A MOVEABLE BRUNCH

While America’s literati talk turkey, publishers eat crow with Hollywood has-beens

Around the Fair

Continued from page 28

So I told Pocket Books to shove it... ”

“It’s the first romance where you get involved with the heroine’s adventures—and it’s all set in Paleolithic times.”

“We had Bantam on our backs. Every time we brought out a title they brought out a rip-off... ”

“Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey is fabulous, absolutely fabulous. She never charges her laundry to the tour.”

At the eighty-third annual American Booksellers Association convention one sometimes felt there was no such thing as an author. In the nighttable world there is only “Our Author,” which means a writer who’s made the best-seller list. “She’s sort of our Margaret Mitchell,” a Crown editor explained Jean Auel to me. “She’s nice, she’s real, she’s been forty weeks on the best-seller list.” But more important still, she’s alive! Even the diet books seemed to be described as Gone With the Wind with a sexy twist.

The ABA is the event where next year’s reading taste is consolidated and labeled, the prose equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival. The venue for this year’s convention was Dallas. So was the script at times. “I wrote the book because I loved the man,” declared John Wayne’s exsecretary and mistress, Pat Stacy, about her definitely not a kiss-andtell memoir. “That is the sole reason.” A similarly impressive dedication, in this case to health and fitness, led Victoria Principal to demonstrate her exercise manual, The Body Principal, in a group workout at the convention site. By day the action seethed around the booths at the Dallas Convention Center, by night in the lobbies or suites of the Hotels Adolphus, Fairmont and Hyatt Regency. It was tempting to see every Stetson in the elevator as a small Texas imprint; the local population seemed almost willfully colorful. “Hang a left on North Central,” the car-park attendant shouted; “then stay on Lemmon.” Most publishers wished they had as the weekend wore on.

Romance is big as usual, but information and improvement are the nonfiction publishing trends of the fall. Readers will be fleeing to facts for reassurance. There is less selfanalysis, behavior monitoring, and greening of America. They were the luxuries of economic prosperity. Now everybody wants dictionaries or guides to office politics. (Some try to cash in simultaneously on the space boom. McGraw-Hill’s book about how to land the job you want is titled, hauntingly, Beyond the Resume.) Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary was advertised by a dummy of an appropriately old and careworn-looking student lugging the tome on her bicycle. Sociology has dropped the racy “personal growth” mode of Gail Sheehy’s 1976 Passages and is now presented as authentic, comprehensive, endless.

At the ABA, where taste is labeled, even the diet books seemed to be described as Gone With the Wind with a sexy twist

American Couples: Money, Work, Sex is Morrow’s bespectacled blockbuster next month. It is being marketed as a “monumental work of social research,” and its blurb invites us to bow down under the yoke of exhaustive interviews. “Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein have made a breakthrough in our understanding of sexual relationships comparable to that of the Kinsey reports in the ’50s.” Densely packed information is seen as the only reliable success factor. “This is not a bad ABA,” one agent summarized. “Two years ago publishers were walking around slitting their wrists. This year there’s Michener’s Texas book.” In keeping with the current worship of facts, the comprehensive nature of Mr. Michener’s research was the buzz topic throughout the restaurants of Dallas. “His library is three feet deep in original Texan folklore.” “He’s traveled five thousand miles interviewing everyone who’s ever been to Texas.” “This is probably the heaviest book we’ll ever see on Texas.”

Mr. Michener has achieved not just literary success but brand-name celebrity. “Once you’ve got that name the rest isn’t so hard,” a Dodd, Mead & Company seer explained. “The bookseller will reorder more of the brand he recognizes. The problem is that every book is a different product no matter how much you tell them it’s the same as the one before. And then there is the problem of the writers themselves—‘If only we didn’t have to keep creating new brands!’ ”

In fiction last year, the top four hardcover sellers apart from Michener’s Space were William Kotzwinkle’s E.T. (665,800), Robert Ludlurn’s The Parsifal Mosaic (497,245), Sidney Sheldon’s Master of the Game (figure not released), and Judith Krantz’s Mistral's Daughter (295,045). Indeed, seventeen of the twenty-five titles were by writers previously represented on the list.

