It was in cabin 5 that he began a novel he’d been miraculously hired to write by Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster. Korda threw him a lifeline and a modest advance when it became clear that Joyce Haber, a gossip columnist who’d written a bestseller about Hollywood called The Users, had become a hopeless alcoholic incapable of delivering a sequel. Dad had produced a TV movie based on the book, and Korda, knowing there would be slim pickings among experienced authors eager to write something called The Winners: Part II of Joyce Haber’s “The Users” and that my father knew a thing
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