Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (18)

 It was while I was publicity clerkin' at the New American Library paperback publishing firm that the heiress to the super-rich Hearst Dynasty's excess wealth, Patty Hearst, was taken hostage in Berkeley, California by the Symbionese Liberation Army [SLA[ racially-mixed urban guerrilla group.

Led by an ex-California prisoner named "Cinque" a/k/a Donald DeFreeze, the SLA demanded that the family descendants of 20th-century media baron William Randolph Hearst/"Citizen Kane"--who in the 1970s still controlled many newspapers, magazines and U.S. television stations--both disseminate the SLA's revolutionary communiques and set up a "food-for-the-poor"/"serve the people" program.

Soon after the SLA grabbed Patty Hearst and her then-boyfriend--a guy named Steve Weed (who apparently had previously been somewhat politically sympathetic towards the U.S. antiwar movement as a student), some folks in U.S. left circles and U.S. underground press circles were already speculating that both the Red Brigade urban guerrilla group in 1970s Italy and the SLA were "agent-provocateur" groups set up by police agents to grab headlines and discredit left-wing movements.

But, like Bernardine and the Weather Underground (who issued an open letter to the 1970s underground press which, while criticizing the SLA for previously killing an authoritarian Black school superintendent in Oakland, noted that "for two generations, the Hearst newspapers have wielded their power" and "the guerrillas have kidnapped the daughter of a rich and powerful man in order to provide food to the poor"), I then felt the SLA's "arrest" of the daughter of the then-Hearst Corporation Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst was morally and politically justified; as well as a creative way to break through the 1970s U.S. corporate mass media's continued denial of free speech rights and equal mass media access to most anti-imperialist revolutionary U.S. political groups who wished to present their political viewpoint to people in the United States.

So using some of the free time during my workdays in the New American Library office to read one of the newspapers that was reprinting the texts of SLA communiques, I actually ended up writing a folk song, titled "Live Like Cinque," which included the lyrics "Live like Cinque, the champion of the poor" around this time. Because in the 1970s I then felt that text like the following reflected my own feelings and political viewpoint in many ways:

"We must first understand who the Hearsts are, who they serve and represent. Randolph A. Hearst is the corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda institutions of this oppressive military dictatorship of the militarily armed corporate state that we now live under in this nation..."

And I also then felt that the SLA was justified in making the following demand of Randolph Hearst, as the price for returning his daughter, Patty Hearst:

"Each person with one of the following cards is to be given 70 dollars [equal to around $437 dollars in 2024 U.S. dollars] worth of meats, vegetables, and dairy products: all people with welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled-veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail-or-bail release slips."

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library [NAL] Revisited: (17)

 Two other New American Library [NAL] employees I vaguely remember, after so many years, were an elderly couple, seeming to be in their late 50s or early 60s, who--almost in their own outer office world across the aisle from me, worked in another one of the offices with (like the NAL publicity director's office) a skyscraper window , out of which one could see the street below.  The white elderly husband and his white elderly wife had apparently previously made some kind of a deal, with either NAL or with the Times-Mirror media conglomerate, to sell their previously independent Daw paperback-publishing firm to either NAL or Times-Mirror.

So now, their Daw paperback firm, that published science fiction and fantasy paperback books--which apparently had never been able to sell as many copies as the books that Stephen King wrote in the decades after 1970 did--was now just a subsidiary of a mass media conglomerate, in an office surrounded by NAL executives who seemed to rarely interact with them.

I can't recall having exchanged any words with the culturally straight, elderly couple. But during my time as a NAL wage slave, my impressions is that the beardless husband, who wore glasses and always came to work dressed in a suit and tie, and the conventionally-looking wife, who always came to work wearing a dress, were used to working together alone and ignoring everybody else at the office. So they barely noticed or cared that no one at NAL seemed interested in socializing or conversing with them; despite Daw being now distributed and marketed by NAL. 

I had been into reading science fiction paperbacks and watching TV shows like Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But by the time I was publicity clerkin' at NAL in the mid-1970s my reading interests had changed so much that, when I did read fiction, I mainly read fiction that reflected a socialist realism, feminist, African-American, Beat Generation or working-class aesthetic. So I don't recall which science fiction novels were published by NAL with the Daw imprint or whether its science fiction paperbacks were generally considered to be of higher literary quality than what other science fiction paperback publishers were publishing in the 1970s.

