Eden's Arbor

Publishings youngest president

I'm rumor-intensive, no doubt about it," says Eden Collins worth, the thirtythree-year-old president of Arbor House, whose upcoming sizzlers include Mayflower Madam, the memoirs of Sydney Biddle Barrows, and Washington Wives, a first novel by Maureen Dean. Collins worth's promotion to president three years ago raised eyebrows because she displaced Donald Fine, Arbor's founder, under whom she had worked for seven years on the marketing side. In July she married New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton at the Hamilton family seat, Ethelwild, in the Napa Valley.

Despite having given Arbor its most profitable year ever in 1985, Collinsworth admits to a credibility problem: "People are amazed that I can talk boy talk and understand figures." Richard Nixon, at the signing for his No More Vietnams, assumed she was an assistant.

"We can be very aggressive without being undignified," she says. Determined to sign up novelist Anthony Burgess and unable to reach his agent by phone, Collins worth rushed over to see the agent at the Plaza. "I had on my summer-Friday ensemble of chinos, a boy's T-shirt, and Top-Siders without socks." In the Palm Court, she talked him into selling her Burgess's The Kingdom of the Wicked. "Word got around that I had gone over to service the agent. I thought it was sour grapes."

One persistent rumor pursues her: that Hearst Publications, which owns Arbor and William Morrow, plans to merge the two. She denies it. "I'm not sure I'll ever understand people's ill will. That's part of my midwestern naivete."

David Sacks