152 MINUTES WITH ...Robert Gottlieb

The 91-year-old book editor waits for his 87-year-old star writer, Robert Caro, to turn in his latest book.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

THE LIFE OF THE editor Bob Gottlieb, at a spry 91 years old, is nowadays largely limited to a single room on the second floor of his East 48th Street townhouse-by choice, not necessity. He can bound up Second Avenue just fine to the diner that he considers an extension of his home, where the waitress knows he takes his chocolate milkshakes extra thick. But everything he needs, his library and his pencils, is right here, so why go farther? To receive guests like this one, he didn't even have to put on shoes or tame the gull's-wing sweep of his silver hair. Burbling away in a leather club chair in his book-lined office (they are arranged according to a system, he says with a point to his head, that's "up here"), with piles of more books on the floor and in the corners, beneath giant MGM publicity posters of Marion Davies, Clark Gable, and Norma Shearer from the early 1930s, he is a man in his element.

"I don't want to go anywhere because there's nowhere I want to go," he says in his fluty register. "My life is very calm, just the way I like." It is here that he waits for one of his most famous writers-and he has edited many of the past century's most famous ones, including Cheever, Rushdie, Lessing, and Naipaul-to turn in a long-awaited manuscript. Assuming, that is, the pair beat what Gottlieb notes dryly are the "actuarial odds." Robert Caro, 87, whom Gottlieb has edited since his first book, The Power Broker, published in 1974, is at work on the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography. Their long relationship is the subject of a documentary, Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie, which arrives (well before the Johnson book) on December 30.