TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611472.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 18.4 KB | 379 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 68

COVER STORY

Burden of Success


As a high-powered lawyer and novelist, Scott Turow has become
the Bard of the Litigious Age

By PAUL GRAY


    "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

    You have heard the charges against my client. The
prosecution argues that with malice aforethought he wrote a
novel, Presumed Innocent, with the intent of willfully
endangering the sleep habits and on-the-job efficiency of
millions of innocent readers. Furthermore, it has been claimed
that my client is remorseless. The government asserts that his
new novel, The Burden of Proof, contains a plot even more
fiendishly complicated and irresistible than its predecessor.
The prosecution would have you believe that said novel, Exhibit
B, constitutes an imminent threat to the public well-being and
to the gross national product."


    This defense might as well rest; the prosecution has a
watertight case. In fact, the imaginary charges against Scott
Frederic Turow, 41, may not go far enough. They ignore, for
example, the $20 million film version of Presumed Innocent,
directed by Alan Pakula and starring Harrison Ford, which will
be released this summer and will probably lure every Turow fan
who is not still hiding from job and loved ones while reading
The Burden of Proof.

    And surely there must be a potential class action on behalf
of writers, charging Turow with monopolistic practices over the
pool of money available for new books. Presumed Innocent racked
up several records. Farrar, Straus & Giroux paid Turow
$200,000, the most the publisher  had ever advanced for a first
novel. A paperback sale of $3 million followed, another
first-novel first. Then came a million dollars more from
Hollywood, and royalties from the 18 foreign-language editions
of the novel are still rolling in. Neither Turow nor FS&G will
disclose the financial arrangements surrounding The Burden of
Proof; what is known is that the author wanted to stay with his
original publisher, and his publisher was eager to oblige. But
the new novel has already attracted more than $3.2 million for
the paperback rights alone. What scribbling starveling, faced
with debts and rejection slips -- and knowing that Turow is in
addition a handsomely paid lawyer -- could resist the impulse
to sue?

    But making a federal case out of Turow's success may not be
the best way to understand it or the man behind it. He is
indisputably a successful Chicago attorney, with a billable
rate of $220 an hour, dedicated to the system that rewards him.
On the other hand, he has made his mark as an author by
dramatizing the limits of legalisms. Both Presumed Innocent and
The Burden of Proof weave and coil intricately around the same
point: without the law, civilized life is impossible; with the
law, civilized life is only nearly impossible.

    At the heart of Presumed Innocent is a murder trial, its
intricate arabesques portrayed in breathtaking detail, in which
the defendant is almost -- almost -- certainly not the guilty
party. The Burden of Proof offers a hero, Alejandro ("Sandy")
Stern, the brilliant attorney who defended the accused narrator
of Presumed Innocent, who must reconcile his responsibilities
to his profession with those to his family. As the novel makes
clear, Sandy cannot do both.

    So how does Scott do both? How can he seek justice for those
who pay for his services and continue to turn out best-selling
fiction about the frailties of the law? Turow does not see the
question as especially difficult: "In functional terms, the law
practice always comes first. When my clients call, I can
interrupt my writing."

    He says this in his 77th-floor office in the world's tallest
building, Chicago's Sears Tower, where he is a partner in the
300-lawyer firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. This
well-appointed, bustling termitarium does not seem the natural
habitat of a writer, but Turow blends in easily. He carries a
suitably stuffed and scuffed briefcase; he wears dark suits and
serious, lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest
stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian
raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from
that heard in the hallways or elevators; he flattens his
vowels and comes down hard on his "r"s, in the approved
Midwestern manner, and tends to drop the final "g" from words
like coming.

    "I love the law. I always will," he says, seated behind his
desk and facing a window with a northward view that embraces
many of the landscapes of his life. On a clear day he can see
Winnetka, where his parents moved when he was a teenager;
closer at hand is the north Chicago neighborhood where he was
born. Somewhere in between is his present house, where he lives
with his wife Annette and their three children: Rachel, 10,
Gabriel, 7, and Eve, 3. "I do regard the law as a noble
calling," he elaborates. "But I can't shake the notion that the
law is coming [comin'] up short in its inability to deal with
intimate human situations."

    This impression is hardly original; jails are full of people
convinced that the legal system has misunderstood them. What
sets Turow's opinion apart from run-of-the-mill sour grapes is
what he has made of it: serious fictional portraits of the
present moment, when moral authority is collapsing and the law
has become, for better and worse, the sole surviving arena for
definitions of acceptable behavior. Disputes that once might
have been resolved by fisticuffs or a few intense minutes in
the confessional or private negotiations between squabbling
clans now tend to wind up as lawsuits. The old ways form a
staple of conventional novels; the newer courtroom focus calls
for a specialist. By accident and design, Turow has trained
himself to write both these narratives at once. He is the Bard
of the Litigious Age, an expert witness on the technicalities
of the current stampede to litigation and on the ethical and
emotional conundrums that accompany it.

