LIGHTS, CAMERA, LITERATURE !

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 9, 1987
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

The horror, the horror -- oh yes, you could not help but feel a twinge, the initial mild foreboding turning to a darker dread, then to outright revulsion . . . not the sensation you expected from a brief foray down the aisles of this great convention, the American Booksellers Association, in Washington, D.C. It is a peek into the future, and the future is weird.

Everywhere are huge posters of the bankable best-selling authors of fall 1987: Barry Manilow, Chuck Berry, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Rose, Arnold Palmer, Joe Theismann, Walter Payton, Meadowlark Lemon, Elizabeth Taylor, Bill Cosby, Shirley MacLaine, Tip O'Neill, Claude Pepper, George Bush, Gerald Ford, Donald Trump, Ben and Jerry, Tom Wolfe . . .

Wait a second. Tom Wolfe? A writer?

How'd he get in here?

The roving cynic must stifle his reflexive sarcasm. The unabridged truth is that there are more good books out there than any one sane person could possibly read. The most beautiful flowers bloom in the desert.

But at first glance the sublime is lost amid the ridiculous. Here, an adult person dressed as Spiderman; there, cowboys posed on a fake horse. Now, swiveling down the aisle, two beautiful young models, dressed like someone's conception of modern teen-agers, with tortured neon hair, miniskirts, vampish lace stockings and cruel stiletto heels.

They are handing out small trapezoidal stickers. Imprinted are the cryptic words, "Pazazz," "Loveswept" and "Sheer Romance."

One of the women says, in a flat voice: "Clairol and Bantam Books are putting on a joint promotion."

She saunters away, inscrutable to the last.

Clairol . . .

The hair company?

Across the convention floor, in the Bantam enclave, the mystery begins to unravel. A woman is passing out samples of the new line of Bantam romances -- the "Loveswept" series. "Pazazz" is revealed to be the name of a new brand of Clairol hair coloring. "Sheer Romance" apparently refers to the general theme of both the books and the color wash.

A sample reading from one of the books:

Matilda, The Adventuress

By Iris Johansen

Explanatory Note: The spicy allure of Matilda's Sheer Cinnamon beauty ensnares the world-weary Roman Gallagher, a driven and brilliant filmmaker.

" . . . Manda lifted her shoulder-length cinnamon gold hair and wiped her neck . . .

"The firelight danced in the golden waves of her thick and vibrant hair . . .

"Her tousled cinnamon-colored hair, sparkling as though touched by a golden hand, shimmered in the headlights; Roman was fascinated for a fleeting instant by that brilliant halo of color."

And so on.

The editor of the Loveswept books, Carolyn Nichols, is standing by to answer questions.

"I'm sure it's the first time that books have been used to launch a new product," Nichols says. She says a woman visited Bantam one day with news that Clairol's market researchers discovered that they were after the same audience. It seemed only natural to team up.

Nichols says Bantam then took some "real books" by real authors and made a few changes -- specifically in the area of hair color.

The first 200,000 copies of the Loveswept books will have a coupon for 50 cents off the purchase of Clairol color wash -- not just any shade of Clairol color wash, but the heroine's shade. Like Sheer Cinnamon.

"We're not going into advertising, we're not advertising in these books," Nichols says. "I don't believe in that. This is a promotion."

Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Hemingway . . . Clairol. Books have become product. And why should it surprise? Publishing, after all, is Big Business, no longer the "last gentlemanly profession." Books are selling as never before.

As corporate America's marketing genius transformed the book industry, the dream of every writer ever to warm a chair in a garret came true: Nowadays it is possible to make a fortune, and earn instant celebrity, simply by writing a couple of books.

And the thing is, they don't even have to be good books. Maybe they shouldn't be good books. Better, perhaps, to shoot for the big, wide target, the bulging lowbrow of America. The commercially minded writer knows it's a vicious entertainment jungle out there, vegetation rife with competitors -- TV, movies, VCRs, general mindlessness.

"I wonder how the small voice of something so modest as literature can make itself heard in the din of publicity," Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, said after a recent ABA meeting in San Francisco. "Does a book still have anything to do with art or thought or culture, or has it become indistinguishable from a seasonal toy?"

This is the howl of the tweedy intellectual: Whatever happened to standards? And, indeed, it is hard not to feel a strange sensation, a discombobulation, a sense of slippage, as one rides this wild track into the next century.

