As for celebrities, they too represent a way of buying a book for a lot of money without having to read anything. By definition, the celebrity isn’t going to write the book—he or she is merely selling his celebrity. Here again, fame can be quantified: The number of people who have seen a star’s movies can be counted, the sales of a singer’s record albums are available, their worth as assets carefully assessed, which is a great comfort to people who would rather deal in numbers than in words, or have lunch with movie stars and politicians instead of writers.
FAILING ANYTHING better in the way of celebrity, murders will do, provided the case is sufficiently splashy. I myself published Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book about Joseph Kallinger, the humble shoemaker of Philadelphia who went on a killing spree with one of his own sons. For many years, I received a Christmas card from Kallinger, who was in the state institution for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania, where he was unwisely placed in the shoe-repair shop at first, thus giving him access to the same sharp, curved shoemaker’s knife with which he had carved up a number of people during his heyday as a serial killer, with results that would have been predictable to anybody but a psychiatrist. Still, it wasn’t Kallinger or any of the other murderers whose books I published who brought me the most attention but somebody who, in the end, got off: Claus von Bülow.
To be more exact, it was von Bülow’s then mistress, Andrea Reynolds, a Hungarian beauty with a background that read like the plot of an Ouida novel, who came to the attention of Joni Evans and me. Reynolds (who was eventually to soar to respectability as Lady Plunkett) was then at the height of her notoriety, having fled from life as a wealthy housewife to the defense of von Bülow, whom she scarcely knew, convinced of his innocence. She quickly became the Passionaria of von Bülow’s legal tribulations, as well as his mistress. Since few other people, so far as one could tell, believed that von Bülow was innocent of having attempted to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, this caused something of a sensation. It was no doubt in part Andrea’s sheer determination to prove the rest of the world (not to speak of a Rhode Island jury) wrong that helped get von Bülow through the second trial, in which his conviction was overruled.
The notion that Andrea was going to write a tell-all insider’s account of what really happened in one of the most sensational criminal cases of the 1980s would be enough to attract any publisher, and it was considered a remarkable coup that Joni Evans and I managed to get to her before anybody else—indeed, my involvement was based partly upon the belief that as a Hungarian and the author of Charmed Lives I would be irresistible to Andrea Reynolds, while as an Oxford-educated Englishman von Bülow and I would have much in common. As luck would have it, I had recently been awarded the George Washington medal by the Hungarian-American Society for being the most distinguished Hungarian-American of the year. As a result, I knew plenty of people who were acquainted with Reynolds, most of whom, when asked about her, raised their eyebrows and shrugged expressively. Hungarians have a certain admiration for those of their countrywomen who achieve fame for their beauty or their abilities as seducers of men, which explains the national pride in the careers of the Gabor sisters and their mother, so I was thus not surprised, when Joni and I finally met Andrea Reynolds, to find that she was a vivacious, shrewd, and voluptuous woman, with that peculiarly Hungarian combination of beauty and a razor-sharp tongue that is perhaps only truly appreciated by Hungarian men and explains, perhaps, much of the melancholy with which they approach marriage.
At any rate, Andrea entertained us at lunch with gossip about the trial and convinced us that the book would be full of headline-making news. Snyder, perhaps because he was trying to keep Joni happy, authorized us to buy the book, for which he ended up paying a lot more money than we had anticipated, with a lot of it up front, since Andrea turned out—not very surprisingly, in retrospect—to be a sharp bargainer who recognized two eager marks when she saw them and employed a first-rate power lawyer.
Shortly afterward, Joni and I went to see Andrea and Claus in their Fifth Avenue apartment—or rather Sunny von Bülow’s apartment, for her presence was everywhere, like that of a ghost, though she herself was still in a coma, as she remains to this day, across town in a luxurious hospital room, surrounded by some of her favorite pieces of furniture, with a manicurist and a hairdresser who visit her every week. The apartment was huge, taking up a whole floor, so that the elevator let one out into a hallway with only one door. It had high ceilings and big windows overlooking Central Park, but despite that there was something dark and gloomy about it—maybe a result of its sheer size and formality, the carved wood paneling, the antique tapestries, the dark, unidentifiable Old Master–style paintings, the heavy drapes, or perhaps even the servants, who were silent, grave, and strangely glum. The dining room was enormous, but something about it suggested that it had been many years since it had been used, a feeling one had about most of the big rooms that we were led through.
Andrea greeted us in a small sitting room, slightly more cheerful than the rest of the apartment and crowded with antique furniture and expensive bric-a-brac and bibelots, like a Madison Avenue antique shop. There was a well-used backgammon board on the coffee table. Claus was a striking figure. Very tall, broad shouldered, once athletic, he was dressed casually in a sweater, tan trousers, and moccasins, and it was easy to see how he had charmed Sunny not so many years ago, when she had still been married to the dashing and notoriously unfaithful Prince Alfie von Auersperg.
