Why an Agent's Behavior Matters to Me
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should explain just why I'm saddened by the way James Frey's agent has abruptly dumped him.
As some of you may know, a few years back I was embroiled in a literary scandal myself. My decision to write a memoir about my former boss, John Kennedy, was angrily opposed by some of my former co-workers, who planted a number of anonymously-sourced stories about me in the media. I was writing the book because I couldn't get a job, because I wanted to be linked with the Kennedys in history's eye, because I was gay and had a crush on John, and so on.
Nasty stuff—and all planted anonymously, entirely without attribution, in the press.
But there was one, more substantive issue which my critics raised: the presence of a confidentiality agreement, signed by the original staff members of George (myself included), that we wouldn't write about John.
I felt strongly, both in the specifics and as a general principle, that such an agreement could not restrict one from writing about a deceased public figure. (I've subsequently written
more on that subject.) Others disagreed, and used the issue to portray me as greedy and duplicitous.
In any case, my agent,
Joni Evans, and I had always informed my publisher,
Sarah Crichton at Little, Brown, about the agreement, and she had assured us that it was not a problem.
Turned out she was wrong. At some point in this whole controversy, the not-yet-defunct Brill's Content ran a lengthy article about me and the book. Content had a new editor, David Kuhn, formerly of Talk, who was hired to make the magazine snarkier—Content was hemorrhaging money—and I was his first victim.
The inevitable hatchet job by
Abigail Pogrebin was so full of anonymous quotations, the magazine's ombudsman later singled it out as an example of what Brill's Content had been founded
not to do.
And the ombudsman didn't know the half of it—didn't know, for example, that the magazine had dug up (and I do mean "dug up"—this was not easy to find) an intimate photo from my personal life and had planned to run it until I furiously pointed out that it was a sleazy violation of a woman's privacy; didn't know that the magazine had Photoshopped a picture of me with John to make it look as if I had my arm around his shoulders.
The piece also contained a damning legal commentary from First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams on the validity of the confidentiality agreement—without mentioning that Abrams happened to be Content's lawyer. Given that, without such a quote, Content really didn't have a story, Abrams' dual role of lawyer and source was a fundamental conflict of interest.
The day after the Brill's Content article came out, Sarah Crichton called Joni Evans, my agent, and told her that Little, Brown was reneging on its deal with me—
not because of the confidentiality agreement, but because of the adverse publicity the planned book was receiving.
Joni asked Crichton to hold off talking to the press until she and I could figure out our next move. Then she called me. I was in shock.
Within half an hour, a reporter from the New York Post was on the phone.
Somehow the Post had been informed that Little, Brown was abandoning the book deal.
The next day's Post contained a quote from Sarah Crichton, who said that she was backing out because I had only told her about the confidentiality agreement days before, and now that she knew of it, she couldn't publish the book.
That was—there's no other way to put this—a calculated, deliberate lie; Little, Brown's lawyers had had the document for weeks, maybe even months, a fact of which Crichton was well aware. During the entirety of that time, Crichton had been assuring us that the agreement wasn't a problem, that the lawyers were just crossing their t's and dotting their i's, and that everything was fine.
In the Post, though, Crichton was covering her ass, and she was willing to use me as a fall guy to do it. Even if it meant lying through her teeth. That was why Crichton, who had previously been nothing but warm and friendly to me, never had the guts to call me and speak to me about what happened—because she knew that she was a liar, and she knew that I knew it.
The following days and weeks were brutal for me. I was out of work, my reputation had been shredded, and my good intentions been convincingly spun as greed and betrayal.
I don't know that I could have survived that time without some sort of breakdown if it weren't for Joni Evans' support.
It would have been easy for her to dump me, just as
Kassie Evashevski dumped James Frey. (Though, to be fair, Evashevski maintains that Frey lied to her; given the above, you can understand why I withhold judgment about such accusations.)
Joni didn't cut me loose—even though her association with me couldn't have been helping her excellent reputation. Instead, she assured me that I would survive and that the book would too. I clung to those assurances like the proverbial drowning man.
More than that, she set up a series of meetings with New York's
most prominent First Amendment lawyers to get their opinions on the confidentiality agreement issue. She took me to lunch at the most visible Manhattan literary hotspots, to let the book world know that I had her support. That may sound trivial to you, but trust me: in the insular world of Manhattan publishing, it matters.
And when I decided to take a year off and write the book without a contract, without a publisher who was even considering it, without an income, Joni supported me all through that time as well, reading the clunky early drafts, giving me feedback, and most of all sustaining my confidence that I could rebound from this profoundly demoralizing and disillusioning setback.
Then, of course, when a manuscript was ready, she went out and sold
the thing to people who saw that it was an honorable book, and it wound up hitting #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. But most important to me was the fact that, at last, I could point to American Son and say to people, "There. It's a clean, honest, admiring portrait of John Kennedy—exactly what I'd always said I was going to do."
And people could see that I was, in fact, a man of my word who, whether or not you agreed with me, was acting on principle. Which mattered to me more than any money or success.
Forgive the length of this story. But as you can see, I have some reason to be grateful for an agent who sticks by her writer when things really get ugly. And I know how rare such a person is. Much as James Frey deserves the criticism he has received, I hope he has someone like Joni Evans in his corner.