How far can it go? How obscene can it get?

And yet . . . though the books that sell the best in this country come from the likes of Sidney Sheldon -- the man who created the TV show I Dream of Jeannie -- even the hoarsest doomsayer must confess that literature is not dead yet.

There are more than just McBooks out there. In an era in which publishing houses have become parts of larger entertainment conglomerates, there are still holdouts, people who would rather discover a great novel than increase corporate profits.

The Resistance lives.

The convention is referred to as simply "ABA," as in, "I'm going to ABA." It is one of the largest trade shows in the country, even though publishing is a relatively minor endeavor, an $11 billion industry, smaller in its entirety than IBM alone.

The convention lasts four days. During that time one can see what will soon be published in the United States, and also learn a great deal about the packaging and marketing of books, and meet and drink with interesting editors, publishers, writers and booksellers, but one rarely, rarely will catch anyone in the act of reading.

This is not the Miami Book Fair, where the central attractions are readings by authors -- few of whom have ever had a weekly television series. The ABA is a different animal entirely. Here, the words inside a book are not as important as the jacket.

There are some great parties. This year they had two big parties, one celebrating a new book about Elvis, the other celebrating a new book about Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry wrote his book himself. He jammed on stage for an hour. At the Elvis party, they had to make do with some bored old geezers playing medleys from the '50s.

A room is set aside in the Washington Convention Center for readings by authors. The room is a converted storage space, with thin paneling, noisy air conditioning ducts and a few rows of hard chairs. In such a room you could picture Soviet dissidents reading samizdat literature out of sight of the KGB.

Though 20,000 people crowded the convention hall this past Memorial Day weekend, there were only a handful at the readings. One promising young writer, Barry Yourgrau, who has a new book out called Wearing Dad's Head, had an audience of three people, or .015 percent of the conventioneers.

"Obviously it makes me angry," Yourgrau said after his reading, "but one might as well be angry at a strong undertow in the ocean. I mean, look at this place. At Knopf they were giving away pillows. Look at this -- Scotch bottles. What are they doing with Scotch bottles?"

The convention is littered with huge blowups of the covers of new books. The people at Ballantine say they wanted to do something different, and show "real people reading books." So there are all these posters of people holding books. But they're not reading -- they're making out! One poster shows a woman in a satin nightgown, in bed, leaning provocatively toward her hirsute lover, having long since lost interest in Sally Quinn's Regrets Only. On another poster, two teen-agers, a boy and a girl, are holding paperbacks, (he, science fiction; she, romance), but have stopped reading in order to grind their hips together.

The book industry is like those teen-agers: healthy but
vulgar. You don't want to know what they're thinking.

Publishing used to be a family business. If you were to walk into Simon & Schuster you could easily find Mr. Simon or Mr. Schuster. At Charles Scribner's Sons, the whole family got in the act. These were modest, conservative enterprises. Though they did not part readily with their money, they were still able to nurture great books.

The word that everyone uses now, as though it were the most common of nouns, is "conglomeration." As in, to conglomerate. It's corporate Darwinism: The large devours the small; the strong consumes the weak.

Simon & Schuster is now referred to as "Gulf & Western's Simon & Schuster unit." William Morrow is part of the Hearst Corp. Harper & Row recently was purchased by Rupurt Murdoch's News America Holdings Inc. Newhouse Publications owns Random House. The German company Bertlesmann AG owns Bantam, Doubleday and Dell.

Scribner's is owned by the MacMillan Publishing Group. Scribner's is a particularly sad story because of what it once meant to publishing. Though it was by nature a conservative, stodgy house, it had a visionary editor named Max Perkins who took risks and discovered some of this country's greatest writers -- including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.

Today, the company has virtually stopped publishing new books, relying instead on its backlist (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.). Scribner's is more of a museum than a publishing house.

Roger Straus, editor and majority owner of the prestigious Farrar Straus & Giroux, is the loudest of the anti-conglomerate voices. When publishing houses were family-owned, he says, "They were in the business of making money, but they weren't trying to make more money than a major corporation, more than an oil company."

Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Michael Korda is a hardened optimist, a member of the school of thought that says that good books and successful books are often the same.

"The notion that only unsuccessful books have quality is just loony. Roger Straus' point, insidiously, is that success is condemnatory," Korda says.

