In the plaza outside HarperCollins, Jim Fox, a white-haired, bright-eyed man wearing glasses, a blue Oxford button-down shirt and a bow tie, is enjoying a lunchtime cigarette. He greets each passerby, his colleagues mostly, by name. A lean man of not quite average height, he is physically unimposing, but carries himself with a sort of elegance that calls to mind a time when publishing was still considered a gentleman's game.
Though we have seen each other only a few times in more than a decade, he greets me warmly and we are soon talking of mutual friends. As we head across the street to Burger Heaven, he greets staff and other diners by name while we make our way to the takeout counter. We first met in 1985, at what was then Harper & Row. Fox had already worked his way up to general counsel; I was an editor. I left the company in 1994, but Fox has stayed, tallying 35 years with Harper. Now 66, he plans to retire at the end of the year, completing a transition that began last December when he stepped down as general counsel to make room for his hand-picked successor, Chris Goff, whom he hired in 1989.
Fox, who started his career drawing up contracts at Doubleday in 1966, has witnessed some dramatic changes in the book business. But when prompted to look back over his career, it becomes clear that it's the people who stand out most in his memory. He has worked closely with some of the book world's most storied figures, and he has some terrific tales to prove it. He shared one involving the legendary Buzz Wyeth, who edited George Plimpton's Paper Lion and Out of My League, among other books.
"In those years, there was a young woman who worked at Harper's who was, shall we say, very voluptuous. And, shall we say, she did not hide her light under a bushel." It was a hot summer day, he recalls. "Let's say, delicately, that a fair amount of her anatomy was on display as she came up the stairs," Fox continues. "She says, in this Marilyn Monroe/kewpie doll voice [Fox imitates the voice, thoroughly enjoying the moment], 'Hi Buzzie, how are you?' We get to the bottom of the stairs, and Buzz grabbed the banister, and he grabbed me and he said, 'You know, whenever I see her, I don't know what's gonna happen first: Are they gonna fall out? Or am I gonna fall in?' "
He tells another story involving the late editor Ursula Nordstrom, whose authors included Maurice Sendak: "Ursula had a corner office on the fourth floor. They'd call up from the lobby and say, 'Mr. Sendak is here.' And she'd say, 'Tell him to wait! Tell him to wait!' She had a piece of red crepe paper and she would roll it out from her office door to the door of the elevator. And then she would make two of her assistants stand and play these little tin horns. 'Toot-toot-toot.' "
Hitting the Mark
Fox was born on May 2, 1939, in Ellwood City, Pa., which was then a booming steel town. From there he went to Northwestern, and, "About the day I graduated [in 1961] the Berlin Wall went up," and everyone was drafted. By his own account, he was not well suited to the U.S. Army. He arrived at target practice, having never fired a rifle in his life. "So we went onto the rifle range, and you're supposed to hold the gun like this"—he demonstrates, pushing the butt of the rifle into his cheek—"pull the trigger and use your face to steady the gun. Of course, when you pull it, all this noise goes right off in your head. All these tough macho kids who have been shooting rifles for years had no trouble with this, but I couldn't stand the noise. So when no one was looking, I'd hold the gun out like this [away from his face]. You can imagine how many times I hit the target."
On the last day, one group ran the targets and counted the score for the other group; then the two groups switched places. "When I got my score, I had qualified as a top-of-the-line marksman. All these guys who were in my unit were laughing and laughing. And I said, 'What's happened?' They said, 'When your scores came down, there weren't any holes in them, so we just poked holes in the target.' "
From early on, it seems, Fox could win people over—even a bunch of macho marksmen at target practice.
The people who have worked with Fox say it's his sense of humor and his spirit of generosity that hold the key to his charm. "Even in a nasty legal dispute, he always treated people with respect and good will. He was a master negotiator because he never thinks negotiation is impossible. There's always another angle to work," says Matthew Martin, who once worked for Fox and is now associate general counsel at Random House. As Goff puts it, "His kindness manifests itself daily and throughout the workplace, and extends not only to colleagues but to adversaries."
Setting Precedents
As far as legal work goes, Fox points to two cases that set copyright precedents during his time at Harper. The first was the case against the Nation. Harper had sold first serial rights for Gerald Ford's memoir to Time magazine, but the Nation got hold of the manuscript and published some of its key revelations ("This was to be Ford's first public statement about the Nixon pardon," Fox explains). Harper sued the Nation and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Ted Miller, then Harper's general counsel, won the case, which stood for the author's right to control the first publication. Fox quickly points out that his contribution was not so grand—he oversaw the typists who typed the contracts (on manual typewriters—this was 1977).
The second case involved a textbook from Harper's college department, Child Development and Personality; its authors felt that a competing textbook was alarmingly similar. Throughout the summer of 1973, Fox sat in his office comparing the two and showing passages to Miller. They identified 120 similar passages, the basis of a lawsuit. "Harper won a copyright infringement action which still stands for the principle that copyright not only protects exact expression, but also the sequencing, which is what [the competing authors] had really copied," Fox explains.
Still, the most significant development in the industry during the past 40 years, he says, is the growth in opportunities for women. "When I started at Doubleday, there wasn't a glass ceiling, there was a concrete floor, and women were below it," he says. He recalls working with Maureen Egan, now deputy chairman and publisher of the Time Warner book group. "Maureen, when I first knew her at Doubleday in 1967, was an assistant for Natural History Press. And after three years, this wildly bright, highly promotable woman was made an assistant editor, which was a major thing." He adds, "Now women have really big jobs in publishing. That's a great change."
He calls Jane Friedman the best executive in publishing (she calls him "a legend in his own time"), and he defends of one of the industry's most controversial figures. "Judith Regan is a very colorful person, and she makes great copy. A lot of silly stuff has been written about her," he says. "But if anybody could figure out why she is as driven, as energetic, as attentive to detail as she is and as good as she is—then that would be an article I'd like to read."
When asked what his own contribution has been to publishing, he says his greatest achievement has been hiring good people, and he counts himself lucky to have worked with Ted Miller for 15 years. "He's a brilliant lawyer," Fox says. "I probably learned more working for him in three days than I did in three years of law school." And his advice to those new to the business: "I would say, as quickly as you possibly can, identify the people that you see are really smart, and try to find a way to get to work with or around those people so you can learn as much as you possibly can," he says. "Then know that ultimately what will make you successful is something of your own invention."
