The Regan Revolution

High-octane book editor Judith Regan has left some claw marks on her way to the top

Things happen to Judith Regan. A taxi swerves to pick her up, cops nab the driver, Regan curses them, and they throw her in jail. She has a baby, gets toxical shock syndrome, and gets burned out of her apartment. She persuades Madonna to do an erotic book, goes into labor on the plane en route to the deal, then watches Madonna take it elsewhere.

And things are happening for her. Thanks to monumental best-sellers by Rush Limbaugh and Kathie Lee Gifford, Regan is, at 39, the book world's hotshot du jour— a vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster who has just moved into a three-room office suite as one of the rewards for making her company many millions of dollars in 1992. "I have more credibility than I did before," she says. "Do I have more respect? Probably not."

For one thing, she did not come up through the usual ranks. Instead, as one of Generoso Pope's "whiz kids," hired to upgrade the National Enquirer, the Vassar grad wrote of Siamese twins, crashed Tony Danza's wedding, put on a suit and chronicled her three months as a man. Such creativity led, inevitably, to a producing job with Geraldo Rivera—or "Horrendo," as she calls him. Then, in 1988, came the idea to write a book with Kris Nelson, Ricky's ex. Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, wanted to do it. Nelson decided she didn't. Pocket bought Regan anyway.

Book Row is not heavily populated with go-getters who brag of being mistaken for Isabella Rossellini. Who don't bother attending editorial meetings. Who finagle bicoastal arrangements with offices on the Paramount lot. Book publishing may eschew the casting couch, but bookish tongues still wag. "I'm not into power fucking," Regan wags back. So what's her secret? "She's got clout because she's made them a shitload of money," says an S&S author. "I'm going to start wearing peacock feathers," the lady says, preening. "Am I a great editor? I'm a great salesman." It's why Richard Snyder hired her, why reluctant stars submit. "She persuaded me that not only could I do it, but I should," says Limbaugh, whose The Way Things Ought to Be was the biggest-selling hardcover nonfiction book of 1992. She also defied industry protocol by negotiating the sale of two of her books—Richard Marcinko's Rogue Warrior and Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone—to Hollywood. "Editors don't do that," she says. "It's just another thing I decided I wanted to do and screw you."

Little wonder she likes tough women (next up: Georgette Mosbacher and Dawn Steel this summer) and tough men (Howard Stem's choice words arrive in the fall). It's the others she has trouble with. "Do you think that people with penises can't turn on coffee machines?" she snarled to a colleague when her male assistant said he didn't know how to make coffee.

Meanwhile, she doesn't sleep. "I don't think I want to do this anymore," she moans, heading home to her two kids and a Central Park West apartment whose furniture, she says, has been put in storage by the husband who is currently divorcing her. Of course she wants to do this. She wants to do it all. She may.

ELLEN STERN