The key issue is whether noncommercial books can still get published in the age of the blockbuster. In a recent article in The New Republic, Ted Solotaroff, a senior editor at Harper & Row, described the discourse within a modern publishing house: "The subtle novel is a 'tough sell'; the one that isn't immediately topical is 'marginal'; the crudely written, heavily plotted one is a 'great read'; the slick one, in which, typically, a gimmick meets a fad, is 'popcorn.' "

Korda and others argue that the blockbusters pay the overhead for the quality books that don't sell.

But Anne Freedgood, a senior editor at Random House, says that some books are published almost half-heartedly: "Probably every book that deserves to get published does get published, but it takes a long time and nobody notices and it doesn't get any reviews."

Publishing houses often spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars advertising books that aren't very good, and little or nothing on books that may be important. Jaws -- The Revenge, the literary equivalent of sausage (a novel by Hank Searls based on the screenplay by Michael de Guzman inspired by the original novel by Peter Benchley), will get a large cardboard cutout display at the entrance of every B. Dalton in the country; not so a book about apartheid in South Africa.

Literature is the stuff you don't have to read once you graduate from college. Webster's makes this attempt: "Writings considered as having permanent value, excellence of form, great emotional effect, etc." The key word here is "considered." Considered by whom? The literati? If the test of a book's literary depth is its ability to incite the emotions and provoke the mind, then Vanna Speaks can theoretically rise to the literary heights of, say, James Joyce's Ulysses, provided it finds the right audience: a receptive mind, a pliant soul.

Korda says, "What gives you the right to classify something as trash? Dickens was categorized as a commercial writer."

And, in any case, what's wrong with trash?

"If somebody writes a book, works hard on it, finds somebody who wants to publish it, finds two million people to read it, that's great," says Richard Ford, whose own widely acclaimed novel, The Sportswriter, sold 60,000 copies in trade paperback, less than 1/100th of the sales of Valley of the Dolls. "I just have no sense of loss at all because of that phenomenon."

In the next few months Doubleday will come out with a book in which the first printing is 1.75 million copies, in hardcover. What writer has such stature? Who could possibly pen so awesome a book? But of course . . . Bill Cosby. Lately he has been first in another popularity contest, the Nielsen ratings.

Cosby's last book, Fatherhood, sold 2.6 million copies in hardcover.

Most books sell only about 5,000 copies. Poetry is lucky to sell a couple thousand -- not much more than the friends and family of the poet. Sometimes a biography or history work will sell in the tens of thousands of copies, if it gets good reviews. This year a book called Bearing the Cross, a biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., won author David Garrow the Pulitzer Prize. It sold "in the high 30s," says the book's editor, Bruce Lee of William Morrow & Co.

"That's fantastic," Lee says.

Except, he says, if you look at the bigger picture.

"It's horrifying."

Good books sometimes don't reach their audience. Chain bookstores live and die for the best sellers. The chains have computers that keep track of sales, and if a book doesn't sell, it quickly goes back to the warehouse to make room for something that might be more popular. The shelf life of a weak seller is rarely more than 60 days -- in paperback, maybe 10 days.

One out of nine general interest books purchased in America is sold by Waldenbooks. Harry Hoffman, the president of Waldenbooks, is unapologetic about the strategy that has made his company the nation's leading purveyor of books.

"I think publishers must become retail driven as opposed to editorially driven," he says. "The publishers must decide that they've got to market their product, as opposed to create their product for literary reasons only."

Hoffman despises literary snobs.

"The reviewers, the New York and New York Times people, are elitist intellectuals who review books for a very small group of people, books that are not published in any quantities at all. And I think they terribly miss the Middle America market -- people who want to read for entertainment and escapism."

Hoffman, a former Procter & Gamble salesman, commands about 1,100 bookstores in America, with hundreds more smaller book shops opening in K marts. Hoffman thinks the ABA is biased toward independent booksellers, and so he pulled Waldenbooks out of the association in March.

Because he's not satisfied with the kind of books coming out of Publisher's Row -- he thinks people want something short enough and easy enough to read in one sitting -- he has decided to introduce his own line of books. Waldenbooks-kind-of-books. Hoffman says he'll have 150 new titles for sale in the spring, with the advantage of favorable display near the cash register and the first 20 feet of the store.