What I do recall, though, is that--after I opened for the NAL publicity director some envelopes (which each contained a photocopied clipping of the latest print media reviews of NAL-published/marketed books) and noticed that one of the mailed-in print media reviews included a mean-spirited and personal attack on her husband's qualification to hold his position as NAL's Daw imprint editor/publisher, which I first showed to the Daw woman co-editor/publisher (before letting the NAL publicity director see it), she read it and then quickly tore up the hostile photocopied clipping.

The only other New American Library Library [NAL] worker I still have some memory of so many years later, mainly because I did have a conversation with him alone inside the office in which he worked, was a usually casually-dressed white visual artist in his late 20s, whose job was to create and draw the different illustrated covers that were printed on each of the NAL paperback books.

The NAL visual artist didn't have to work 9-to-5 while dressed in a suit and tie when he came to his skyscraper office "studio"/ private office each day.  And he could pretty much spend the day creating and drawing the illustrations used on the book covers, without having to interact personally with any of the business-oriented NAL executives and higher-up corporate-types.

But my impression, after chatting with him alone in his private office at some length, where I had been told to go to in order to pick up some rush book cover illustrations he had been assigned to complete, was that this NAL paperback book cover illustrator would have preferred to be at home during the day or in a studio, working on his own paintings, rather than being in the skyscraper each day doing what he likely considered to be "hack work." 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: (16)

 Within a few weeks after I began publicity clerkin' at New American Library, however, it became obvious that, by the mid-1970s, the most power within its office, in determining which manuscripts were to be published, promoted and publicized most, was held--not by its culturally-straight, white upper-middle-class female editorial director--but by its culturally-straight and less intellectual white upper-middle-class male sales department executives.

And because the manuscripts most likely to be marketed commercially most profitably as paperback books, were those that tied-in to already-produced media conglomerate movies, television shows or to mass media celebrities, or were those manuscripts most likely to be adapted into a Hollywood movie or commercial television show, those were the kind of manuscripts that NAL's sales department executives most wanted to see NAL accept and publish.

So even if the New American Library's editorial director may have wanted NAL/Signet to be into publishing manuscripts of a more enduring and higher literary quality than what it published in the mid-1970s,  it's likely that the intellectually low-brow NAL male sales department exeutives would have blocked her from doing so; since the paperback book publishing firm's male sales department executives had little interest in literature and evaluated writers' manuscripts solely on the basis of whether or not they would increase NAL's annual business revenue.

Among the only four other NAL employees I have vague memories of, after so many years, was a young white woman clerical worker whose desk was around 10 yards to the left from my desk, in some other department of the paperback book publishing office. Looking to be in her early 20s, she still dressed up for work each day in a culturally-straight way; and, despite it being in the mid-1970s, still never came to work casually dressed in slacks, or even less-casually in pant-suits,--unlike most young white women clerical workers her age were then starting to do. But still, this young woman was likely to have been considered the most physically beautiful younger woman in the NAL office, by most men.

Despite her dressing in a culturally-straight way, because she was both a NAL clerical worker, like I was, and a younger woman whom I also considered physically beautiful, after I first noticed her, I, initially, hoped that she would be interested in perhaps occasionally chatting with me or getting to know each other.

But, despite both being stuck in clerical worker wage-slave slots at the same workplace, after I smiled at her and said "hi" one day when she walked passed my desk within the office, and she seemed to turn her head the other way and did not even say "hi" in return, the vibe I got from her was that I was definitely not the kind of guy she would ever be interested in conversing with or dating--even if she didn't already have a boyfriend (which, given her physical beauty, she likely already had).  So no words were ever exchanged between this physically beautiful NAL clerical worker and me during the whole time I was publicity clerkin' at New American Library.

 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (15)

 So many years later, I no longer have much memory of other people who worked at New American Library [NAL] during the mid-1970s. The person at NAL who seemed to then have the most influence, from an editorial decision-making point of view, in determining which submitted manuscripts were to be finally accepted for publication, was a culturally-straight-looking and dressed white upper-middle-class white woman in her late 20s or early 30s.

This top NAL editorial decision-maker received a copy of each puublicity release, that was written by the NAL publicity director, Marge, and typed up by me, about every paperback book that was being publicized by NAL; at the same time copies of  the press release were put into envelopes and mailed out to various corporate media newspaper, magazine or radio-television book reviewers.

Most men then would likely not have considered the NAL editorial decision-maker as physically attractive as Marge still was in the mid-1970s, despite the chief NAL editor being younger. But with her smiling, easy-going, good-natured personality within the office--which seemed to reflect the fact that she now felt happy with the kind of work she was being paid a good salary to do within the world of publishing--most men in the mid-1970s would still not have considered NAL's then-most influential editorial department decision-maker unattractive.

