TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061289/06128900.010

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 4KB | 64 lines

BUSINESS, Page 46

The Naughty Schoolboy


    Just who is Andrew Wylie and why is he stirring up so much bile
in the publishing industry? "He's probably the most dishonest agent
in the business," claims Scott Meredith, who is Norman Mailer's
agent. "Wylie is to the literary business what Roy Cohn was to the
legal business," snipes superagent Morton Janklow. "A sociopath,"
says Daphne Merkin, associate publisher at Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.

    Wylie, 41, is a peevish Manhattan literary agent whose most
famous client is Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's novel, The
Satanic Verses, that prompted the Ayatullah Khomeini to order his
execution. The Wylie-Rushdie pairing is apt: if only one of them
is an agent, both are provocateurs. At a time when many agents have
turned mercenary, Wylie tops them all in aggressiveness and
acerbity. Says he: "This little East Hampton approach to
publishing, where publishers and agents share summer houses so that
they can get together and shaft the writers, has gone by the board
-- I'd like to think partially as a result of our efforts."

    Publishing has long since lost the gentlemanly style it had in
the days when Andrew's father, the late Craig Wylie, was a senior
editor for Houghton Mifflin. The young Wylie's transgression is
that he disobeys the few rules that are left. He rustles writers
from other agents, which he admits, noting, "This is not Texas
ranching; these are not cattle with a brand." He has been accused
of representing authors before they know it. "That's a lie," he
says. And when it comes to negotiating, he's slippery: "Sometimes
I make it up as I go along."

    However Wylie does it, his clients love the results. "The hell
with publishers," says Robert K. Massie, president of the Authors
Guild and a Wylie client. "Andrew isn't going to play along." While
some agents swing bigger deals, Wylie has won relatively large
advances for the literary writers he represents, including more
than $250,000 for two books by the young novelist David Leavitt.

    As the industry's top snob, Wylie makes it his duty to malign
agents who represent books he considers vulgar. He has called
Janklow the literary equivalent of a heroin dealer for handling
novels by authors like Judith Krantz. "They have no lasting value
and two years after they've been published are worth nothing," he
says with a Grottlesex stammer.

    A Harvard graduate with a major in French literature, Wylie
drove a cab and communed with Andy Warhol before finding his
calling as an agent. In 1980 he signed up author I.F. Stone after
singing Homeric verse to him on the phone -- in Greek, of course.
(Wylie later handled Stone's unlikely 1988 best seller, The Trial
of Socrates.) Three years ago, Wylie persuaded British agents
Gillon Aitken and Brian Stone to form a partnership. Wylie has
brought Susan Sontag and other distinguished authors to the firm,
yet many of the big names on his list are either one-shot
autobiographers or recruits from his London partners.

    Veteran agent Sterling Lord sees Wylie as the naughty schoolboy
of his generation. "Each one (of these agents) pushed the ethics
back a little further," he says. But even Wylie's critics
acknowledge that he is an inevitable product of the awkward
transition from cottage industry to multinational business. So they
see little choice but to play along. Says Wylie: "Publishers find
it very hard to return our phone calls, but they do."