Phyllis A. Westberg

Memories of Phyllis

Belated word that my former boss, Phyllis Westberg, president of Harold Ober Associates, the oldest literary agency in the country, had passed away stirred a number of emotions and memories about my tenure as Phyllis’s assistant at Ober in the late 1990s. I’d faxed my meager resume (I’d just graduated from the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College) to every literary agency in New York, and Ober was one of only a couple to respond. Walking through the door at Ober’s offices on Madison Avenue for my interview was like entering a wormhole back to the 1920s, when the agency was founded and when its star client was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through the decades, the roster of Ober authors had grown, and it read like a survey of twentieth-century literature: J. D. Salinger, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Sherwood Anderson, Pearl S. Buck, James M. Cain, Langston Hughes, and Dylan Thomas were just a few names among the many who had passed through the same door. Overhead lighting was eschewed for low lamps, everyone smoked, and the sound of typewriters filled the air. Phones would ring and ring, owing to the deliberate absence of voicemail. Phyllis was somehow amazed that I knew how to type—further amazed that I’d taken it as a class in high school—and she hired me at the conclusion of the interview.

There were surely better candidates, but in my first few weeks at Ober in the fall of 1997, I came to understand that the agency was in a bit of turmoil, and so it was possible that they just needed someone, regardless of experience or expertise. The stresses on the agency included the recent loss of its grande dame, Dorothy Olding, who had worked directly for and with Harold Ober. Olding was also famously J. D. Salinger’s agent. Too, the agent who had been hired to develop and curate the frontlist (i.e., contemporary authors) had left rather abruptly and taken all said contemporary writers with them. I learned through office gossip that Phyllis had also suffered a recent shock: her lover, a married man whose wife was also a friend of Phyllis’s—an “arrangement,” I believe it’s called—had committed suicide in her apartment, and she was in the process of looking for a new place.

Phyllis had the whiff of dragon lady about her, mostly because she would breeze in without really speaking to anyone and disappear into her lamplit office and smoke what surely wasn’t the day’s first cigarette while I sat at my desk just outside her door, waiting for her to call me into service.

We’d spend the first half of the day on Dorothy Olding’s estate, including readying her Midtown apartment for sale, my first glimpse of an actual New York apartment (and not one stuffed with anonymous roommates), as well as executing the wishes in her will, which involved chasing down heirs, as Olding and her long-deceased husband had no children or immediate relatives. The rest of the day we spent on the agency’s business: correspondence and contracts relating to the trove of estates Ober represented (an agency founded in 1929 is naturally responsible for an outsize share of literary estates), as well as manuscript submissions for the clients Phyllis represented or had inherited. At the end of each day, Phyllis would click off the lamp in her office, say good night, and take the bus home, unless it was raining, in which case she’d walk a block to the Waldorf Astoria, where she’d tip the doorman to put her in a cab.

As time passed and our working relationship found its footing, I learned that she’d come to Ober from the world of magazines like Collier’s and others whose names recall a glamorous publishing past. If she told me the story about how Dorothy Olding came to hire her at Ober, it’s lost to the mists of time. It was easy to envision Phyllis chain-smoking in fashionable outfits at literary parties in the Mad Men era. But I could also sense that she was a shy person who hid behind a gruff exterior, as shy people sometimes do.

When she learned I was living in an illegal sublet in Brooklyn, a bedroom built into an artist’s studio, Phyllis told me that when she first came to New York, she lived in Spuyten Duyvil, a neighborhood in the Bronx, as long a train ride home after a late night in the city as mine was to Brooklyn, albeit in the opposite direction. Phyllis had gone to college in Chicago, at Shimer College on the South Side, which I only knew because she attended a reunion one year. But was she from Chicago? I can’t say for sure. I knew she had a sister in Florida, twenty years younger, who maybe worked at Home Depot.

The flood of memories that came to me when I learned of her passing included the following:

 She used to like to torture me with pop quizzes about the British titles of the works of Agatha Christie, whose estate Ober represented.

 One time she threw a party at her new apartment, and I arrived with an empty stomach, then proceeded to drink an entire bottle of wine. Nerves, probably. I remember chatting with Ober client Ira Levin and the next thing I remember is vomiting in Phyllis’s sparkling new white tile bathroom sink. When I woke on the couch in her guest room (perhaps her first overnight guest in the new place!), she said drolly, “Can’t take you anywhere, eh?” And then we rode to work together.

 When she inherited Salinger as a client, she wasn’t really familiar with his work beyond The Catcher in the Rye. (The reality of working at a place like Ober was that we thought about and talked about writers and their books by name and title, but no one had read every single one.) She grabbed copies of Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey as she left one night to read over the weekend. When I saw her on Monday and asked what she thought, she just shrugged. We had a lot of Salinger adventures together—the shredding of the letters Salinger had written to Joyce Maynard that Maynard auctioned off at Sotheby’s (Peter Norton of Norton AntiVirus purchased them and returned them to Salinger via Ober), the legal blockade of an Iranian film version of Franny and Zooey that Lincoln Center attempted to include in a film festival, etc., etc.—but I never had the feeling Phyllis thought it was more than carrying out the author’s wishes, just as she would for any Ober client.

 What else? Oh, she’d discovered Judy Blume, who eventually left Ober, which happens at every agency, but thereafter Phyllis wouldn’t take Blume’s infrequent calls. “Tell Phyllis I said hello,” is how Blume would sign off with me.

 She seemed to be annoyed that thriller writer Dean Koontz had been wooed away by another agent, who asked him why more of his books hadn’t been made into film.

 She took an annual summer vacation to a spa in Connecticut, though once she deviated to go to New Hampshire to visit Salinger, whom she’d never met.

 She got a cat for her new apartment that she named Scout after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

 She gave me an old black-and-white television for my illegal sublet when I said the place had no TV.

 She maybe suspected that I was sometimes sleeping on the floor of her office when I was between apartment opportunities (her rug had a thick pad under it), but she never said anything.

 When the temporary filling from a traumatic but low-cost root canal I had done by dental students at NYU finally fell out, and the tooth got infected, she arranged with her dentist on Madison Avenue for me to get the repairs I needed and for me to pay for them over time. I suspect she guaranteed payment with the dentist in the event I defaulted.

 She supported an idea I had to write a history of the agency (never completed), letting me take the train to the Ober archives in Princeton on Fridays in the summer.

 She sent me to spy on a demonstration that Sony was giving about a new handheld e-reader and report back.

 She would sometimes send me to the bodega across the street to get her a Dr Pepper. She got a kick out of the fact that my previous boss back in Phoenix, savings-and-loan kingpin Charles H. Keating Jr., had had all the fridges stocked with Dr Pepper, his favorite.

 She and my father shared the same birthday, April Fools’ Day.

 She offered me a substantial raise when I gave notice, not knowing that after three years of low pay and unstable housing, I was too burned out to stay.

What I like to think is true: Phyllis saw in me someone like her, from a meager background, or at least with no clear advantages, who’d come to New York under their own steam and found a way to make a life in letters. She was a mother figure to me (we would sometimes snip at each other, and I would disappoint her more than once, as sons often do), and while it would’ve been laughable for me to say out loud, and certainly embarrassing for her to hear, I loved her, and our time together. With her passing, and the absorption of Ober into another agency, a piece of a time and place special not just to me but to generations—old-world, glamorous, literary New York—disappears forever.

Jaime Clarke