An author has become a name brand when he doesn’t take taxis anymore. He lives in a stratosphere particularly eerie to those writers who’ve spent ignominious years toiling at the wordface. Given the system, it is remarkable that any newcomers crash through the list barrier. Douglas Adams, the young English best-seller, is one such phenomenon, as surprised as everyone else by the success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate enjoying literate low-key London dinner parties when superagent Ed Victor took over his career and shot him into space, where he has rejoined his fiction.

(continued)

Continued from page 30

But back to the action. At the Cafe Cancun, the Crown Publishers dinner for twenty-one (not to be confused with the Crown Publishers dinner for six) was feasting on Combinacion de Eduardo washed down with tequila. Bruce Harris, Crown's director of publishing, was an hour late. Bantam had failed to send the limo for Jean Auel, so Harris had acted as chauffeur. But he was anxious to point out that he loved not only his stars. He had also attended a party for William Goyen, author of the famous but unread novel The House of Breath. Harris’s wife, Susan J. Petersen, is president of Ballantine Books. “We have only one child between us,” Harris said. “We call it our joint imprint.”

The Adolphus Hotel was the chief celebrity haunt. Here not merely the heads of Crown publishing but the crowned heads of publishing swirled around a lobby that was decked out like the garnish in an old-fashioned. Wood paneling, potted plants, and portraits of four fat muses gave it a Baden-Baden-by-Busby Berkeley air, but serious book chat was conducted. Certain key suites were the venues for the prestige parties. Intellectual kudos was to be gained from an invitation to The New York Review of Books party on a ranch forty-five minutes by car from Dallas, but acceptance demanded total guest commitment, and who could resist the Pocket Books at-home for Lana Turner at the Adolphus? This champagne reception on a terrace suite, hosted by Ron Busch, president of Pocket Books, drew publisher Seymour “Sam” Lawrence; agent Owen Laster, head of the literary department at William Morris; Stanley Newman, MCA’s vice-president; but not, it seemed, Lana Turner. By eight P.M. Busch was looking simultaneously ashen and agitated. “Everyone’s asking where Lana is,” he said. “I can only say where I hope she is—in the shower.” He disappeared out to the elevator to pummel again on the recalcitrant legend’s door.

The party’s energy sagged, then soared at the arrival of Dick Snyder, the abrasive president of Simon & Schuster. He was flanked by Suzy Kamil, his great-looking, highachieving, vice-president Praetorian guard. A small, wiry man, Snyder is a fire hose in business and conversation. He is bullish on the crest of Jane Fonda’s workout wave. His secretary once told an importunate agent, “Mr. Snyder doesn’t wish you good and he doesn’t wish you bad. He just wishes you don’t call him anymore.” Publishing groupies describe how he “gives great hire,” and dream of being “poached” by him. “He sends a limo and a man with white gloves and serves you Perrier on a tray,” a subsidiary-rights lady drooled. “And once you’re hired and really in—you know, in the inner circle like Suzy Kamil—he never lets you feel safe. You really have to have your act together.” She beelined across to him. “The Adolphus is an unexpected plus, isn’t it, Mr. Snyder,” she said in his direction.

“I’m not staying here, so it’s an unexpected minus as far as I’m concerned,” he replied.

But where was the guest of honor? When Lana Turner at last appeared on tiny black stilettos, she was pinched, tucked and coiffed into chapel-of-repose perfection. Her escort was a six-foot hairdresser, Eric Root. “Nobody talks to me like that,” she snarled in the direction of Ron Busch en passant as she stuck her hand out at the remaining publishers.

“Did you see that?” breathed Owen Laster, who had stayed until the bitter end to see the screen goddess of his youth. “She just stormed past Busch. She was wearing these fabulous bugle beads. It was just like Portrait in Black." A celebrity with indefinite shelf life!

The night-table publishers would swap Our Author any day for Our Film Star. -UBIQUITOUS

UBIQUITOUS