of Mike Hammer detective pulp novels, Mickey Spillane, stopped by at the office to chat with the NAL publicity director in her office;; about some publicity business matter related to the 1970s marketing of his series of novels.
Spillane was then a beardless, crew-cutted guy, who looked culturally-straight and--in the 1970s--still dressed himself in a sport-jacket and dress shirt when he dropped by his paperback publisher's office.
With some gray spots in whatever hair was left on his crew-cutted head, Spillane looked neither older nor younger than most U.S. men then in their 50s (which was apparently his then age during the 1970s) generally looked like. And in the 1970s, Spillane seemed to look to me more like a middle-aged aging jock in his build and face than much like a middle-aged aging novelist or writer.
The sale of the pulp novels and movie and television adaptations of the novels that Spillane had written, in the decades before he appeared about 8 yards from me inside the NAL office, had likely made Spillane very wealthy and, perhaps, some kind of literary celebrity name for some U.S. readers and movie or television viewers. But--despite smiling in a satisfied way as he left the inner windowed-office of Marge, the NAL publicity director, exited the outer office and headed towards the floor's skyscraper elevator in a rapid way--Spillane didn't seem to expect anybody in the commercially-oriented NAL publishing firm to stop their work and treat him as if he were royalty;
Perhaps, in part, because Spillane may have realized that, by the 1970s--as a result of the cultural impact of the post-1969 new wave of feminist consciousness on most U.S. readers of novels--most people, especially women who worked within the U.S. publishing world sub-cultural, considered most of his commercially profitable novels to now be old-fashioned and out-of-date in the sexist macho male personal/political consciousness they reflected.
