Books Are in His Blood

A recent visit to the home of the publishing scion Charles Scribner III concluded with a surprise guided tour of Mr. Scribner’s personal scrapbook. Recalling his early ambition to portray a doctor in soap operas, Mr. Scribner sought a photograph of himself, age 15, playing Cassius in a high-school production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.But Mr. Scribner’s boundless enthusiasm got the better of the search for the photo, as he found something to detain him on nearly every page: a picture of Queen Noor of Jordan, formerly Lisa Halaby of California (“I was a friend of hers when we were classmates together at Princeton. The humor in that was, as college students I was much more formal than she was, now it’s reversed!”), a letter from President Nixon, complimenting Mr. Scribner on a biography of President Wilson that had been published by the now-defunct house of Charles Scribner and Sons, and countless articles on the house’s most famous authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.Never mind that his demeanor was momentarily that of an excited schoolboy. Mr. Scribner’s family has been making books for a very long time, and at 6 foot 1, with hair that is still dirty blond and with a resonant, self-assured voice, Charles Scribner III, 54, looks the part of the pedigreed publisher.“I’m actually the fifth of that name, the fifth in a row,” Mr. Scribner said, “but when I was born, I grew up as the third because my father was junior. And in our family we just counted the live bodies.”If Mr. Scribner is proud of his family’s history in publishing, which goes back to 1846, he’s surprisingly sanguine about the end of that history. Though Mr. Scribner has two sons (the elder, also Charles, wears his name without appendage),the firm of Charles Scribner and Sons is no more, dismembered and renamed as part of a hostile takeover a decade ago. Mr. Scribner decided to stay on as an editor at Simon and Schuster.“I called myself the curator of dead authors. My primary responsibility was overseeing the publication of our most famous classic authors: Hemingway, P.D. James, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Ms. James, as he quickly pointed out, is still very much alive and writing terrific mystery novels.)Last spring he left that job in order to work full time on a spiritual memoir, to be published soon by Doubleday.“What I thought was, I’ll assign myself to write a piece every day for 365 days,” Mr. Scribner said. “I started on the Feast of Epiphany, the feast of light, it’s a sort of Christian version of Chanukah. I took it from Epiphany to Epiphany.”He describes the book a reflection on faith, art, and memory, and it’s clear from his fervent recollection of events past that those are places where Mr. Scribner’s imagination gladly dwells.As a student of art history in college, Mr. Scribner was moved, in part by the art, to convert to Roman Catholicism. “It was not a rejection of my past: I had a very happy childhood experience of religion right up into college. It was really almost more of a continuation of a journey. I’ve been to London,” he said, “now I’m going to keep on going to Rome.”A born Upper East Sider, many of Mr. Scribner’s early memories are just minutes away by foot from his apartment in the east 70s: his childhood home, his primary school, a favorite old drugstore.“The Upper East Side is like living inside a wonderful Brueghel painting, there are all these fascinating details. Perhaps there are changes or additions to the painting, but then there are the original details that recall the first experience.”And then there’s the townhouse where the film version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a movie he estimates he has seen nearly 100 times, was set. Today the house where Paul Varjak fell in love with Holly Golightly is the home of stock broker Peter Bacanovic, who was sentenced this year to prison and house arrest in connection with the Martha Stewart trial.Mr. Scribner has a sympathetic offer for him: “I’m so in love with that street and that movie that I would gladly volunteer to do his five months of house arrest in that building. I would watch the video of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s “every day to make myself feel better.”Not that the apartment Mr. Scribner shares with his wife, Ritchie, is lacking in history. It was once the home of Mayor John Lindsay.“Oh, I’ve met him on several occasions,” Mr. Scribner said, without missing a beat. “Two of the three schools we attended were the same: Buckley and St. Paul’s. In fact, one of the first things I did as a student St. Paul’s was I found a radio and secretly stayed up until late in the night listening to the returns [of the 1965 mayoral election].”At this point, it should be said that Mr. Scribner is not really a name-dropper. Serendipity, more than stature-seeking, has brought him close to the rich and influential. This son of a well-connected book publisher and a professional ice skater (Joan Scribner performed well into her 70s, and the scrapbook contains pictures to prove it) has always embraced chance and usually been rewarded for it.At last the photo Mr. Scribner had been seeking presented itself. “That’s me,” Mr. Scribner exclaimed, pointing to a blond young man swaddled in robes stage. “And do you know who that is?” he said, pointing to the other figure on stage, a dark-haired peer costumed as Caesar. “That’s Cam Kerry, Senator Kerry’s younger brother!”“I played the role of Cassius in a very sympathetic light, and when my father reread the play he agreed with it,” Mr. Scribner said. Then there was silence, as Mr. Scribner turned reflective.“The scrapbook is in a way like the journal and the experience of living,” he said. “They all have one thing in common: They’re not chronological, they jump back and forth.”

Books Are in His Blood

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