    If Turow were simply a well-to-do attorney who dabbled in
literature, he would almost certainly be hovering still in the
ranks of the unheralded and unsung. He regards himself as an
unlikely candidate for the rewards he has received: "I don't
think anybody betting would have bet on me. I certainly
wouldn't have." This is not simply modesty but the recognition
that his progress came by way of a number of steps that made
no particular sense when he took them. There is a circular irony
to Turow's triumph: he finally became what he had always
wanted to be -- a successful novelist -- by admitting failure
and taking up a profession. The renunciation of his dream, and
a lot of hard work along the way, eventually helped the dream
come true.

    The son of a gynecologist on Chicago's North Shore, Turow
inherited ambition early: "I grew up with a very successful
father, whose success I knew I'd be expected to emulate." His
early years were spent in what he describes as "a nouveau-riche
Jewish ghetto" filled with returned World War II veterans eager
to get ahead; he recalls the "sense of identity" he got from
that ethnic community and the loss he felt when, at age 13, his
parents moved further north to the wealthy and Waspish suburb
of Winnetka.

    There he encountered what he remembers as "a quiet current
of anti-Semitism" for the first time, another goad for him to
excel. At New Trier high school, he began writing for the
school newspaper and quickly determined that he had found his
life's work -- one that promised glory at least equal to his
father's, and on his own terms. "I told my parents," he says,
"that I had abandoned their lifelong ambition for me to be a
doctor. I was going to be a writer."

    They were neither amused nor encouraging. "My mother wanted
to protect me from the fabled anguish of the literary life. She
said I could be a doctor and write on the side, like Chekhov
and William Carlos Williams." No sale. At Amherst College in
the hubbub of the counterculture '60s, Turow became more
rebellious still. During his freshman year, he and 22 other
students marched against Army recruiters on campus; all
promptly lost their student draft deferments. Turow eventually
received a 1-Y permanent deferment because of a chronic anemic
condition.

    On the academic front, Turow was a dedicated free spirit.
"I wasn't a great student," he says. "I was nominally an
English major. I was trying to figure out how to become a
novelist. I wrote a lot, and I read a lot." He recalls
"drinking in" Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and
being "overwhelmed by" Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of
Mirrors. He also fell under the influence of a visiting teacher,
the short-story writer Tillie Olsen. "She took me seriously
as a writer, and I'm enormously grateful."

    While at Amherst, Turow had two stories accepted by the
Transatlantic Review ; also, during a Christmas break back
home, he had a blind date with Annette Weisberg, an art major
at the University of Illinois and a near neighbor whom he had
never met before. With graduation approaching, he was offered
a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford. "What was
the alternative? A job!" So to the dismay of four parents, he
and Annette set out for California.

    Among other lessons, his four years at Stanford taught Turow
the charms of the bourgeois life he thought he had rejected.
"True student poverty," with its balancing of stipends, food
stamps and unemployment benefits, he found difficult to take.
"The only fight about money that Annette and I ever had was
over a $6 pot she bought at an art auction." In addition,
California life-styles in the early 1970s made Turow realize
that he was more conventional than he had thought. "It was
unbelievable," he remembers. "There was incessant drinking and
substance abuse, and marriages were falling apart all over the
place. Annette and I were newly married [they made their union
official in April 1971], and we decided to stay married. In
that sense, California was too crazy for us."

    Some of Turow's irritability stemmed from the recognition
that his writing was going nowhere. In spite of his gratitude
to helpful professors -- part of his earnings from Presumed
Innocent went to endow a fellowship at Stanford -- he felt
stymied by "academic values about literature, the sense that
books could be appreciated only by a priesthood. I thought that
a great novel could be read as well by a bus driver as by an
English professor. It was not a popular view." He was also
convinced that no great novels would be written by him. "It
finally dawned on me that I was not James Joyce. I wanted to
be a genius, but I wasn't one."

    The novel he had been struggling to complete for his
master's degree, titled The Way Things Are, involved, among
other complications, a rent strike. "I realized that I knew
nothing about the legal complexities of such an act," he says.
"I also noticed that most of my friends, the people I had come
to feel closest to at Stanford, were lawyers." As a lark, Turow
decided to take the Law School Admission Test; he came back
from the exam convinced he had made a fool of himself. In fact,
he scored well enough to gain admission to Harvard and Yale law
schools. He submitted The Way Things Are to some publishers and,
as he expected, received rejections. "Even if that novel had
been published, I would have gone to law school." He chose
Harvard, chiefly because the Boston-Cambridge area offered
numerous job opportunities for Annette to teach art and support
him.

    The story could easily have ended here, and in a not very
original way: another aspiring artist sur renders to the
exigencies of the real world. But Turow's arrival at Harvard
came with one of those little anomalies that inspire curious
readers to turn the page. While explaining to his agent his
decision to abandon literature, Turow had mentioned the
possibility of someone's doing a nonfiction book about the
experiences of first-year law students. He received a $4,000
contract to do just that. So he went to Harvard not only to
study law but also, as he says, "to make new friends and to
write about them."

