DAMSEL IN DISTRESS

By Paul Gray

IN 1991, AFTER READING THE MANUscript of a novel submitted by Joan Collins, Random House editor Joni Evans wrote a letter to the actress saying, among other things, "My biggest problems have to do with asking, 'Could this be real?'--and thinking it could not be." Problems? What problems? A steamy novel by a glamorous celebrity that read as if it were not "real"? Faced with such an object, many editors and publishers would have immediately ordered up a dust jacket and a print run of 200,000 copies.

But Evans and Random House, which had given Collins a $4 million, two-novel contract a year earlier, claimed that the actress, by turning in work they deemed below the threshold of trashiness, had not lived up to her side of the deal. The publisher sued Collins for the return of her $1.3 million advance. The actress countersued, arguing that her sweetheart contract required her only to submit a "complete manuscript," not an "acceptable" one. Since she turned in two novels, A Ruling Passion and Hell Hath No Fury, as her contract stipulated, Random House owed her the rest of the $4 million.

The dispute wound up in a Manhattan courtroom last week and on Court TV and provided some entertainment for the winter-weary. Newspapers printed excerpts from Collins' spurned fiction ("'Don't call me your little cabbage,' she said savagely. 'I'm nobody's cabbage.'"), along with careful descriptions of her clothing. While grilling Evans, the actress's lawyer harked back, perhaps unintentionally, to a precept set forth in Aristotle's Poetics: "She turned in--however good, however bad--a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end, a completed manuscript?" After a pause, Evans said, "No."

Collins had a moment of high drama late in the week while being cross-examined by a Random House lawyer. Did she not, she was asked, contend in a 1992 $20 million lawsuit against the Globe tabloid that published photographs of her topless with her boyfriend so distressed her that she was unable to fulfill her Random House contract? "Don't you have any shame?" he bellowed. Showing little of the steely resolve of Alexis Carrington, the character she portrayed in TV's Dynasty in the 1980s, Collins fled the witness stand in tears.

Whichever side prevails, the courtroom shenanigans and attendant publicity threw uncommon, and some would say unwelcome, light on one of publishing's oddest sidelines. The rise of the celebrity novel--of books that may or may not have been written by the famous names on the covers--can be traced back to the mid-1960s. Then, Jacqueline Susann and her husband-- press agent Irving Mansfield so relentlessly promoted her on TV and wherever else prospective readers could be buttonholed that Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls (1966) became a monster best seller. Other novels followed from her teeming pen, and they were successfully marketed not so much as new books but as new Jackie Susanns.

Other publishers caught on to the Jackie phenomenon and eventually came up with an interesting question: Why wait around for authors to turn themselves into celebrities when it's possible to sign up people who are already famous or semi-so? Whether such folk could actually write novels mattered hardly at all. Turning unmitigated dross into dross that will sell is how editors and, sotto voce, ghostwriters earn their keep.

And so the public was favored with novels by, yes, Joan Collins, Ivana Trump, Martina Navratilova, Britt Ekland and supermodel Naomi Campbell, whose publisher provided her with a 250-word synopsis of her book so that she would be able to discuss it with reporters. Fabio has published fiction too. "He was fabulous on ideas," says Ellen Edwards, who edited the chesty male model.

These names, to be sure, do not constitute anyone's idea of a celebrity A-list. It would be comforting to assume that the Collins--Random House imbroglio arose because the publisher finally felt shame at the prospect of putting out more bad prose under a big name. But it is equally possible, as Collins claims, that Random House decided the market for brand-label fiction was collapsing (or at least the market for the Joan Collins brand, once Dynasty left the air in 1989) and that the publisher could never earn back the $4 million it had promised the eager author.

Whether economics or a recovery of good taste lies behind this dispute, the news for book lovers may be good. Fewer bogus novels by transient celebrities may free up some contracts for actual writers, a few of whom may eventually become big names. That, come to think of it, is how this season's hottest literary celebrity, Jane Austen, got her start.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York