Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  Douglas, frankly, loved the money when, in the eighties, it finally started rolling in like Pacific breakers. He’d tried not having money; not unreasonably, having money had the edge. His approach was innocently simple. He divided his income into three. One third was Monopoly money for play and pleasure. One third he put aside for a pension or a time when the wellsprings of creativity might dry up. One third, destined—as he believed—for the taxman, he gave to his accountant (about whom there is a macabre story to be told in a later chapter).

  Douglas’s accommodation was still pretty cheap. Jon Canter was working as a copywriter in advertising, though his heart was in screenplays and sketches, and Douglas was bringing home veritable sides of bacon, so they decided to escape from the Holloway Road. The flat there may have had a kind of romance of the bleak, but by comparison their new digs near St. Mary’s Church in leafy Highbury New Park were heaven. Those versed in the geography of London will notice that each move was taking Douglas closer to Islington, though he did not buy any property there until 1981. Jon says it was strange to come home after a hard day writing fizzy selling copy to find Douglas being interviewed by some bright-eyed journalist.

  Two snapshots of their life there: the first cordless phones, about the size and weight of a brick, had just been manufactured. Douglas just had to have one, and took to wandering about the flat with it making calls, even taking it to the loo. “Blimey,” or words to that effect, said one caller, “reception is not so great on those gadgets. The interference sounds like someone having a piss from a great height.” Another detail Jon remembers was giving a dinner party when Douglas wandered in and rather commandeered it by deciding the theme for the evening would be the greatness of Ringo Starr’s drumming. Jon was not angry about his party being hijacked. “It wasn’t anarchic,” he says, “and it wasn’t intended to disrupt. It was just ingenuous to a fault . . .”

  But more often than not, Douglas would eat out. The restaurant trade in London in the early eighties has a lot to be grateful for: Douglas did much to sustain it. He was wildly hospitable about taking friends out for exotic meals; sometimes, though, his mates resented it. Douglas had never intended his wealth to be seen as triumphalist and, when he was accused of a lack of sensitivity, he was mortified.* 133

  Douglas himself had little envy in his make-up and liked to see his friends succeed, and this could lead to a certain naïveté about money. He was recklessly extravagant. It did not occur to him to feel jealous of those with more (though much later, in California, he came to lose his innocence in that regard) and he could be taken by surprise by those who were jealous of him. Other writers who knew Douglas at the BBC could be a little satirical. There is a writers’ room at the BBC, in a grim office block in Langham Street just behind Broadcasting House, where the writers of topical comedy are housed in uncomfortable chairs and fed all the daily papers. Once Douglas was spotted on the pavement from the window of this retreat. Several scriptwriters yanked open the window, and one of them, believed to be a witty, short, scruffy git with a beard, yelled out: “Oi, Douglas, toss us up some dosh!”

  Douglas’s love of computers, he said “gave a whole new meaning to the term disposable income.” Once he was extolling the virtues of the new Apple laptop to me, and urged me not to delay. “Nick,” he said, after a brilliant exposition about the superiority of its operating system over that of the PC, “You simply must get one immediately.” It was about £2,000. I pointed out to Douglas that he had simply forgotten what it was not to be wealthy. He went quite pink.

  But he was not unaware of the apparent contradictions of having passionate views about the state of the world while not being put to the test by his privileged life in his beloved Islington—famously the home of “champagne socialism” and, at one time, Tony Blair. “Apparent” should be in quotation marks because it is hard to see why having money in the bank ipso facto disqualifies you from caring about the planet, especially if your opinions are supported by well-informed and rational argument. Later Douglas gave unstintingly to such causes as the Save the Rhino fund. In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Douglas teases those suffering from subtle liberal guilt by inventing a prostitute who provides an intimate and specialized service: she tells wealthy people that it’s all right to be rich.

  Initially, though, amid the welter of foreign rights being sold, the biggest English language market of them all, the United States, did not go for the book at all. Within five years, however, the US was to become Douglas’s biggest source of income.

  The publishing industry in America is largely based in New York, though there are pockets of publishers in California and Boston. New York is an exciting city, but the problem is that it knows it. New Yorkers are convinced that they are the pivot around which the world turns; in many ways, they are right. Think of that famous cartoon by Steinberg on the front of the New Yorker magazine. It was captioned “The view from Fifth Avenue” and three-quarters of the image went as far as Eighth Avenue. Almost out of the frame, on the horizon it said California and Japan.

  Certainly in publishing it is New York and not London where the major deals are executed, and there is a vitality and buzz about the business there that is hugely exhilarating. The native wit is wonderful, but it’s the humour of people under fire. Even buying a sandwich is combat. “We’ve got the money, we’ve got the smarts, we’ve got the style, and you’re a bunch of Brits who are, by and large, charming but useless—and not invariably charming either” is an attitude often encountered when doing business over there.

  Back in 1979, publishing in New York was madly fashionable (and still is, despite having become much more corporate). At the time it was set mainly in mid-town Manhattan; all the publishers knew each other, many of them socially, quite a few had slept with each other, and a fair number had places on Long Island in the Hamptons (the right Hamptons as opposed to the wrong Hamptons), where the hierarchies of office life would continue in different form. God help us, New Yorkers use expressions like “restaurant culture” without laughing and worry about getting a table by the pool at the Four Seasons. In that tough city it matters if the sneakers do not quite go with the jeans. It was a hothouse full of clever people working in a debauch of self-regard. Yet for all its gloss, New York can be very parochial.

  “It’s far too British . . . British humour does not travel. We cosmopolitan city slickers from Gotham City understand it, but how will it go down in Oshkosh, Wisconsin?” Such were the sentiments employed by American editors to keep their chequebooks inviolate when faced with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In fairness, America is the dominant culture of the world and it exports its entertainment in such extraordinary volume that the industry is up there with armaments and agriculture as one of their big three foreign exchange earners. There must be kids in villages in North Wales or rural Japan who are more familiar with Los Angeles police procedural slang than they are with their own culture. Innumerable TV series and movies have made the American landscape known to us, but the reverse is not true. Why should it be when the United States manufactures a home-grown product that is so seductive that it sells all over the planet?

  Douglas was beside himself. He so wanted to be a success in the USA.

  “Bloody, bloody publishers,” he would snarl, “they always say that stuff is too British. They said that about Monty Python. The sophisticated media people say it. They all bloody say it. The only people who don’t say it are the audience. You know, the readers, the actual public. I’ve met some of my American fans, lots of them, and they get it. They are very much like my British ones.” You had to tease him to nudge him out of his Tourette-ish riff. And, of course, eventually the rights were sold.

  Sonny Mehta remembers the process:

  I was on a trip to New York [the winter of 1979], right after we’d published Hitchhiker’s and it was number one in the charts. I was actually rather hooked on Workman Publishing in those days. They only did non-fiction of a very specific sort. They were
a small, very focused publishing house, and I just loved the type of things they did and the energy with which they did them. Then Bruce [Harris, of Crown], who was a friend, happened to come by and take me out to lunch or something. I said I had this extremely odd novel . . . It’s not exactly science fiction; it’s very eccentric. So he said: “Let me see it,” and I said, “Well, actually another publisher has it.” I kept waiting but [name deleted to save embarrassment] has had it for a week or ten days, and hasn’t come back to me. So Bruce said: “I’ll send someone to pick it up.” And the very next morning the phone rings at about 7:30 and I’d been getting wasted the night before. It’s Bruce Harris. I said: “Bruce, do you know what time it is?” And he said: “Now listen, I just want to tell you that last night I read that manuscript you gave me, and I really want to do it.” And I said: “You call me at 7:30 to buy a manuscript?—forget it.”* 134 Bruce must have thought it was a negotiating ploy, because he rang five times.

  Anyway, they did see it immediately, and actually Bruce was the other person I wanted to read it, so he bought it straightaway.

  Bruce Harris is an affable, civilized editor of the old school. Now the Publisher at Workman, he was then the Publisher at Harmony Books and Marketing Director of Crown, a feisty independent house, with the memorable address of 1 Park Avenue. Crown has long since been absorbed by a pseudopod from one of the industry’s giant cartels. Bruce says that when he read Hitchhiker’s he laughed out loud. (You should appreciate that it takes a lot to produce this response in a publisher for whom the joys of reading have often been crushed by routine.) It was, he says, the proverbial light bulb going off in his head . . .

  And the fact that I could pick up two books for a sensible advance of only $15,000 in total, when smarter publishers than I had passed, was helpful. I had to clear it with my boss, for Crown did not publish much fiction. We always tried to do good stuff, and Douglas Adams proved to be helpful for the imprint.

  I remember Douglas with great warmth. When he first came over to do promotion, we went out to lunch and we got on famously. Then I took him to a bookstore, Colosseum Books, and said: “Go ahead, buy what you want. I’ll pay.” I always found it interesting to see what authors choose, and it’s a gesture they appreciate. We once did a deal with Maurice Sendak after giving him the run of our warehouse. Anyway, Douglas was modest at first, but eventually bought about $200 worth of books. Right on top of the pile was a title on how to overcome writer’s block.

  Our first edition of Hitchhiker’s was a neat little hardback priced at $9.95. It had an illustrated jacket of the rings of Saturn making a rude gesture, and largely on the strength of that we got floor displays from Walden Books [a large, powerful chain]. Douglas enjoyed the promotion tours, too. A lot of authors find them arduous, but he seemed to like the travel, the hotels, the pretty girls, and doing the signings. He got a kick out of reading his work and liked meeting the audience.

  I’ll miss him. He was always jolly, a gust of fresh air. He was terribly prescient about Information Technology and all that stuff. He foresaw its implications years before the rest of us. Once I was on a panel with him in Cannes to discuss the impact of the CD-Rom on publishing, something about which I knew little. Douglas rehearsed some of it with me before we went on, and then he gave a dazzling performance himself. I still recall him describing how it would be possible to view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as if walking along just a few feet beneath it.

  It is interesting that Bruce mentions Douglas’s love of travel, because later in his life, when he found it excruciatingly difficult to write, he would use travel as an anaesthetic. The succession of airports and endless lonely hotel rooms, with their identical lay-out, mini-bars and anxiously polythene-wrapped plastic mugs, the jet lag, the permanent hum in the ears, the homogeneous malls, his polished production of the same speech—all this could induce a kind of hypnagogic trance, like lucid dreaming. It was flight—flight from deadlines and some of the responsibilities of home.

  Bruce wasn’t the only American publisher to adore the book. Back in London, Marty Asher, Editor-in-Chief of Pocket Books, also loved it. Pocket Books was a large paperback house, part of Simon & Schuster (itself then owned by Paramount, and now part of the even more unlikely media cartel, Viacom). Marty is a modestly sized man with a quick wit and engaging manner. He was in London on a mission that was the reciprocal version of Sonny’s on the other side of the Atlantic. Marty was searching the British market for goodies,* 135 and had seen a copy of Hitchhiker’s in Pan’s office and scrounged one for consideration of its US potential.

  It had been a wintry day. Marty had just got back to his room at the Savoy Hotel, suffused with the honourable fatigue that comes after trawling publishers all across London, and from being politely noncommittal when offered complete dogs. He decided to take a bath. The baths at the Savoy are very comfortable for they are constructed on such a heroic scale that you have to swim to reach the plughole. Also they come equipped with stainless steel art-deco accessories for holding loofahs, sponges, soap and recent British bestsellers. Marty Asher (nothing if not professional) relaxed in the hot bath, reading Douglas Adams and laughing like a drain.

  This book, he thought, is a must-have. He was disappointed to learn that he had just been beaten to the post by Bruce Harris, but as Pocket was a mass-market paperback house with considerable clout, Marty was able to buy the US paperback rights from Crown. In many ways this was an ideal combination. Crown was quirky, independent and trying hard, and still small enough to have the personal touch, while Pocket was a big marketing machine with powerful distribution across the US.

  Crown’s Harmony hardcover sold out, but Hitchhiker’s did not become the huge bestseller that it had been in the UK. The radio series had been picked up by some of the cooler stations in the American National Public Radio network, but it wasn’t until March 1981 that all the stations took it and gave it a national airing. Pocket’s promotion for the paperback was quite inventive. They pitched the book squarely at the college crowd with lots of advanced reading copies given away at university and college bookshops. Douglas was embarrassed that more was made of his connection with Monty Python than was really the case, but he partly had himself to blame as he had solicited spoof quotes from all the Pythons. (“A lot funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written”—Terry Jones—gives a flavour). Besides, from the publisher’s point of view, Monty Python was exactly the right button to press, something quintessentially English that worked commercially in America.

  Pocket ran a large ad in the Rolling Stone, a magazine with some excellent journalism and impeccable street cred. The first 3,000 respondents who could bear to write to the Hyperspace Hitchhiking Club (c/o Pocket Books) would receive a freebie copy.

  Marty recalls that when they published the paperback in August 1981, the initial impact was not huge but that the pattern of sales was very encouraging. He recalls:

  It went out in the hipper independent bookshops, especially where there was a big student market. It was culty. We sold 50,000 and then reprinted, and kept on going back to press. By the time his second hardcover was published we knew we had something. The series kept on looping round on National Radio too.

  I met Douglas at the ABA [the American Booksellers’ Association, a huge trade convention] in Los Angeles that year. We had a large, amusing lunch. He was wonderfully lunatic, and I was surprised at how much he loved California. He was like a kid in a gigantic toy store. He loved it even though there was another deadline imminent.

  Meanwhile, back at Pan, publishing Douglas was both pleasurable and irritating. Publishers’ editors, for example, will often buy their authors lunch. It’s one of the perks in an industry that is not well paid. It is easier to establish a rapport with someone while sharing such a basic human appetite as food. From the professional point of view it also has the virtue of putting a frame around the encounter; even a really long lunch is not as dangerous as inviting an author to the office where he or
she can hang about all day peering resentfully at other authors’ point-of-sale material.

  But the margins in publishing are as thin as the paint on a French car, and editors do not have unlimited expenses. Inevitably the exes get scrutinized—sometimes with appalling rigour—by a clerk in the accounts department who cannot grasp why some spoilt media-trendy should be entitled to so much free lunch. So the deal, though inexplicit, with authors is that they do not trespass too much on the editor’s privileges. It’s just bad form always to order the most expensive thing on the menu and wash it down with wine that may cost a week’s wages. Dear old Douglas had no such inhibitions. It was partly that he inherited his father’s appetite for luxury. Also, though in many ways he loved fame, he could never quite believe it. Insecurity gnawed at him all the time: am I really a star? Perhaps if I act like one, and people clearly treat me like one, it will by some process of magical thinking become an unassailable truth. But, one has to concede, sometimes he was just thoughtless. His editor, Caroline Upcher, who combines emotional sensitivity* 136 with an uncompromising determination never to be a corporate drone, was not amused when he ordered, not checking with her first, a bottle of champagne in a smart restaurant with breathtaking smart restaurant-type mark-ups. There is a legend, still whispered in lunching circles, that she told him he could pay for it himself.

  As anybody who has worked in an office for more than a minute will appreciate, internal memoranda are more often a vehicle for politics than for information. The ease of email has only exacerbated the problem. Caroline is a fine editor, not a tactician; it is hugely to her credit that she could never be bothered with the nuances of the blind copy to the CEO; life is too short. Companies have their own style, and Pan’s idiom was racy and no-nonsense.