Sunny had been something of a throwback (it was hard not to think about her as if she was dead), a tall, beautiful American heiress of enormous wealth, whose ambition, so far as one can tell, was to marry into the European nobility. A hundred years ago, this was common enough, when the daughters of the robber barons of New York and the meat packers of Chicago were shipped across the Atlantic with their mamas and trunks full of clothes to look for the right kind of husband: a duke, or a prince, with the right bloodlines, a castle, Schloss, chateau, or palace, and a need for ready cash. By the end of World War Two, however, this was already the stuff of musical comedies rather than real life. Sunny appeared, in this as in so many other ways, to be hopelessly out-of-date. Nevertheless, her ambition was to be part of the aristocratic European fast set and to marry into it, which she did twice, with all-but-fatal results.
Claus himself had belonged to this set only on sufferance. It was said that he had appropriated the von to his name, he wasn’t rich, and, having read law at Oxford, he eventually found himself a job working for the eccentric American oil billionaire John Paul Getty in England, where Getty lived in self-imposed and splendid exile. What Claus actually did for Getty is not altogether clear, but it gave him ample scope to play the man-about-town and to move easily in the circle of the international rich, where a good-looking, charming, and well-dressed single man with the right kind of manners was always welcome. In a way, Claus was as much of a throwback as Sunny, with his unapologetic snobbery, his life of ease as the husband of a rich woman, his fin-de-siècle elegance, and his weary sophistication. How many men these days had no profession, no job, and apparently no ambition?
Indeed, Claus did not seem to have accomplished much in his life (though many people no doubt regarded his marrying Sunny as the accomplishment of a lifetime, given her fortune). Even his notoriety was of recent date, acquired only when he was accused, tried, and convicted of trying to murder Sunny. Marriage had enabled him to live like a rich man, and the accusation of attempted murder had made him famous.
His expression was that of a man who was amused by both fame and fortune. He had a good face for a villain (if he was one): a supercilious, slightly lopsided smile, a long, slightly crooked nose, a raised eyebrow, sharp little eyes for such a big, strongly featured face. Absent the Prince Valiant hairdo and the funny hat, he reminded me of Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III, at once amused and gratified by the horror he inspires in other people. Claus, it was easy enough to see, hugely enjoyed his notoriety, which,
like that of the Marquis de Sade, had an unmistakable whiff of decadence and sexual kinkiness to it. At his trial, his relationship to prostitutes and drug dealers was alluded to, and his former mistress, the beautiful Alexandra Isles, actually testified against him. It was even rumored that von Bülow practiced necrophilia, an accusation that he denied, but without any particular vehemence. I guessed that he would rather be accused of anything than of being middle-class. His strength, in fact, was that he not only was unshockable himself but rather enjoyed shocking people. I suspected that this might have been the reason why the charge of attempted murder was directed against him in the first place: He had made himself seem like just the kind of man who might do it.
We sat down and, while tea was served and Joni and Andrea exchanged gossip, Claus and I conversed about England. His voice was curious—upper-class English, with only the faintest trace of Europe buried deep in the background and a tendency to laugh loudly at his own jokes. We were very quickly at ease with each other, perhaps because so much of my early life was spent around people who were self-created. Claus seemed to have invented himself as a cynical dandy, cultivating a certain Byronic pose.
Claus was at pains to make it clear that the book was going to be Andrea’s and Andrea’s alone. He would not interfere or influence her; she should tell the story as she saw it. Andrea laughed. “It will be our story, darling,” she said firmly—after all, she had sold the book to us on the basis that it would be as close as anyone could ever get to having Claus tell his story—and from the expression on her face it was easy to judge who the dominant partner was in this relationship. Claus lit a cigarette and smiled blandly. Whatever his relationship had been with Sunny, he did not argue with Andrea. He gave the strong impression, in fact, that he never argued with anybody, that he was always in agreement, which perhaps explains why people were puzzled and even angry when that turned out not to have been the case.
Would we like to see the apartment? Andrea asked. Of course, we were unable to resist, so we were taken on a brief tour. Along the way, we met Claus and Sunny’s daughter, who said hello quietly then leapt into another room like a startled deer. It was beyond mere shyness—it was the involuntary flight of a girl who has been exposed to more tragic incursions than she can bear and for whom, perhaps, the idea that Andrea was going to write a book about her father was the last straw. We went through an enormous, old-fashioned kitchen, the kind that required a small army of servants, hardly a place in which a young girl could get a glass of milk and a few cookies for herself, then down a short flight into a plain-looking room full of metal garment racks hung with clothing. In the center of this sat an elderly lady behind a sewing machine, working away. I wondered if the clothes had once belonged to Sunny.
I thought of Sunny herself, dressed carefully every day in an expensive negligée, her hair and nails done, unconscious and kept alive only by machines, and all of a sudden I wondered whether the book was such a good idea after all.
Years later, when I saw Al Pacino play the devil in The Devil’s Advocate, I realized to my surprise that the apartment in which he took up residence in New York looked exactly like that of the von Bülows.
