Former ceo and chairman of Doubleday &Company--as well as life trustee of the New York Public Library, long-timetrustee of the New York Zoological Society and board member of the AmericanAcademy of Rome--John Turner Sargent, Sr., 87, died peacefully at his home inManhattan on February 5. He "had been in frail condition in recent yearsafter suffering a stroke."
In partnership with Nelson Doubleday,Sargent led Doubleday's expansion as a "communications conglomerate"and vertically-integrated publishing enterprise that included bookmanufacturing, the Literary Guild and Doubleday book clubs, the acquisition ofbook exporter Feffer & Simons, the 26 Doubleday book shops and more,including radio stations and film production. (One notable movie was 1974'2 TheParallax View, starring Warren Beatty and based Loren Singer's Doubledaybestseller.)
His family, which includes his son JohnSargent, Jr., currently ceo of Macmillan, writes: "One of the mostaffable, suave, and erudite of publishers in the heyday of the New Yorkpublishing scene, Mr. Sargent instilled a close working relationship with abevy of Doubleday’s powerhouse authors--old and new--from Daphne du Maurier,Victoria Holt, Irving Stone, Dwight Eisenhower, Leon Uris, Arthur Hailey, TheodoreRoethke, Alex Haley, Stephen King, Gay Talese, and Peter Benchley, along withthe agents and executors of the industry's most envied list of backlistauthors. Mr. Sargent was a longtime friend of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis andencouraged her to join the firm as an editor in 1978 after she left VikingPress."
The WSJwrites: "Well-read and urbane, Mr. Sargent was close to many Doubledayauthors and threw lavish dinners. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethkewas a particular friend, and sometimes slept in Mr. Sargent's bathtub at theconclusion of a bibulous evening." Sargent recalls his father's annual"singles only" Christmas Eve parties--co-hosted with JoanFontaine--for the AP:"A Salvation Army band would play at midnight and everybody would singChristmas carols. And you had to be single. There was no flexibility in thatrule." More importantly, he tells Doubleday colleagues that "thecompany was in his heart for over 60 years. The Doubleday anniversarypaperweight was still on his desk the day he died."
There will be a private service in Bostonon Friday and a memorial celebration honoring Mr. Sargent's life at a date tobe determined in March in New York City.
The family asks that those wishing to makecontributions in Mr. Sargent's memory direct them to the New York PublicLibrary or the Food Pantry and Shelter ministry administered by St. Bart'schurch.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar