A Likely Story

Wednesday, January 19th

A full week of negotiation, and I am not entirely happy at the result, but Annie says it’s the best we can do, and too late to try any other house this year, so this morning we said yes and Jack Rosenfarb messengered to Annie’s office a letter of intent outlining the agreement; that was so I could get started without waiting for contracts to be drawn.

Anyway, the deal. I get twenty-five thousand on signature, another twenty-five June first (dependent on yesses from those five celebs), and the rest August first. The full advance is on a sliding scale between seventy-five and one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, with sixty percent going to the contributors and forty percent to me.

And, if the deal falls through, five thousand of the first advance is mine anyway, to pay for my time and effort. So no matter what happens, this idea has at least earned me five grand.

Annie, whose office is a janitor’s closet on a low floor of the Empire State Building, took me to lunch in her neighborhood and gave me a copy of Jack Rosenfarb’s letter, and I actually saw her smile a bit. She had a Jack Daniels and two glasses of white wine and became vague toward the end of the meal, calling me “Tim” and saying sentences that almost seemed coherent until you looked back at them. For instance, she allowed as how she’d been warming to the idea of The Christmas Book over the last week or so, from her initial negative reaction, and by now was quite fond of the notion. “The best books, like the best women, are all whores,” she went on. “Never trust an amateur at anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

I walked her back to her office, happy she wouldn’t be doing anything on my career’s behalf this afternoon, and then came home to start work. Yesterday Ginger ran off on the Xerox machine at work a hundred copies of my two solicitation letters, with a blank for me to type in the victim’s name, so I have just sent the writer’s letter to these forty people:

Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Russell Baker, Ann Beattie, Helen Gurley Brown, William F. Buckley, Jr., Leo Buscaglia, Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, E. L. Doctorow, Gerald Ford, William Goldman, John Irving, Stephen King, Jerzy Kosinski, Judith Krantz, Robert Ludlum, Norman Mailer, James A. Michener, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Puzo, Joan Rivers, Andy Rooney, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, Isaac Bashevis Singer (what the hell), Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Diana Trilling, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Wambaugh, Tom Wolfe and Herman Wouk.

The illustrator’s letter went to these ten people:

Charles Addams, Richard Avedon, Jim Davis, Jules Feiffer, Edward Gorey, Robert Kliban, Jill Krementz, LeRoy Nieman, Charles Schulz and Andy Warhol.

I was just typing Carl Sagan when Hubert Van Driin called to say he thought we’d had a nice and productive chat on Monday, but on reflection he was deciding to say no to The Wit and Wisdom of Clint Eastwood. It’s probably just as well.