And the editing? Despite his upper-class airs, Galassi, as it turned out, proved to be a superb editor for that book, allowing it to breathe in every way and urging only truly prudent changes. With a musical thing going on in my head, I treated word repetitions like beats — and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Fortunately, as the author of a fine book of poetry, Morning Run, he was linguistically savvy enough to stanch my gushing use of certain words, like lumbering in reference to Cesar Castillo’s sexual attributes, which, early on, had occurred some fifty or so times. He was also splendidly judicious in other ways — I don’t think we had a single argument over anything at all. (It was just a different time altogether: Now everything is done over the Internet, manuscripts like this one electronically transmitted and much of the work done without actually speaking or spending much time with anyone — the impersonality of it all is staggering to old-school writers like me.) By contrast, meeting with Galassi, with my unruly, marked-up, held-together-by-chewing-gum rewrites in hand, was a joy. We’d work for a few hours in the morning, then head out for lunch somewhere near their offices by Union Square, to just relax and have a few drinks — at least I did — and later I’d take the subway back uptown feeling as good as anyone could over a professional relationship.
I also had a pleasant experience with the in-house copy editors, the sort of ladies who walked around with pencils tucked behind their ears and seemed to swarm, paper in hand, along the hall of that publishing house, whose walls were lined with books and shelving like library stacks, to check out their facts. I got along particularly well with a longtime employee, a Puerto Rican woman, Carmen, whose tender loving care in regards to that manuscript — and the capricious Spanish I employed — made a wonderful difference not just to my novel but to me. The fact that she so liked it made me feel good, as it represented its first success with a Latino reader. (And that left me happier than anything else: For once, with my writing as my own front man, as it were, I was being accepted.)
The final touches, at least at that stage, had to do with conceiving of a book jacket. A well-known cover designer, Fred Marcellino, had asked me, through Jonathan Galassi, if I had any ideas that might be of use to him. Since the novel’s title followed the style of a 1950s mambo record, I sent him about four record jackets from that time: He especially liked one of them, which featured a sultry-looking blond babe of the 1950s, whose image he lifted and put on the cover of my book. (The cover, incidentally, turned out great, though a few years later, the designer’s use of an actual image of a woman from one of those jackets, the model still being alive, would involve me in a lawsuit, in which I was held at fault.)
Along the way, other things seemed to be cooking. A friend from my Brooklyn days, an art scholar and entrepreneur, Jeffrey Hoffeld, had told me that the founder of a gallery in which he had once been a partner, Arne Glimcher, might be interested, as an aspiring movie producer, in taking a peek at The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love—even in its early uncorrected form. Since I had nothing to lose, I went along with the notion. A few months later, I met with Ms. Wasserman and we went over to Glimcher’s place on East Fifty-second, an opulently maintained art deco high-rise apartment building of 1930s vintage (so I would guess), across the street from where Greta Garbo supposedly lived. He occupied a duplex penthouse overlooking the East River, and the first thing that impressed the hell out of me as I walked in was the fact that his entryway floor was inlaid with an antique second-century Roman mosaic of a maritime theme; his walls were covered with paintings from his gallery, the Pace on West Fifty-seventh, all by famous artists — Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and a portrait of him in broken pottery by one Julian Schnabel, among others; talk about money. I can remember trying to behave as if I were not already in over my head, though Glimcher, younger then by a decade than I am now, could not have been nicer, nor more accommodating, and seemingly humble.
I would imagine he, as a professional gallery owner, took an enormous pride in discovering new talent, and I suppose that same tendency had followed him into the movie business. I was apparently that new talent, and he did everything to charm and impress me. He spoke of spending a lot of time with “Sigourney” on the shoot for Gorillas in the Mist, of his many industry connections and his absolute determination to make my novel into a film — though it had yet to receive even a single review. With passion, he spoke about many of the novel’s themes — the close yet troubled relationship between the brothers really hitting him in a personal way — and of course, of how he, of a certain generation, had been raised on the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. And that song I had created on Nestor’s behalf, “Beautiful María of My Soul”—“Oh, you’ll see what I’ll end up doing with that. We’ll get a first-rate composer in, I promise you.”
He spoke of making my novel into a film with such confidence that, after a while, it started to feel like a foregone conclusion — such matters as an agreement for a movie option as a precursor to a contract, a necessary formality, would be forthcoming to my agent in no time at all.
That day, I got my first sense of why the man, as I’d learn, happened to be one of the most successful art dealers in the world: He was good at making you feel that his intentions were really your own. And he knew just which buttons to push. On our way out, while leaving it that I would meet him at some future point in his favorite restaurant, the Four Seasons, to talk over things further, he telephoned his chauffeur, a former cop named Bob, and gave him instructions to take us wherever we wanted to go in his limousine. I was startled. The only time I had ridden in a limousine before was for my pop’s burial out in Long Island. After dropping Ms. Wasserman off at her place on East Eighty-sixth, I found myself being shuttled uptown toward my old neighborhood like a pasha. I liked his driver — a real working-class man, of Sicilian roots, the sort with whom I always got along, a real salt-of-the-earth fellow. We talked, mainly about the Howard Beach area of Queens — my brother’s second wife had a lot of family out there, and that Italian connection opened Bob up as if he were an old-time chum and confidant. Eventually, he told me how much he thought Mr. Glimcher was worth — a stupendous amount. “And that’s not includin’ the value of his artwork, capiche?” I used to think that he was just confiding in me as one working-class guy to the other, but I can’t help wondering now if I was set up, those incredible numbers meant to further impress me.