• • •
WORK ON the book progressed quickly, according to Andrea, even though—against our advice—she had chosen to write it herself, without help. As time went by, we became more familiar with Claus. He had a slightly heavy-handed sense of humor, a kind of leaden German joviality, and his charm, while constantly on display, could wear through to reveal a certain snappish petulance and some impatience when things did not go as he expected them to or when he was bored. Andrea worked hard to keep him amused, but I was reminded of Madame de Maintenon’s weary comment about Louis XIV when she was the mistress of his old age: “Quelle horreur d’avoir à amuser un homme inamusable” (What a terrible thing it is to have to amuse a man who is unamusable).
We took them to Rao’s, where Claus was treated with the grave courtesy owed a man who had beaten a murder rap, for dinner with Irving Lazar, who was eager to meet them—he was furious that he hadn’t signed up Andrea as a client and determined to get Claus to write a book of his own (an idea that Claus tactfully discouraged). During dinner, Andrea and I fell into a discussion about writing and editing (now that she was working on her book, she had taken on the airs of a writer and spoke of her new profession with grave authority), while Claus became increasingly bored, as was often the case when he was not the center of attention, at least of Andrea’s. Eventually, during a pause in our conversation, he interrupted. “Well,” he said, in his low voice, very slowly so that all attention was focused on him, “I’m an expert on comas, not commas.”
There was a moment of silence, then Lazar said, rather loudly, “Jesus Christ, he did it!” The same thought must have occurred to everyone around the table at the same time, because after that the dinner broke up rather quickly—there was none of the usual sitting around over coffee and brandy.
Shortly after my belief, such as it was, in Claus’s innocence was shaken, my confidence that we were going to get the book we wanted was also shattered when Andrea delivered her manuscript. We discovered that it was alarmingly reticent on the subject of Claus von Bülow and concentrated mostly on her own childhood, which, however picaresque, was not what we felt we had paid for. A tug-of-war followed in which we demanded more sensational newsbreaks and more about Claus and his trials, while she dug her heels in, and eventually we turned down the manuscript and never got our money back, yet another example of the dangers of celebrity publishing.
* Publishers were right to see that the hardcover mystery business was changing—the days when your local stationers rented out mysteries at a dollar a day (not so long ago—my ex-wife was still renting one or two a day even in the mid-sixties) went the way of the dodo—as mass-market paperbacks took the place of rentals, only to be supplanted, eventually, by the rental of videotapes. Things change, of course—the local stationer itself has been replaced by a convenience store owned and run by people who don’t even speak English. Nevertheless, the appetite for mysteries remains.
CHAPTER 33
As the eighties drew to a close, publishing was beginning to go through another period of rapid change, as the book suddenly seemed to be the way in which major news was made. Of course, books had always made news, but for the most part indirectly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had made news by drawing the public’s attention to environmental threats, but the material in the book had run in The New Yorker first, as had John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In the seventies, however, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men and The Final Days not only made news but were news. By the time Woodward wrote Wired, his book about the life and death of John Belushi, the “embargo strategy” had been adopted by many publishers, sometimes for books where a premature leak might matter, more often just to give the impression that a book contained newsworthy material when it didn’t. Books were thus not only an extension of journalism but a subject for journalistic scrutiny, as were, by extension, the people who published them.
This was something new. Books never brought people news. News was the business of papers or, later, radio and television. Now books, despite the slow, creaky, shade-tree-mechanic nature of producing them, which had not changed much since the invention of movable type, were becoming news carriers, even though it normally took nine months to go from a complete manuscript to a finished book, or perhaps three months if it was done on a “crash” basis, which required putting most of any publisher’s production department to work on a single title.
The “instant” book had been created by paperback publishers to capitalize on a news event, like the many brought out immediately after the Israeli raid on Entebbe, in 1976, but “instant” books were now making news, which led, among other things, to a whole new relationship between book publishing and the press that was at once far more competitive and far more antagonistic. In any
event, book publishing, so long as it remained small and relatively unprofitable as businesses go, had never been of much interest to the press to begin with—now that publishing houses had grown into major companies, often allied with even larger ones, as S&S was with Paramount, changes and events in the publishing business became legitimate news.
Until the eighties, most book publishers weren’t big enough to have anything interesting to hide, and any gossip worth printing would have been about the authors, not the people who worked in publishing houses. From the eighties on, publishing houses were growing and acquiring so fast that they nearly always had something to hide, if only from the financial press, while many editors and executives were getting more press than authors. Part of the reason why journalists began to pay more attention to book publishing was that it was neither far away nor a world apart, the way the movie business is; book publishing took place on the Boston/New York/Washington shuttle axis, and most people in book publishing were accessible, rather than walled off from the press by PR people. So long as somebody like Lee Iacocca stayed behind his desk, he was hard to get to, and any interviews would be with company PR men present to ensure that nothing controversial was addressed, but the moment he wrote a book, he was out there in the open, eager to be interviewed by anybody, if he thought the interview would sell books. In short, he was just like any other author, and you could ask him questions you could never have asked him otherwise and get answers, too.
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