The Agents: Writing With a $ Sign

British Author Hunter Davies recently sold the U.S. publishing rights to his forthcoming biography The Beatles to McGraw-Hill for $150,000. Harold Robbins gets $500,000 in advance for every novel he dictates. Kathleen Winsor (Forever Amber) got $500,000 from New American Library for the paperback rights to her 1965 slow-selling novel Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West. Norman Mailer's contract with the same publisher guarantees him $450,000 apiece for his next two novels--plus a possible bonus of $100,000.

Such statistics carry an unmistakable message: the place to look for the most creative writing in America today is not in bookshops but in author-publisher contracts, with their imaginative use of the top row of the typewriter keyboard--where the $ and % signs snuggle in compelling proximity. The principal practitioners of this profitable art are literary agents, the canny manipulators of today's flourishing writer's market. Authors and publishers alike agree that it is the agent who deserves the traditional flyleaf salute to the person without whose aid, comfort, understanding, affection, patience, encouragement and hard-eyed business sense this book could not have been sold.

Minor Details. In quieter publishing days before World War II, an agent was usually little more than a genteel go-between for artist and publisher. His main activities were directed not toward books, but toward magazines; they paid a set amount for each article or story, the agent got his 10% cut, and the deal was finished. Arrangements with book publishers were considered a nuisance. Paul Reynolds, 64-year-old son of the founder of the venerable Paul Reynolds agency, recalls that his father declined to represent Novelist Willa Cather because he wanted nothing to do with checking periodic royalty statements from her publisher.

Today's agent just loves those royalty statements from book publishers. But he also exploits a growing variety of other outlets for his client. Given a hot property and an Air Travel card, he will busy himself selling subsidiary rights to the movies, TV, paperback houses, foreign publishers and serialization syndicates--to say nothing of arranging for new assignments from publishers and setting up lecture tours.

Den Mother. Whatever else he does, though, the agent can rarely avoid for long his original function: the care and occasionally the feeding of his authors, who, like infant children, are in constant need of mothering. Few authors can have that need fulfilled as thoroughly as Novelist Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?), whose agent really is his mother, Ad Schulberg, a 37-year veteran of the business. But few agents serve as a mother substitute as successfully as Candida Donadio, an exceedingly shy woman who abhors publicity and rarely allows herself to be photographed. Such clients as Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Thomas Pynchon (V.), and Bruce Jay Friedman (A Mother's Kisses) worship her for her combination of good business sense and warm understanding of their difficulties. The trade calls her "the Den Mother of Black Humor."

Though most agents try to avoid taking on untried writers, Miss Donadio makes a specialty of them. Says Knopf Vice President Robert Gottlieb: "Candida will send a story to a small literary magazine and not take out a cent of commission from the teeny check that comes back--and she'll do it for years."

Look in the Eyes. Although Agent Donadio has a sharp eye out for potential profits, she has an even keener eye for a writer's prose. "Language means the most to me," she says. "The way words are put together. I read selfishly. I want to see either a new insight or some kind of confirmation of what you already know. If I'm not sure, I look at a writer's eyes. They tell me a great deal." Without the need for optic examination, she took on California Writer Robert Stone, whose excellent first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, was published last year. Agent Donadio had to pry every page of the jumbled manuscript out of Stone, and since the pages were not numbered, she had to spread them out on her living-room floor and rearrange them before the book was in shape for submission. Later, when Stone went into a navy-blue funk, she made him finish the novel. She also made him number his pages.

"When something is wrong in a story," Miss Donadio says, "and the writer doesn't see it or doesn't know it--there is something in the writer's life he doesn't understand. A young writer will call me and say how depressed he is and how dark and awful life is. Well, life isn't dark and awful, and I'll break my back showing them that."

The Auctioneer. Manhattan's Scott Meredith, 43, perhaps the nation's most successful literary agent, approaches his work in a considerably colder spirit. Some years ago, the trade set up the Society of Authors' Representatives, a gentlemanly association of agents who valiantly try to regulate their business with a code of ethics. He is its most important nonmember. He advertises the services of his 30-man staff, and he charges a fee for reading manuscripts--two functions frowned upon by the S.A.R. Meredith can afford the frowns. His stable includes Norman Mailer, Gerald Green, Ellery Queen, Mickey Spillane and Meyer Levin, and he sells about 6,000 "properties" every year.

It was Meredith who in 1952 started "auctions"--the practice of submitting promising manuscripts, along with a bidding deadline, to more than one publisher at a time. Typically, he will send out letters to about 20 publishers informing them in glowing but vague terms about a sure-fire bestseller. After a sufficient number of nibbles, Meredith sets his H-hour, and on the big day--watches synchronized, manuscripts neatly packed in grey boxes--a platoon of messengers fans out across Manhattan to deliver their valuable cargo to the publishers. Fevered reading is then followed by even more feverish bidding.

Although conservative agents mutter in their tweeds about such practices, many have learned the game. Yet Meredith remains the master auctioneer. For Mystery Writer Evan Hunter, he got a $550,000 advance on two novels and nine "Ed McBain" thrillers; for Irving Shulman (Valentino), $100,000 apiece for his next two books; for Science Fictioneer Arthur C. Clarke, $160,000 for one book; for Whodunit Author Richard Prather (The Kubla Khan Caper), $1.1 million for 20 paperbacks.

Anything Goes. Between the Donadios and the Merediths, the thriving agency business is rich with specialists who represent, in varying degrees, some combination or permutation of the two. Irving Lazar is a Hollywood agent who concentrates almost exclusively on sales to film companies. Attorney Paul Gitlin represents Harold Robbins, among others, as both lawyer and agent.

Robert Lantz's clients include such writers as James Baldwin, such occasional writers as Leonard Bernstein and non-writers as Mike Nichols. Lantz is particularly adept at movie roles. "You have to know the territory," he explains. "You must know the real dope --who is hot, who are the bankable elements of a deal, who has the ear of an important star or director. Everything is interrelated. Every work of art can be commercially exploited, can go into anything, become anything."

However they handle their job, though, most agents are happy enough to participate in the publishing bonanza. But there are many who also fear that the payoff is getting too big for comfort. Says Jim Brown of James Brown Associates: "A man like Scott Meredith has hurt the industry by pressing for unrealistic advances in terms of what he is offering." Echoes Agent Robert Lescher: "I'm in the business of handling creative careers. I don't want a publisher turning sour on a writer because I negotiated too big an advance."

But so long as publishers keep hungering for bestsellers, it is not likely that the more aggressive agents will change their tactics. Says Sterling Lord, who runs a successful medium-sized agency: "The money is there. The great crime, if you control rights, is not to exploit them." So far, the authors are not complaining about exploitation.

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