There will be romance, mystery, science fiction -- all the best seller genres. They'll be good books, he says. He can't name, off hand, any of the authors, but he says they'll be good writers, and some will probably write under a pseudonym.

Are we talking about some serious no-holds-barred formulaic trash, here?

"There's a lot of good stuff in formula, too," answers Hoffman. Then he chuckles, "We're certainly not going to have any Pulitzer Prize winners in what we're doing."

The book publishing industry cannot market-research its products as easily as can a soap company because it doesn't have the time or money and has too varied a product line. So book publishing executives rely on the best seller lists. They see what's doing well, and, true to Hollywood tradition, they imitate shamelessly.

The problem with imitation is that the reading public is notoriously fickle. Readers are not automatons. Sure-bet blockbusters can end up in the remainder pile. David Stockman got $2 million for his memoir of the Reagan administration but booksellers could barely budge it. And no one has yet come up with an explanation of why Umberto Eco's dwarf star-dense epic, The Name of the Rose, became such an enormous favorite.

Those blockbuster writers who do sell steadily and in great numbers (Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, James Michener) have become virtual mini-industries. If (perish the thought) Stephen King were to be incapacitated, his publisher would simply have to find someone else to write under that name; he's that huge. It happened to Ian Fleming. Some of his James Bond novels are among the top 100 best-selling books of all time. But Fleming's dead. So the new adventures of Ian Fleming's James Bond are written by a workmanlike writer named John Gardner. They're best sellers.

Lately the hot ticket to writing stardom is being a celebrity. If you can't beat television, join it.

All jocks write books. This fall, members of the NFL- champion New York Giants are publishing five autobiographies.

Ghost writers have become as ubiquitous as electricians or plumbers and nowadays probably make almost as much. Presidential candidates are going to start drawing up strategies for winning the ghost writer vote.

Sometimes you will hear the let-them-read-trash attitude described as "democratic." Giving the people what they want.

But maybe people read trash because they are seduced -- led astray by an elite layer of society that cares far less about democracy than profits.

People do not like trash instinctively. They're not born that way. Somehow the raw human stock develops over the years into an audience for this kind of product.

In European countries, notes Jonathan Galassi, executive editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, "there's more of a tradition of reading serious literature than in our own society. . . . We're 250 million, and they're 50 million, and yet sometimes they can sell up to 500,000 copies of a (serious) book. The proportion of readers is much higher."

So what would happen if the U.S. publishing industry just refused to publish trash?

Stuart Applebaum, a Bantam vice president, says, "There's absolutely no evidence that if Danielle Steel, Louis L'Amour and Stephen King ceased publishing new books, their fans would immediately jump to the novels of Walker Percy, Philip Roth and John Updike."

The industry, nevertheless, does not put quite as much effort into selling Percy, Roth and Updike as it does Steel, L'Amour and King. These are the authors that get the kind of sales creativity that went into Bantam's "Summer Spectacular" contest: Bookstores feature a display of Bantam paperbacks that contain entry blanks for the contest. The more books you buy, the greater your chances of winning a new Cadillac Cimarron.

"It's modeled after the airline frequent flier programs," Applebaum says.

If the industry is enslaved by sales, then it follows that soon bookstores will start selling anything that sells, regardless of whether the item can be technically described as . . . well, a book. This is the ultimate in literary slippage. Go into a Waldenbooks and you will find cassette tapes, movies, sunglasses, T-shirts, coffee mugs, desk laps and other sundry items. Harry Hoffman, the Waldenbooks czar, says 20 percent of his business is "nonbook," and the percentage is rising. He says he'll hold a meeting if and when it hits 25.

At the ABA convention, a man named Victor Salupo stood up at one of the afternoon conferences and said, passionately, "We have become an entertainment information business. People are buying cassette tapes. They are buying video tapes. We persist in thinking of ourselves in a book mold. I think it's important that we reconceive ourselves, not just as booksellers, but in a new form, a new shape. I can guarantee you that although young people are not buying books, they are buying records! They are still a huge consumer audience, and if we can't sell them books, maybe we can sell them something else."

What has arisen is a radical concept: Literature Without Reading.

You've heard of "music video." Now there's such a thing as the "video book."

"A video book is a video," says Jane Friedman, a Random House editor. "The whole concept of the video book is taking a book and bringing it out on video."

