The Best of Everything

536 Pages·2005·1.78 MB·English

by  Rona Jaffe

The best of everything
1. The best of everything
The best of everything
Rona Jaffe
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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Foundation
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Praise for Rona Jaffe andThe Best of Everything
“A classic of its kind. The dialogue is real, the people are real.Most career girls,
past or present, will respond with the shock ofauthenticity.” —Saturday Review
“It will ring a bell with anyone who has lived in New York at a timeof life when
the city looks like a vast crackerjack box of amorous
possibilities. It has mountains of merit.”
—New York World-Telegram
“Rona Jaffe will have you believing that very shocking things dohappen in New
York bars and apartments. This is a story that shouldbe read by girls with
dramatic ideas about New York, parents withqualms about their daughters’
ideas, and men with baffling questions about girls’ minds.” —The Cleveland
Press
“An exuberant and readable book. Miss Jaffe is an artful and per-suasive
storyteller. It almost will certainly ruffle many a male ego.”
—The Spokane Chronicle
“Such is the author’s skill that this story of five girls is unmistakablythe story of
someone you know.” —The Boston Globe
“Any employer reading these pages will make a mental note tocheck up on what
the girls in his office do after lunch, and withwhom. ” —New York Post
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rona JafFe is the author of sixteen books, including thebestselling Class
Rona JafFe is the author of sixteen books, including thebestselling Class
Reunion, Family Secrets, The LastChance, and Mr. Right Is Dead. She is the
founder ofthe Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents a nationalliterary award to
promising women writers.
YOU DESERVE
THE BEST OF EVERYTHING
The best job, the best surroundings,the best pay, the best contacts.
—From an ad in THE NEW YORK TIMES
Foreword
The way all this happened sounds itself like a novel. I was a youngstruggling
writer in New York City in the 1950s who had been practic-ing her craft since
she was two and a half. I used to send stories to TheNew Yorker when I was
nine, and they would come right back. The editors thought I was an adult who
couldn’t write.
After graduating from Radcliffe at nineteen, I worked at a publishingcompany,
Fawcett Publications, for almost four years, rising from filingclerk to associate
editor. While there, I finally had several stories published in national magazines,
and eventually quit my job to write fulltime, hoping to complete a novel. I had
no money and was still livingwith my parents.
One day, I was visiting the offices of Simon & Schuster to see my college friend,
Phyllis Levy, who was then the secretary to the editor-in-chief, Jack Goodman.
Jerry Wald, the famous Hollywood producer,happened to be there meeting with
her boss. Goodman said to Wald,“Rona s going to write a hell of a novel some
day.”
“And we’re going to publish it,” Phyllis added. '
Wald, who was in town scouting for properties to option, said, “I’mlooking -for
a modern-day Kitty Foyle. A book about working girls in NewYork.” Out of
curiosity, I went to the library and read the novel byChristopher Morley, which
had been made into the 1940 movie starringGinger Rogers. I thought it was
dumb. I said to myself: He doesn’tknow anything about women. I know about
women. And I work in anoffice. Still I let the matter drop, until I went to
women. And I work in anoffice. Still I let the matter drop, until I went to
Hollywood on vacationwith Phyllis, and Jerry invited us to lunch. I wanted to
say something interesting to him, so I casually remarked, “I’m going to write
that working-girl book.” He replied that he was going to produce it.
On the train back from California, coming into New York, I had thevision of the
beginning for the book, which is all the hundreds andhundreds of girls” walking
to work. I came up with the title that morn—
vn
ing, too, a phrase I remembered from a New York Times help-wanted adthat
began: You Deserve the Best of Everything.
I didn’t know if the things that happened to my friends and me werean anomaly,
so I interviewed fifty women to see if they’d had the sameexperiences, with the
men and the jobs and all the things nobody spokeabout in polite company. Back
then, people didn’t talk about not beinga virgin. They didn’t talk about going out
with married men. They didn’ttalk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual
harassment, which hadno name in those days. But after interviewing these
women, I realizedthat all these issues were part of their lives too. I thought that if
I couldhelp one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was
allalone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile. I had no ideawhat a
chord it would strike for millions.
Jack Goodman died suddenly of a heart attack, and was replaced bySimon &
Schuster’s rising young star Robert Gottleib. He told me to“look back in horror
and write,” and so I did. We spoke on the phoneregularly, and I’d tell him what I
was going to work on every day. Meanwhile, Jerry Wald was doing a huge
publicity campaign for a book Ihadn t written and he hadn’t read, so it was a
surreal and rather nerve-racking time.
I wrote, obsessed, every day for five months and five days, on a man-ual
typewriter, until the 775-page manuscript was finished and the twofingers I used
to type with were bleeding under the nails. I was proud ofthe fact that my
publisher made no revisions except for grammar andspelling. And because I
hadn’t made a carbon copy, and since we didn’thave copying machines then,
they had to send the manuscript out to atyping service to make copies. My first
indication that the book wouldbe a success was when I spoke .with the women
from the tvping servicewho had gotten hold of my phone number. Because the
publisher wasin a hurry, they had to hire a team of typists who were each given
publisher wasin a hurry, they had to hire a team of typists who were each given
only aportion of the manuscript to work on. The girls had gotten so caught upin
the chapters they were working on, they couldn’t wait for the finishedbook to
find out what happened next. Instead, they would ring me. Atthe time I thought:
There’s my audience.
The book was published less than a year after I left my parents, gotmy own
apartment, and began it. I was twenty-six.
As soon as The Best of Everything was published, it was a huge bestseller.
Women would show up at book signings with their well-worn
viii
office copy asking me to inscribe it to “all the girls on the forty-ninthfloor.” To
this day women come up to me and say that the bookchanged their lives. After
they read it, they decided to come to NewYork and work in publishing. I was a
little surprised, because I hadthought The Best of Everything was a cautionary
tale. But of course anexciting life, even if very difficult, is better than a dull one,
even if itchanges you forever.
There was so much publicity and it all happened so fast that the situation felt
completely unreal. Interviews and photos of me were in thenewspapers
constantly, and I was even sent to Hollywood several timesto help with the
movie. Standing in front of a bookstore, I would lookinto the window at all the
copies of my first novel, with my picture onthe front cover, and wonder what I
would think of this suddenly celebrated person if I weren’t her. The one thing
that was clear, though, wasthat I was now a professional author with a career
ahead of me.
The honesty of The Best of Everything paved the way for other authors. And in
many ways it’s as relevant today as it was then. Somethings have stayed the
same and some have come back. The Best ofEverything is a sociological
document but it’s also about change: howyour dreams change, how your life
changes, how each thing that happens to you changes something else.
And that doesn’t change.
Rona Jaffe2005
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