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	Oscar Dystel: An Interview by David Finn By David Finn

Oscar Dystel is one of the towering figures in the publishing business. As the head of Bantam books for several decades, he had a major impact on the books Americans read. We have been friends for a long time, and I have always enjoyed his warmth, good sense of humor, and personal sensitivity. I interviewed him when he was 92 years old as one of my series of articles on friends who are over 90.

David Finn: Oscar, you have had a remarkable life and done many wonderful things. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I have always admired your professional achievements. But I’d like to begin this interview by asking you about your family.

Oscar Dystel: I’m glad you begin with the most important part of my life. My wife and I have always had a close family. My son was a significant part of my life, but he died tragically two and a half years ago—which was a great blow to us. I’m very proud of my daughter who is also in the publishing business. She is an extremely successful agent. I’m also proud of her daughter who is a writer, and her son who has just been bar-mitzvahed.

DF: Tell me about your wife.

OD: My wife and I were married for 65 years and we had a wonderful life together. She died about two years ago, and I still haven’t been able to get over it.

DF: How about your childhood—where were you born and what was your family like?

OD: I don’t know how far back you want to go, but I was born in Fordham Hospital in the Bronx. I remember that my mother told me that she went to the hospital in a streetcar to give birth to me. My parents had absolutely no money and no education, although my father was a very thoughtful intellectual, a socialist. I remember in my early days he was always a supporter of Eugene Debs, the perennial socialist candidate for President. My mother and father both worked in a garment factory, which is how they met. Later, they worked together in a tailor shop—I remember seeing my father press clothes on a machine with one foot on the lever, and my mother sitting in front of the store mending clothes. I remember that I shared an apartment for a number of years on the lower East Side with my grandparents, my mother’s brother, another uncle, and my two aunts. There were seven of us in an apartment that should have accommodated no more than five people. 

DF: Were you closer to your mother than your father?

OD: I never really connected with my father. My mother made the biggest difference in my life. She was a loving person and very caring of me as her only child. I didn’t realize how wonderful she was, and how much I loved and respected her, until many years later.

When I was young, she thought the only way I could get out of the ghetto would be for me to learn how to play the violin. So she found a teacher for me in New Jersey and I practiced many hours a day. Then she wanted to find a teacher for me in New York, and I remember when she took me to Carnegie Hall, dragging me there with my fiddle. She introduced me to Christian Kreins, who listened to me play and decided to take me on as a student for hardly any money. He thought I had talent. I once even gave a recital at the Chamber Music Hall at Carnegie. But I knew I never would have what it took to be a virtuoso, so I finally gave it up.

DF: Did you have many friends as a youngster?

OD: I did. I remember in my early childhood making friends with the children of a rag picker who had a basement across the street where he stuffed the rags he found.

DF: I think that word, rag picker, has fallen out of use. I don’t even know what it means. Is it someone who picked up rags and sold them?

OD: That’s right. He picked up rags, baled them and sold them.

DF: Where did you go to school?

OD: I have in my apartment a photograph of my junior high school class of 1927, in Brooklyn. It’s amazing how I—at this age— can recognize almost everybody! We were all dressed in uniforms. It was later in high school that I met Marion, my wife. It was a school in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

DF: How did you get from Brooklyn to Bridgeport? OD: It’s a strange story. My mother’s sister married a fairly wealthy man from Connecticut, and he brought my family to Connecticut where my father opened a little liquor store. So he went from a factory to a garment store to a liquor store but barely made a living in any of his jobs.

DF: What happened after you finished high school?

OD: I was a sprinter in high school and was able to get a track scholarship to NYU where I was on the mile relay team. I couldn’t have gone to college without that scholarship. Then after a year and a half I pulled a tendon and I couldn’t continue on the team, so my scholarship wasn’t renewed. However, I was able to get a part-time job typesetting at the New York Times to pay my tuition. I was dong so well at school that I became the managing editor of the college yearbook, “The Violet.” I guess I did a good job as editor since my teachers urged me to apply for a scholarship at the Harvard Business School. I had no idea if I was qualified, but I got the scholarship. When I was there, I also worked on the grounds, digging for weeds and waited on tables to support myself. My first real job was a summer job, writing direct mail solicitations for a direct mail letter shop. My wife, Marion was working there as well.

DF: When did you get married?

OD: October 2, 1938—67 years ago. We had a wonderful marriage.

