You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
End of an Applebaum era
Stuart Applebaum, the longest-serving Bertelsmann staffer in North America, has had an extraordinary career.
The longest-serving Bertelsmann staffer in North America, 52-year-lifer Stuart Applebaum, Penguin Random House’s self-styled “emeritus executive vice president, corporate communications,” received an elegant send-off on his 75th birthday last week, a “graduation” (he refuses to say “retirement”) that most in the business never thought would occur.
Having started as a curly-maned, smart-mouthed New York publicity kid from Flushing (“the Gütersloh of Queens”, as his younger brother, Irwyn, who once ran Bantam Dell, joked), Stuart–universally known as such–grew into a silver-haired eminence, helpmeet to many of the nine c.e.o.s he’d worked under. Although his tongue never lost its taste for irony, he was the man who gave them the smooth right word at the right time, but also knew how to keep his (and others’) mouths shut as to where the bodies, metaphorically speaking, were buried. Two c.e.o.s–current head Nihar Malaviya, and Alberto Vitale, who retired in 1998–were there to toast him.
Although made “emeritus” 10 years ago–when Claire von Schilling took over executive responsibility for the department–there was never any doubt, beginning as a Knopf publicity assistant and moving on to Bantam book publicist, Bantam publicity/PR director, BDD and then Random House communications chief, and comms chief for the first year of Penguin Random House’s merged existence, that Stuart was married to the job. If further proof were needed, consider that right after the mega-merger announcement, while one of the worst storms in New York history wreaked havoc, Stuart stayed at his desk for 32 hours straight to do his job.
Malaviya remarked that it was hard for him to revisit Stuart’s early career, “in the days of carbon paper and Wite-Out”, since that was before he was born. However, when Malaviya arrived at the company more than 20 years ago, “the one name I heard so often was Stuart’s, a kind of omnipresent deity-like presence”. As he moved up the ladder, Malaviya learned from Stuart and Claire “how to interact with reporters, manage our wonderful shareholders, and figure out exactly what to say in reports”. That’s especially useful now, at a moment when, as he told The Bookseller, “Things are coming up all the time, and you never know what they will be, whether it’s book bans, or AI, or something else.” The one constant, of course, is that “we’re looking for growth”.
Right after the Penguin Random House mega-merger announcement, while one of the worst storms in New York history wreaked havoc, Stuart stayed at his desk for 32 hours straight to do his job.
The Flushing family Applebaum was headed by a teacher-mother and a father who was, Stuart said, “an omnivorous collector of used books”. Perhaps that is why their eldest son, while still in school, became “obsessed with finding out when the new books would go on sale”. He frequented his local library in Queens, and found that the Publishers Weekly on the librarian’s desk could tell him. The librarian let him peruse her copy each week, and he attests to never having missed an issue since. Admitting, also, to having been “brash” and “obnoxious” when new to the business, he somehow grew up, and by the beginning of this century, had learned to give back. The charitable foundation Stuart started has contributed all manner of books and services to the Queens public library system, serving more than two million New Yorkers, from immigrant children to grannies in nursing homes.
Continues...
Many authors whom Stuart worked with in his publicist days are no longer with us, from Jaws author Peter Benchley, to Maya Angelou, to Barbara Cartland (at a Bantam company show–yes, there were such things in the old days–his then boss Esther Margolis asked him to impersonate Cartland, and he brought down the house), to Louis L’Amour, Stuart’s all-time favourite author. L’Amour’s wife Kathy and son Beau, had flown in from LA to celebrate the man who had helped keep “all 130” of L’Amour’s frontier stories in print.
Lee Child didn’t give a speech, but was there and did speak to The Bookseller, having known Stuart for almost a quarter-century. “Very idiosyncratic and effective,” Child said, “Stuart always figured out the right thing to say. Every mistake that RH executives made, he told them not to do. Now he’s yet another fixture gone, inevitable, but kind of sad. It’s such a collegial, pleasant business, you get to like these people. When they depart, it leaves a hole.”
