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Remember there is the good John Simon and the bad John. We have the good John. He's a comer. Of course now we've got from Knopf a troika from Simon and Schuster which is simply superb. Bob Gottlieb to me is one of the top editors in the country. Nina Borne is a great advertising woman. Tony Schulte is a wonderful administrator. This is a formidable trio!

Sometime in the future I want to go into exactly how Knopf and Random House worked under the same auspices and stayed separate, but that's something else that we can...

That I can do very quickly and we'll stop here. When we bought Knopf--and I'll tell you the whole Knopf story-- one of the faithful promises that I made Alfred Knopf was that nobody at Random House would ever interfere with his editorial policy or ever tell him what book to publish or not publish. That is a promise that I made that I've kept religiously for two very good reasons. One is that I consider myself a man of honor and when I make a promise I stick to it. Second and much more important, he scares the hell out of me.

Yes, but he isn't really involved now.

Yes he is. He comes in a couple of days a week, and he's still the great Alfred Knopf.