The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing

The renovation was completed in 1970, and that was the year that Grove began to fall apart. Prompted by the success of "Yellow," Rosset, who had always wanted to be a filmmaker, bought foreign films as fast as he could find them. "Barney was buying the entire output of Czechoslovakia, Poland, God knows, whatever," Seaver said. "None of them worked. Suddenly, all the money we'd made on 'Yellow' was down the drain."

There was the growing sense that Grove had lost its mission. "Things were already beginning to go into a tailspin," said Sobel, who had resisted the new emphasis on film and was fired. "I almost think that Barney fired me to spare me from watching the company that I helped build fall apart." The '60s had ended, and the hope was turning sour. Peaceniks gave way to militants. Grove's move from an upstart house to a media conglomerate made its anti-establishment posture seem more like a contradiction. The feminist movement gained strength, and Grove became a target.

Rosset loves titillating novels, and they held a small but prominent place on Grove's list. Some of these are now classics (like "Tropic") but others (like "Romance of Lust") appealed to crasser sensibilities. Rosset calls these books "erotica." "I once said 'porn' about something he'd published and he just exploded," said Mike Topp, a friend of Rosset's. Whatever the label, the books were considered pornographic at the time they were published. (Now some of it just seems sort of squishy.) In 1969, Life magazine published a profile of Rosset titled "Old Smut Peddler." To some of his colleagues, the erotica was a trade-off that made the less commercial books possible. "The porn greased the wheels there," said Silverberg. "There was always porn on that list. And people actually used to read it." But Rosset bristles at the suggestion of any economic calculation. "The erotica excited me. I liked it. I thought it was sexy. It was just that simple," he says. To feminists, however, it wasn't simple at all.

Rosset had championed the far left since middle school, but there were "some gaps in his progressive program," as John Oakes, an editor who later joined Grove, delicately put it. In early 1970, Rosset fired several employees who had tried to unionize the editorial staff. One of them, Robin Morgan, was a feminist activist, and in April, she and a group of women barricaded themselves in the executive offices. Grove "earned millions off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing women," the protesters stated. Rosset was out of the country ("in Denmark buying more films," Seaver laughed ruefully), so he and Seaver consulted by phone on whether to call the police. Would Grove really turn the cops on a group of protesters? Finally, Rosset told Seaver to make the call.

"We had always thought of ourselves as liberators," said Seaver. "We all felt we were working for a cause instead of a publishing house." Their blindness left them unprepared. Grove had a masculine ethos and mostly male executives. So did many other houses at the time, but the difference was that Grove claimed to stand for justice, civil liberties and sexual freedom. "Sex and politics go together," Rosset said. The feminists agreed; in fact, Rosset's words sound a lot like their mantra, "the personal is political." But what they meant was that inequality and oppression were prevalent in all aspects of a woman's life, from the bedroom to the boardroom. Rosset meant was that there is no freedom without freedom of expression in all realms.

The protest came at a terrible time for Grove. The real-estate market collapsed, and by the end of 1971, Grove was deeply in debt. It sold its new building at a huge loss and suspended Evergreen. Meanwhile, other publishers were taking advantage of the more permissive environment, and there were fewer untouchable manuscripts. "They had such a distinctive position, particularly in the '60s, as the countercultural publisher," explained Morgan Entrekin, who merged Atlantic Books with Grove's backlist to create Grove/ Atlantic in 1993, several years after Rosset had left. (Grove/Atlantic remains one of the few well-respected, successful independent publishers.) "As they moved into the '70s and '80s other publishers started to occupy the same ground."