Politically, the NAL's top editorial decision-maker seemed to be, like Marge, just an anti-racist and anti-war, culturally-straight liberal in the mid-1970s; who had not been involved enough in the late 1960s or early 1970s hip youth counter-culture to have developed a more politically radicalized, anti-imperialist and pro-Black Panther Party antii-racist political consciousness, like I had.

But, given some of the early 1970s women's liberation movement-related and feminist paperback books that NAL had started to market (after the white middle-class's feminist movement began to receive much more favorable corporate mass media coverage, following the well-attended Women's Liberation march in Manhattan in the summer of 1970, and the idea of "women's lib"  then became a trendy one within U.S. upper-middle-class white liberal circles), it's likely that NAL's editorial department boss was a more conscious bourgeois feminist in her political views than Marge was in the mid-1970s, when I was publicity clerkin' under the two of them at New American Library.

Many years later, I noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that this same NAL editorial director may have graduated from Barnard College in the early 1960s--in the years before historical events and Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] chapter campus organizing had eventually politically radicalized many Columbia and Barnard students.

And many years later, I also noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that some of the post-World WarII baby-boom fiction writers (who weren't ever as politically or culturally radical as most pre-World War II-born novelists or Movement activists, like Marge Piercy, Carl Oglesby and Abbie Hoffman, or most pre-World War II-born or post-World War II baby-boom 1960s underground New Left Movement writers)--like Maine-based left-liberal Stephen King (who still believed in the 21st-century that the Warren Commission's "official" version of what happened in Dallas, Texas between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 was true)--were promoted within the paperback book publishing world by this particular white upper-middle-class woman NAL editor in the 1970s.

Not sure, myself, how true the info on the internet I came across was. But most of the writers who became best-selling U.S. fiction book authors in the late 1970s and in the 1980s pretty much failed to reflect the literary values and historical social/economic realities experienced by most hip counter-cultural, post-WWII baby-boom working-class people of all racial backgrounds, in their fiction.

So the class situation reality, middle-class life interests, fantasies, values and ideological/political perspective of the NAL editor likely were reflected by the particular best-selling U.S. fiction writers whose literary careers she chose to promote, I suspect.

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (14)

Publicity clerkin' in the New American Library book publishing corporate office, within the plastic Sixth Avenue skyscraper each day from 9 to 5 or 9:30 to 5:30, Monday through Friday, produced little variety in may daily workday routine at this office.

In the mid-1970s, within the skyscraper corporate offices like the New American Library one (in which lettering engraved on the wall, with the words "Times Mirror", could be seen as you walked through the office door, to remind you that the New American Library paperback publishing firm was, by then, a subsidiary of a larger corporate media conglomerate), besides escaping from your wage-slave cage desk for an hour everyday to eat lunch outside the skyscraper somewhere (and maybe, afterwards, then sit in a park or library, shop or window shop or just walk around on the street), you also got a 15 to 20-minute coffee break away from your desk, to break up your morning; and a 15 to 20-minute coffee break away from your desk to break up your afternoon.

A non-unionized worker for some food vendor, whose boss had won the concession contract to sell the coffee and cakes to the employees at the offices within the building, would roll one of the food vending carts, which contained wrapped-up cakes and buttered rolls, a coffee dispenser, juice bottles and fruits, near the glass front door of each office. And some of the New American Library workers or executives would either purchase a cup of coffee to bring back to their desks or stand around chatting with other workers or executives during the morning or afternoon coffee break.

Becaause I both didn't drink coffee then and didn't encounter any other workers around the food vending cart who seemed either culturally hip or interested in chatting with me, I usually just waited in line, purchased a Danish cake or a buttered roll and returned to my workplace desk for most of my coffee breaks at New American Library, in both the morning and afternoon.

While sitting at my desk, though, I always made sure that I didn't resume doing any work I still had to do until the 15 to 20 minutes were up. But if the NAL publicity director happened to be speaking to someone on her office telephone, her secretary was also on the telephone, and a third telephone call came through, I would then sometimes have to pick up the telephone, occasionally, during my coffee break time. 

  

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (13)

 A final response of mine to hearing about Dylan's initial 1970s "comeback tour" was to take a Long Island Railroad train out to the Nassau Coliseum, on the evening that Dylan was performing live on Long Island and charging the inflated concert ticket price, to see if any Yipster Times readers or Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front supporters--who also felt that some hip capitalists were individually enriching themselves by being involved in youth cultural rip-off activity and collaboration with music industry media conglomerates that economically exploited and politically manipulated U.S. music fans and the U.S. youth market--would be protesting there.

