From Brooke to Book

Sherri Daleys High Cotton

When Sherri Daley, onetime social secretary to Brooke Astor, finished two hundred pages of a manuscript about a cotton trader who committed suicide, she gave it to Knopf editor Gordon Lish, unsolicited. "He called me the next morning at 9:01. He said it was one of the best pieces of fiction he'd read in a long time," she remembers. "I said, 'It's not fiction, Mr. Lish.' "

Philip L. Hehmeyer made a catastrophic mistake on the commodities market in 1982 and then killed himself in his kitchen with a pump shotgun. On a blackboard he had written, "Someone had to do it. Self-awareness is silly." The thirty-seven-year-old Hehmeyer left a fiancee preparing for

a wedding in ten days, an unrecoverable debt, and a renegade legend on the New York Cotton Exchange, of which he was the newly elected chairman. Of all his ex-girlfriends, Daley became the one to record his Gatsbian life in a highly emotional autobiographical novel, out from Norton this summer. A chronicle of the Wasp fast lane, High Cotton is a hypnotic romp with "Bloody Bulls," golf, martinis, anxiety, and sex ("so close to the truth that I had a lot of trouble with the legal department," says Daley). Hehmeyer, called "Haywire" by his buddies for his daredevil trading, ground his teeth so violently in his sleep that Daley was afraid they'd crumble. But, says Daley, "he was mesmerizing." She did anything to be near him—sometimes sleeping outside his door on nights he was probably out with other women. "I was a wimp."

To some who knew Hehmeyer, Daley's book may be a shock. "There will be two camps—those who think I did it just to aggrandize myself, to make cheap money off tragedy, and others who will think. Good for her, she turned a

terrible situation around."

Amy Engeler