"Ann called me and told me that S. I. Newhouse had suggested doing a bio of John D. Rockefeller and named me as a possible author," remembers Ron Chernow. "I told her I thought it was an atrocious idea -- that John D. Rockefeller was a cold, mean, wooden person and that there wasn't much more to say about him. She was in a very ticklish position. Here her boss for the first time in my knowledge had suggested a book and possible author, and here I was rejecting it. It was interesting: She said to me, 'Go out and explore the idea, and if you still think it's a bad idea, fine, I'll deal with that.' " Titan lingered for sixteen weeks on the Times best-seller list.

"She laughed at my jokes, which is all that an author wants," says Adam Gopnik. "Ann sent me two dummy book covers -- the one I wanted, and one that she came up with. Ann thought that if we had a cover designed, it would help me understand exactly what the book should be. I had been an art critic, and I thought I knew what I wanted. But my wife and I opened the envelope, and instantly we knew that hers was the one. It was a graceful way of getting what she wanted."

It took Ann Godoff until she reached the age of 30 to discover her life's calling -- in the unlikely oasis of a publishing temp job. Her life until that moment had some fantastic locations and great guest stars but no central theme. Her father worked in the record business and moved her, her brother, and her mother from 89th Street and Park Avenue to Beverly Hills. She went to Beverly Hills High School in the sixties, walking the same halls as classmates Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss. When her father died in 1965, the others moved back to New York, to the El Dorado on Central Park West. Ann attended Bennington for a time, then NYU film school, where a pre-Mean Streets Martin Scorsese taught one of her classes.

Some time after graduation, she enrolled in two different architecture programs -- at City University and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design -- and supported herself as a writer for Dr. Joyce Brothers's TV show, as a producer of TV commercials, and as a saleswoman, hawking Oldsmobiles at a West Side dealership. In 1980, she landed a part-time assignment at Simon & Schuster. She started typing mailing labels, then moved on to writing the letters that accompanied review copies of books, and eventually became an editor under the unrelentingly serious Alice Mayhew.

In 1987, she moved to Atlantic Monthly Press, home of some of publishing's rock stars before they were superstars. Gary Fisketjon was there, as was Morgan Entrekin -- the party-boy publisher immortalized by Jay McInerney -- years before he published Cold Mountain and the Gospel According to Candace Bushnell. The place had a sense of great things about to happen: Think the Beatles in Hamburg, with Godoff most like George, the quiet one. "She was very serious and hardworking," remembers Fisketjon, "and unlike the rest of us, she didn't go out and snort coke every night."

"She told me that Atlantic Monthly Press was the most she ever learned about publishing," says Geoff Shandler, executive editor of Little, Brown, who worked at Random House in the nineties. As her confidence built, her ambition began to overgrow tiny Atlantic. In 1990, she jumped to Doubleday, only to jump back to Atlantic three weeks later. "Maybe coming from such a small house into such a big house was not what she was interested in," muses Doubleday president Stephen Rubin, who had hired her and now is a friendly competitor with her within Bertelsmann. "Clearly, she got interested in it later."

The following year, after Fisketjon had left for Knopf, Godoff came to Random House. Both Random House parent-company executive Alberto Vitale and Evans have claimed credit for bringing her in; in a sense, both are right. "I'd had lunch with both Alberto and Harry at different times and told them to hire her," remembers agent Esther Newberg.

Godoff quickly developed a specialty in unlikely, quiet literary works. Her first hit was The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, an academic author whom Godoff brought to Random House from Atlantic and who had never tried a mass-market book before. "Nobody knew what the hell the title meant," Carr recalls. "The whole sales force said, 'We don't know what this thing is. We don't know if it's a historical novel; we don't know if it's a murder mystery.' They wanted me to change the name right up until it hit the stores. And I said to Ann, 'You can't rebreed the horse just as it's at the gate.' And she believed that, and she overrode everybody."

Next came John Berendt, who chose Godoff after just one lunch meeting set up by his agent, Suzanne Gluck, who also happened to represent Carr. "That one-on-one is dazzling with Ann," Berendt says now. "Other editors had said that they loved the book, but in the course of conversation they raised the question of 'genre.' Ann just breezed right over it. She said the challenge -- not the problem, but the challenge -- is to get people to read it. She understood that it didn't need editing -- it needed positioning."

Godoff also invoked her sister imprint, Knopf, in the meeting with Berendt. "She said, 'I see a narrow trim size and a Knopf cover,' " Berendt goes on. "It was heresy for a Random House editor to say that, because the two houses were in competition with each other." Today Chip Kidd, the famed Knopf book designer who does occasional work for little Random, says Godoff has "a much better design sense" than Evans ever did. "Some of the stuff I see coming out of there is amazing."

Armed with a talent for making authors feel important, Godoff began to make their books be important. She blazed a trail of best-sellers by untried authors, creating a potent tiny Random within little Random. In 1994, she had a hat trick: Midnight, The Alienist, and Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler all sat on the Times best-seller list. She also edited Tina Rosenberg's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, The Haunted Land. "She has the gift of making people pay attention to them," says Adam Gopnik. "Like a good movie producer, she sees the one thing you have to protect to the death about a book. Her confidence about what's strong about a work gives you confidence."

On more than one occasion, Godoff used her graceful power of persuasion politically, inside Random House. In the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial, Random House published two different books: Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth's An American Tragedy from Evans, and Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life from Godoff. An American Tragedy was announced well after Toobin's book, taking Godoff and Toobin completely by surprise. Godoff used all her power in the marketing department to keep the book from upstaging Toobin's. "There was no 'This was for the good of Random House' coming from Ann," says an observer. "She had one client, and it was Jeffrey."

Observers saw just one other younger editor, Villard publisher David Rosenthal, whose ambition seemed as potent as Godoff's and who might have succeeded Harry Evans. Rosenthal had turned Villard into a powerhouse with Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air and his own O.J. book, Henry Beard's O.J.'s Legal Pad. Complicating matters was the fact that Annik La Farge, Godoff's companion, worked for Rosenthal at Villard.

"I think David was certainly a contender," says Steve Wasserman, the editor of the L.A. Times Book Review and a former Random House editor. "David's a very ambitious guy. He's a guy who had been an editor at Rolling Stone, full of beans, a great wit, voracious appetites, a man of the city."

And yet neither Rosenthal nor Godoff had the charisma of Evans. "David was a surprise to some people, too," says one former Random editor. "A lot of people didn't see David as a leader, given his personality, his abrasiveness. And yet if you found somebody who described Ann Godoff as warm and fuzzy, I'd like to hear it."

In May 1997, Alberto Vitale named Ann Godoff editor-in-chief of Random House, giving her the day-to-day reins of the imprint under Evans. The following Labor Day weekend, Rosenthal left Villard to head Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint, taking La Farge with him; the former internal rivals now inherited a long-standing feud between the two storied houses. "Once David left," says Wasserman, "I think Ann had the field to herself." By November, Evans had resigned, and Godoff assumed the top spot.