But when I arrived outside the Nassau Colisuem, as mostly white middle-class and white upper middle-class suburbanite post-1966 Dylan fans were walking towards and through the concert arena's doors, the only sign of any protest I noticed was a Yipster Times writer named Aron passing out a leaflet in the arena's parking lot.

The leaflet included a photocopied image of a check from CBS to Bob Dylan for $80,000 [equal to around $482,000 in 2022]; which seemed to indicate that in the mid-1970s Dylan was apparently collecting over 10 times as much money each month from the CBS media conglomerate as the vast majority of mid-1970s freaks and U.S. music fans were able to earn in a year, at whatever menial, straight 9-to-5 wage enslavement job (like the publicity clerk job at New American Library that I then had) they were trapped in during the mid-1970s.

And the leaflet the Yipster Times writer was attempting to distribute pointed out that, with that kind of money already passing into Dylan's 1970s bank account from CBS on a regular basis, there was no economic justification, other than hip capitalist individual greed, for Dylan to be charging his fans so much money for tickets to his initial live concerts in the mid-1970s.

After I said a few words of encouragement to the Yipster Times writer when he handed me the leaflet, he, alone, continued to hand out his leaflets to as many of the post-1966 Dylan fans as he could encounter, before they marched into the Nassau Coliseum.

Standing alone myself in front of the entrance to the Nassau Coliseum, I observed, for awhile, how the suburban music fans reacted when they were handed the leaflet.  And I noticed that Aron wasn't receiving much of a response, one way or the other, from the music fans who accepted the leaflets he handed to them.

So I concluded that the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island was too far from Manhattan neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side for there to be any chance that any protest would develop outside or inside the live Dylan concert on Long Island to express dissatisfaction with the inflated ticket prices Dylan was now charging his music fans.

So when the number of young music fans heading into the Dylan concert began to decrease, I began the long walk alone from the Nassau Coliseum to the Long Island Railroad station to catch the train that would take me back to Brooklyn.  And on the train, I re-read the leaflet the Yipster Times writer had handed me in the Nassau Colisuem parking lot.

But when Dylan performed live in Manhatttan's Madison Square Garden a few days later, some counter-cultural Movement people apparently did appear in larger numbers outside Madison Square Garden to express their dissatisfaction with the ticket prices Dylan was charging for his "comeback tour" performance there. 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (12)

Once I heard about the inflated ticket prices that Dylan was going to charge those U.S. music fans interested in attending his initial 1970s live concerts, I soon telephoned Murray Lerner, the documentary filmmaker who had produced a film in the 1960s, Festival, that contained some footage of the early Dylan performing at the Newport Folk Festival prior to 1966.

But when I asked Murray Lerner over the telephone if it would be possible to arrange for screenings of his 1960s Newport Folk Festival film on some local New York City campuses to be shown for free, to 1970s college students, during the time Dylan was making his initial 1970s live concert tour (so that, for free, younger 1970s music fans could better determine the degree to which the Dylan of the 1970s was different than the Dylan of the early 1960s), Murray Lerner indicated that he still wanted to receive money in the 1970s for allowing 1970s students to see his 1967 Festival film for free, while Dylan was on his well-publicized 1970s "comeback tour."

Hence, it wasn't until the late 1990s or early 21st century that most music fans in the United States who had never seen Murray Lerner's Festival film when it was first released in the 1960s were able to see much of its footage, as well as some added footage, as part of a newly titled film, "The Other Side Of The Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at The Newport Folk Festival."

A second thing I did, when I heard about the inflated prices Dylan was going to charge folks who bought tickets to his initial 1970s live concert tour, was to write a satirical folk song about "Bob Dylan Incorporated", which protested against the commercialism of the new 1970s symbol of hip capitalism: "Bob Dylan Incorporated."

I sang the satirical folk song about "Bob Dylan Incorporated" for awhile inside the slum apartment near the Brooklyn waterfront that I was living in, while Dylan was touring again and I was publicity clerkin' at New American Library. But, by the late 1970s, I no longer was singing this particular song and had lost the piece of paper containing the lyrics for this song.  And I forget if I ever recorded on my cheap cassette tape recorder in the slum apartment the "Bob Dylan Incorporated" satirical folk song on any cheap homemade cassette tape of folk songs I may have mailed to anyone during the mid-1970s. So I no longer can recall what the lyrics were to this particular folk song.