I SHOULD HAVE mentioned earlier that PEN’s primary patrons, during the first year that I was president, were Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg, who at this time were very rich: rich enough that Gayfryd could cheerfully spend a million dollars on a birthday party for Saul.
By the time I more or less got settled in at PEN I had met Gayfryd Steinberg only once, at one of our galas. On Gayfryd, mainly, it seemed, rested our hopes for a helpful foundation coming into being, a prospect that made many members of the PEN board vocally restive.
Was the Steinbergs’ money too bloody for PEN? One who definitely thought it was was new board member Ken Auletta, a distinguished reporter for The New Yorker and other journals who reported on finance, the entertainment business, and the like. This was a time when moneymen on the order of Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken were going to jail.
Ken Auletta issued a sharp little protest about the Steinbergs’ involvement with PEN, which I read while on an airplane flying to Hollywood, where I hoped to get a job. Had I been flying east, rather than west, I probably would have called Ken Auletta up, invited him to lunch, and he and I would have made a private peace, which would have no effect at all on the climate at PEN, where, it was clear, there would soon be blood on the floor, as well as on the money.
Rather than inviting Ken to lunch I wrote him a letter, which, not to my surprise, ended up in New York magazine. I had come to realize what I really always knew, which is that people as cynical as myself should not involve themselves too deeply in the nonprofit world.
The result for PEN was, first of all, the loss of Gayfryd. I came back from Hollywood in time to preside over a rather stormy board meeting. Gayfryd Steinberg left us, changed her mind and came back, then (I think) turned on her heels and left again. I recall one meeting in the executive dining room of Simon and Schuster at which Gayfryd arrived wearing a shirt so diaphanous that she was essentially topless. Others at the meeting were Dick Snyder (my publisher and other head of Simon and Schuster), Karen, and Gayfryd and her nipples.
Up to this point I had not seen enough of Gayfryd Steinberg to know whether or not I liked her. Bureaucratically it soon ceased to matter. The Steinbergs suffered a reversal of fortune, Saul had a stroke, and there were no more million-dollar birthday parties.
At PEN the clamor for a foundation soon sank to whispers. There is, as of this writing, no PEN Foundation. The document hammered out before my time, which was supposed to entice patrons, was, as Dick Snyder pointed out, so plainly reluctant that few tough-minded, thick-skinned New York patrons-to-be would have been likely to write PEN too many checks.