Robert Gottlieb's Avid Reader (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016) sets some kind of record for name-dropping: the index is nothing but names, from Kobo Abe to Michael Young. Gottlieb doesn't just get phone calls from his wife it always happens when, for instance, "I was having dinner with Edna O'Brien, just the two of us."
Gottlieb is not above comparing himself to legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who supposedly re-wrote much of Thomas Wolfe. Editor Gottlieb always finds manuscripts --whether from Lauren Bacall or Joseph Heller -- to be in terrible shape and he has to work night and day and all weekend to make them readable. He made Simon and Schuster a success, brought Knopf back from the dead and improved "The New Yorker" considerably when he took over from William Shawn (and then it went downhill after he was replaced with Tina Brown.)
Gottlieb was not only a great editor he also practically ran two ballet companies, first the NYC Ballet (he was fired from the board when Peter Martins objected to an Arlene Croce piece he ran in The New Yorker, not just because Gottlieb ran it but because, as Martins says, "you believe it."). Then Gottlieb went to work with Lourdes Lopez at Miami City Ballet, after personally choosing her to run the company. Gottlieb also published a book about Balanchine (George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Harper and Collins, 2004) with little insight into Balanchine's genius and no discernible knowledge of ballet steps or choreography, falling back on subjective terms such as "speed" and "attack."
In fairness to Gottlieb he does seem to have chosen good assistants to work with him and apparently always got along with his bosses. It would have been nice to hear more about the writers he worked with and details of editing, other than that he took a box full of scribbled notes and turned it into a book. And does he truly think that being selected for Book-of-the-Month club or making the best-seller list are measures of the quality of a book?
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