DF:How did you happen to go into publishing? OD: That’s an interesting story, too. I wrote an article while I was at Harvard about the difference between paid and controlled circulation in publishing. My theory was that it didn’t make any difference to advertisers whether a publication was paid for or whether it was distributed free. The important question was what kind of editorial content was in the publication. If the editorial material was good and people wanted to read it, the advertisements could be successful. I interviewed a lot of publishers by phone to help write my thesis (I couldn’t afford to travel for the interviews!), and my conclusion was that it was the quality of the editorial content that determined how effective the advertisements would be. Because at the time this was such a revolutionary idea, word got around about my thesis, and when I graduated I was invited to meet the head of McGraw Hill. He told me that he completely disagreed with my thesis since all the magazines they published were paid for. But then I went to see the head of the Control Circulation Audit Bureau, and he had a very different point of view. He was convinced that I was right. Subsequently, the CCAB published
my thesis as a small book, and it was so well received in the industry that I established
a reputation in the publishing business almost overnight.

DF: How did you get your first job after you got your MBA?

OD: Because the thesis I wrote made such an impact in the publishing world, I was offered all kinds of jobs when I got my MBA. Eventually I got a job as promotion manager at Esquire. I must have been doing pretty well since not long after I was hired, I was asked by the publisher, David Smart, to look into another magazine owned by the company called Coronet, which was experiencing substantial losses. It was a disaster. I wrote a long report that was like a Harvard Business School thesis, in which I stated that what needed to be done, among other things, was to change the management of the magazine. David Smart liked what I wrote and said, “Ok, from now on, you’re the editor!” I had no idea what an editor did, but I took the job and completely changed things around. I was there until World War Two started, when I worked for the Office of War Information and was sent overseas. In the army I published a magazine called U.S.A. written in eleven different languages, which was dropped all over the world. When I was overseas I also ran a leaflet operation in the Mediterranean theater for the Allied Forces. I was in charge of dropping leaflets in southern France. When the war was over, I thought I would come back to Coronet as editor, but by that time David Smart had taken over the job and wanted to continue doing so. So I left and soon became managing editor for Colliers magazine, but that didn’t last long. They had a different idea of how to manage a magazine than I did, so I left and become the head of Bantam Books. It was a paperback company that was owned by several major publishers— Grosset and Dunlop, Scribner, Random House, Harpers, and the Book of the Month Club, but it was doing very badly and was losing a lot of money. I ran the company for 26 years as Chairman and CEO and made it into the most profitable, efficient paperback company in the world.

DF: How many books do you think Bantam published at its height?

OD: We published between 600 to 1,000 books a year. There was no one like us in the business. I was proud that we had become one of the most successful businesses in the publishing world. My whole concept was to be an effective merchandiser of books. When we considered new titles, we didn’t read for the sake of enjoying the book but of considering its commercial potential. We learned how to read the first and last part of the book and make a judgment as to its potential sales We selected titles that we thought had great, or potentially great, commercial appeal. We promoted our books with a good deal of know-how and did a very effective job selling them. For instance, Jaws was one of our most important books, and as a result of its success, the image of the shark became world famous.

DF: I know that you continue to be recognized as one of the great figures in the publishing industry, so what have you been doing since you left Bantam?

OD: I became an adviser to various publishers and got involved in a number of acquisitions, including New American Library and E.P. Dutton. But I never wanted to have the responsibility of running a company again.

DF: How did you become so actively involved in the National Multiple Sclerosis Society?

OD: My son, John, was a brilliant young man. He was also an outstanding international figure skater. He was the among the best and class president at Brown University. Then he went to Yale Law School, married a lovely young woman, and moved to Seattle. When he was still in his twenties he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And he got the “brass ring,” the worst case, with a constant, inexorable decline. His wife’s father was a doctor, and sometime after my son was diagnosed, it was decided that my son and his wife should get a divorce. It was very tough, but I understood and supported her, as did my son. Of course it was a great loss to him, but she kept in touch with him for years after that, and when he died she came to his funeral. His sickness was devastating, but he never complained. He had amazing courage. For more than 30 years he went downhill. We arranged for him to live independently in Westchester, near our home, and my wife, Marion, saw him every day. I saw him regularly also and had wonderful conversations with him. He was a great human being. At the end he couldn’t speak, see, or even move. He died at the age of 54.

DF: You wrote very movingly about your son in the manuscript about your life that you let me read. You had it packaged in a beautiful box, and I took it home. When I finished reading it I told you I thought it was a fascinating story and beautifully written, and I felt it ought to be published. In fact, I wanted it to be a Ruder·Finn Press book. But you said you didn’t write it for publication, you wrote it for your grandchildren. As someone who has had a lifelong career in the publishing business and published so many different kinds of books, I couldn’t understand that.

OD: I have showed that manuscript to a few of my good friends—like you—but I never thought the story of my life would interest people who didn’t know me. So I wrote it as a private story, and I feel I should keep it that way.

DF: You know I don’t agree with you. Besides your many other accomplishments, you were a major figure in the publishing business for many years, and I think it’s a story that ought to be part of the literature of our time. I hope some day you will change your mind. But in the meanwhile, I want to thank you for agreeing to this interview and talking about a few of the highlights of your remarkable life.