Half a century ago, when I was in my mid-thirties and on my third career, I did something I had wanted to do for a long time. I quit my job and wrote a book. It was a book about the first act of my career—seventeen years with the infamous United Fruit Company. I started there as a messenger/office boy at age eighteen (making $32.50 a week) and rose to become vice president of public relations for the controversial Fortune 500 company. My job was to try to put a good face on an ugly company.
At thirty-five, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that. So I quit. Two years later, I wrote a book. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit did very well with reviewers and readers in the US and around the world, including translations in Russian and Japanese—highly unusual for a business book. The fact that I wrote a largely critical book assured that I would never again work for a major company. As one CEO said, “Anyone who writes books like this is not to be trusted.” After that, I published several other books but realized I could never make the kind of a living I wanted this way, so I treated writing as a hobby. I wrote screenplays, fables, fiction, short stories, humor—everything except poetry.
Over the years, I kept notes on scraps of paper, and as I got into my eighties, several people suggested I write a memoir. I certainly had more than enough material for a memoir, and at the urging of people close to me, I started to write the story of my life. One of these people was my friend, the writer Kevin Stevens, who said he would edit what I wrote and help me get it published. So, I began it when I was close to ninety. Within a year, I had 40,000 words written.
The next year, I suffered several small strokes, damaging falls, broken bones, and declining eyesight. One of the falls resulted in a severely broken ankle that required surgery. I began to wonder: Am I going to finish my memoir? Am I going to get it published? Am I going to find an agent who wants to represent it? Is he or she going to find a publisher who would be interested in publishing a memoir written by an old man?
I also considered my age. I was ninety then. Would I live to be ninety-three or ninety-four? Even if I finished it, did I have enough time to find an agent and a publisher? The publishing process with something like this might take five or six years. I was running out of time. These thoughts stayed with me and resulted in a block. For the next year, failure to write sent me into a depression, and I could not write anything. But I had invested a lot—40,000 words, and Kevin and I had only 10,000 or 15,000 to go.
After a year, I came up with a plan. I would push to get those final chapters written and then publish the book online. I would create a website and make the book available to readers in digital form—for free. I don’t need another hardcover book on my shelf.
So, here it is. There will be more to come. One of the benefits of publishing a book online is that I can add to it incrementally. I remain convinced that the stories I have to tell will be interesting to a lot of people, so stay tuned for future chapters, including my encounters with Caesar Chavez, Angela Lansbury, Al Capp, Terry Southern, and many more. Some are entertaining. They’re sometimes shocking. And maybe, above all, there are lessons to be learned from the life of a Brooklyn kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had a limited education, no money, and no connections.
About the title. Fifteen years ago, I wrote The Tree Nobody Wanted, the story of a Christmas with my grandmother (Nanny), the kind of Christmas poor people had that other people don’t understand. At one point, my character visits the ugly, replanted, but magical Christmas tree for the last time. Here is what I wrote toward the end of the book:
Darkness comes early in winter, and it was approaching very fast. I said goodbye to our tree, perhaps for the last time, and I sensed a sadness coming from it. I reached out and gently touched a branch, the way Nanny used to do, and a piece of it came off in my hand. I put it in my coat pocket and said goodbye one more time. I turned and walked out of the Botanic Garden and across the wide street. As I reached the corner, I turned for one last look at our tree because I realized that once I turned the corner, I would no longer be able to see it. Life is many things, including a series of turning corners. One minute things are in front of you in full view, and the next instant you can no longer see what was there. All you have left is the memory.
I receive lots of letters from readers saying that those two lines were their favorites, and that “turning corners” is life. At my age now, I can see that all the corners I’ve turned resulted in meeting and working with new people, new projects, new adventures. So that is the title of my memoir.
I hope you enjoy it.