The money rolled in.
And so did the stories, and they were terrible. Fielding stacked them, and when each had been in his office for two weeks, so that it would look as though he’d taken his time and given it a careful reading, he returned it with a letter explaining just what was wrong with it. Most of the time what was wrong was the writer’s utter lack of talent, but he never said that. Instead he praised the style and found fault with the plot, which somehow was always flawed in ways that revision could not cure. Put this one away, he advised each author, and write another, and send that along as soon as it’s finished. With, of course, another reading fee.
The business was profitable from the beginning, with writers incredibly sending in story after story, failing entirely to learn from experience. Fielding thought he’d milk it for as long as it lasted, but a strange thing happened. Skimming through the garbage, he found himself coming across a story now and then that wasn’t too bad. “Congratulations!” he wrote the author. “I’m taking this right out to market.” It was probably a mistake, he thought, but this way at least he got away with a shorter letter.
And some of the stories sold. And, out of the blue, a professional writer got in touch, wondering if Fielding would represent him on a straight commission basis. By the time my patient, young Gerald Metzner, went to work for him, Byron Fielding was an established agent with over ten years in the business and a string of professional clients whose work he sold to established book and magazine publishers throughout the world.
Fielding had half a dozen people working for him by then. One ran a writing school, with a post office box for an address and no visible connection with Byron Fielding or his agency. The lucky student worked his way through a ten-lesson correspondence course, and upon graduating received a certificate of completion and the suggestion that he might submit his work (with a reading fee) to guess who. Another employee dealt with the professional clients, working up market lists for the material they submitted. Two others — Gerald Metzner was one of them — read the scripts that came in over the transom, the ones accompanied by reading fees. “I can see you are no stranger to your typewriter,” he would write to some poor devil who couldn’t write an intelligible laundry list. “Although this story has flaws that render it unsalable, I’ll be eager to see your next effort. I feel confident that you’re on your way.” The letter, needless to say, went out over Byron Fielding’s signature. As far as the mopes were concerned, Fielding was reading every word himself, and writing every word of his replies. Another employee, also writing over Fielding’s mean little scrawl, engaged in personal collaboration with the more desperate clients. For a hundred bucks, the great man himself would purportedly work with them step-by-step, from outline through first draft to final polish. They would be writing their stories hand in hand with Byron Fielding, and when it was finished to his satisfaction he would take it out to market.
The client (or victim, as you prefer) would mail in his money and his outline. The hireling, who had very likely never sold anything himself, and might in fact not ever have written anything, would suggest some arbitrary change. The client would send in the revised outline, and when it was approved he would furnish a first draft. Again the employee would suggest improvements, and again the poor bastard would do as instructed, whereupon he’d be told that the story, a solid professional effort, was on its way to market.
But it remained a sow’s ear, however artfully embroidered, and Fielding wouldn’t have dreamed of sullying what little reputation he had by showing such tripe to an editor. So the manuscript went into a drawer in the office, and there it remained, while the hapless scribbler was encouraged to get cracking on another story.
The fee business was ethically and morally offensive, and one wondered why Fielding didn’t give it up once he could afford to. The personal collaboration racket was worse; it was actionably fraudulent, and a client who learned what was going on could clearly have pressed criminal charges against his conniving collaborator. It’s not terribly likely that Fielding could have gone to jail for it, but a determined prosecutor with the wind up could have given him some bad moments. And if there were a writer or two on the jury, he couldn’t expect much in the way of mercy.
Fielding hung on to it because he didn’t want to give up a dime. He didn’t treat his professional clients a great deal better, for in a sense he had only one client, and that client was Byron Fielding. He acted, not in his clients’ interests, but in his own. If they coincided, fine. If not, tough.
I could go on, but you get the idea. So did young Metzner, and he wasn’t there for long. He worked for Fielding for a year and a half, then resigned to do his own writing. A lot of the agency’s pro clients were writing soft-core paperback fiction, and Metzner tried one of his own. When it was done he sent it to Fielding, who sold it for him.
He did a few more, and was making more money than he’d made as an employee, and working his own hours. But it wasn’t what he really wanted to write, and he tried a few other things, and wound up out in California, writing for film and television. Fielding referred him to a Hollywood agent, who, out of gratitude and the hope of more business, split commissions on Metzner’s sales with Byron Fielding. Thus Fielding made far more money over the years from Gerald Metzner’s screenwriting than he had ever made from his prose, and all he had to do for it was cash the checks the Hollywood agent sent him. That was, to his way of thinking, the ideal author-agent relationship, and he had warm feelings for Metzner — or what passed for warm feelings in such a man.
When Metzner had occasion to come to New York, he more often than not dropped in on his agent. He and Fielding would chat for fifteen minutes, and then he could return to Hollywood and tell himself he hadn’t entirely lost touch with the world of books and publishing. He had an agent, didn’t he? His agent was always happy to see him, wasn’t he?
And who was to say he wouldn’t someday try his hand at another novel?
Years passed, as they so often do. Business again called Gerald Metzner to New York, and he arranged to drop by Fielding’s office on a free afternoon. As usual, he waited for a few minutes in the outer office, taking a look at the sea of minions banging away at typewriters. It seemed to him that there were more of them every time he visited, more men sitting at more desks, telling even more of the hopeful hopeless that they had talent in rare abundance, and surely the next story would make the grade, but, sad to say, this story, with its poorly constructed plot, was not the one to bring their dreams to fulfillment. What a story required, you see, was a strong and sympathetic lead character confronted by a problem, and... Di dah di dah di dah.
He broke off his reverie when he was summoned to Fielding’s private office. There the agent waited, looking younger than his years, health club-toned and sunlamp-tanned, a broad white-toothed smile on his face. The two men shook hands and took seats on opposite sides of the agent’s immaculate desk.