    After his grueling first nine months, Turow spent 14 equally
grueling weeks in the summer turning his diaries into narrative
form. One was published just before his final year at Harvard.
Some of his professors and classmates did not like the book --
and particularly their thinly disguised appearances in it --
but most reviewers were ecstatic. One went on to sell some
40,000 copies in hardback and to become an underground,
pass-along classic among law students. Turow confesses himself
thrilled by "my first taste of literary success," but he was
not swayed from the new path he had chosen. "I gave no
thought," he says, with heavy emphasis, "to not practicing law."

    Harvard had changed him. "I learned a lot about myself in
law school," he says. "I finally got over the '60s. I
discovered that raging inside of me was a competitive,
acquisitive little Jewish boy from Chicago." When an offer came
to join the U.S. attorney's staff in Chicago, he and Annette
jumped at it. "I thought it was the best job imaginable, that
it had the power to help shape the community." The return to
their native city marked an important rite of passage for the
Turows, a sense that the onetime prodigal children had returned
and were prepared to become adults. "I had been taught that all
writers have to find their roots," Turow says. "Well, I found
mine in the upper-middle class."

    At that point he was not really a writer anymore but a
full-time lawyer. The eight years he spent as a deputy U.S.
prosecutor included Operation Greylord, a widespread crackdown
and sting operation that nabbed corrupt judges and other
scoundrels in the Illinois legal system. Turow successfully
prosecuted, among others, a state attorney general and a
circuit-court judge.

    This was heady stuff for a young attorney, but Turow had
something else on his mind as well. On his half-hour train
commutes from his suburban bungalow, he had begun a novel,
jotting scenes in a spiral notebook. Given these conditions,
the book lurched along fitfully, and Turow often felt that
Presumed Innocent would never be finished. "Eventually Annette
told me to quit my job and get that book out of my system." He
took the late summer of 1986 off and submitted a manuscript two
weeks before reporting for work at his new firm. "I hoped that
I had crossed the great divide between popular and serious
fiction, but at times I thought I'd simply fallen into it."

    The success of Presumed Innocent initially overwhelmed him.
"I'm not a weeper, but a few weeks after the novel came out,
I woke up early one morning and cried uncontrollably for about
an hour. The realization that I'd finally done what I'd wanted
to do for so long just floored me. It was both immensely
satisfying and a little scary."

    The financial windfall has had almost no visible impact on
him. He and Annette still live in the house they bought five
years ago, a four-bedroom affair on a corner lot on a quiet
street. "I don't believe in living like a raja," he says. "I
didn't want to buy a big house on the lake and then have people
point at it." And neither he nor Annette saw any reason to
tamper with a good thing. "After our early struggle to
establish our values, we really felt we'd found our way.
Annette's career as a painter had begun, our children had been
born, we'd formed a family. Why change?" One small alteration.
He wrote Presumed Innocent in the basement; now he has a
second-floor study.

    He is mildly apprehensive about the reception that will
greet The Burden of Proof. He expects some reviewers to cudgel
him with the success of Presumed Innocent and anticipates
complaints that the new novel does not repeat the formula of
the old. "But that was intentional," he says. "I was wildly
afraid of self-imitation when I began the second book. And I'm
proud of The Burden of Proof, particularly the portrait of
Sandy Stern and his complicated involvements in family life."


    Turow's life at the moment is hectic. As a lawyer, he is
representing clients in what he delicately describes as "three
grand-jury matters" that will occupy some of his attention as
he sets off on a coast-to-coast publicity tour for his new
novel. Why not simply stay at home and take care of business?
"Since I've taken money for this project, I owe all the people
who have an investment in it."

    Can this guy be for real? Writers, especially the rich and
famous ones, are not supposed to be self-effacing and
cooperative, nor to heap praise and gratitude on their editors
and publishers. Turow regularly does: "Jonathan Galassi [editor
in chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux] made recommendations that
substantially improved both Presumed Innocent and The Burden
of Proof. After the way I've been treated by my publisher, I'd
be a schmuck to think about going somewhere else." That is a
distinct departure in an age when publishing-world loyalties
have been swept away by bidding wars and the lure of big
advances.

    Yet Turow's straight-arrow character may explain, better
than anything else, why his books have struck a responsive
public chord. His plots and characters revolve around a nexus
of old-fashioned values: honesty, loyalty, trust. When these
values are violated -- sometimes salaciously, always
entertainingly -- lawyers and the legal system rush in to try
to set things right again. But the central quest in Turow's
fiction is not for favorable verdicts but for the redemption
of souls, the healing of society. Best sellers seldom get more
serious than that.


____________________________________________________________
LITERARY VERDICTS

    ONE L (1977)

    -- Turow's advance: $4,000     -- 300,000 copies sold in
U.S.    -- More than 25,000 copies sold in Japan

    PRESUMED INNOCENT (1987)

    -- 712,000 hard-cover copies sold in U.S.     -- 44 weeks
on best-seller list    -- 4.3 million paperback copies sold in
U.S.    -- Movie rights sold for $1 million

    THE BURDEN OF PROOF (1990)

    -- Hard-cover first printing of 800,000     -- Initial
advertising budget of $750,000    -- Paperback rights sold for
record-breaking $3.2 million    -- Reprint rights already sold
in 15 countries