Video books resemble cheap TV documentaries or Saturday morning cartoons. So far, the video-book concept has been mostly limited to such things as recipe books and books for children and young adults.

Mom, kids: You don't even have to read anymore!

Friedman also is publisher of "audio books." These are the cassette tapes that you can play in your car stereo on the way to work. Random House is now bringing out a line of original audio books. These are books that never were in print. Friedman has started out with self-help stuff, such as Back Pain Relief. She sees grander things down the road: Original literature on tape.

"I feel that's the wave of the future. I feel that there absolutely will be original audios. Why shouldn't someone write a story that we put on audio that has never been in book form? Maybe the thing now is to go from audio to books."

At the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists booth -- naturally the movie studios have booths here at the book convention -- there is a catalog of 33 new "Great Books On Video." These are Hollywood movies, ready to be played on one's VCR at home, only instead of coming in the usual cheap plastic cases they look like books. They have a bound-leather appearance. The catalog says these movies have been "handsomely designed to look like the fine volumes that inspired these fine films." Rack them side by side and they're the spitting image of the Harvard Classics.

A brochure features a young boy of about 12 or 13 pointing to a copy of H.G. Wells' classic novel The Time Machine, and the kid is saying -- this is right on the cover of the brochure -- "These videos are so excellent, they even made books out of 'em!"

On a best seller list dominated by the Usual Suspects, a new book has appeared this summer called The Closing of the American Mind. The author, Allan Bloom, delivers a terrifying indictment of the failure of American education, and mourns the decline of reading:

"Our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading. They have not learned how to read, nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement from reading."

A 1984 report by the Book Industry Study Group showed that 56 percent of the population 16 years and older read books. Between 1978 and 1983 the percentage of people under 21 who read anything, books or magazines or newspapers, dropped from 75 to 63.

Slippage.

The American Century is coming to a close. The U.S. military isn't as strong and the movies aren't as good; Detroit makes inferior cars and there's trash on the best seller list.

Maybe this queasiness in the gut is just hypochondria. Or maybe it's an honest recognition that superpowers come and go . . . that cultures wax and wane, that greatness is earned, not inherited. The gut says: Maybe we blew it.

"You would have to be a dummy not to be in dread about the future of things," says Korda, the Simon & Schuster editor, "but I don't think that can be stemmed from the 14th floor of the Simon & Schuster building."

Great literature rarely appeals to a mass audience. If you look at the best seller lists of the early 1900s, the same kinds of easily digested pablum were popular then as now. What is astonishing is that this is the single most common argument of the defenders of modern publishing: Things are no worse today than they were 50 years ago.

Fifty years ago, hardly anyone went to college. Fifty years ago, there were hardly any bookstores. Fifty years ago, people just didn't go shopping for books. Fifty years ago, people worked long hours and had little leisure time.

Fortunately, civilization is in a constant state of progression, and people get smarter, and life gets better and books . . . well, things are no worse today than they were 50 years ago.

That's shooting low. Sometimes standing still is the same thing as slippage.

Apostscript.

The most popular memoirist in modern America graced the
halls of the ABA convention. She signed books at the autographing booth and then walked gracefully to the Bantam Books enclave, to sit for interviews. She was once known as an actress and dancer. Now she's as prolific with the pen as John Updike, and is indisputably one of the country's top authors.

Shirley MacLaine's fifth book will be published by Bantam on Aug. 26. The title is It's All In the Playing, and it has an advance hardcover printing of 400,000. An automatic best seller.

Her general theme is that she's searching for her higher self. Out on a Limb detailed how MacLaine believes she has gone through several reincarnations over the past few millenia. The book sold three million copies, approximately 1,000 times the American sale of the translated memoirs of Elias Canetti, who has never been in a movie but has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A movie based on Out on a Limb starred Shirley MacLaine as Shirley MacLaine.

Her new book is about the making of the movie based on her earlier book.

She said, "It uses the structure of the experience of playing myself to explore -- well, the notion that we're all the writers, directors, producers and stars of our own drama. You can play your part in real life just as you can play your part in a movie."

So, the obvious question . . . Does she think there will be a movie based on this new book, in which, perhaps, she will play herself writing a book about playing herself in a movie based on her earlier book?

She thought about it a second.

"I don't think so," she said.

Her publicist, Stuart Applebaum, refused to be so skeptical:

"Nothing is impossible."

Memo: COVER STORY
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald