Oliviero Toscani and Benetton certainly grabbed the public’s attention with their latest ad campaign, “We, On Death Row.” Masterminded by Toscani, the campaign zeroes in on the issue of capital punishment with intimate photographs of 26 convicted killers who await their execution. Accompanied by text that never reveals the nature of the inmates’ crimes or anything about their victims, the $20 million campaign, which has just finished in the United States, has stirred up a critical and legal tempest.
Sears, Roebuck & Co., Benetton’s longtime client, has stopped selling its products. The California Assembly has called for a boycott against the Treviso, Italy, company. Victims’ rights groups, such as Parents of Murdered Children (POMC), are appalled that the murderers — one of whom is John Lotter, whose killing of Teena Brandon was portrayed in “Boys Don’t Cry” — are remembered in the catalog, rather than the victims.
“They make victims out of the murderers,” says Greater Portland, Ore., member Mary Elledge. Her POMC chapter will run a series of Benetton-style billboard ads that will feature the faces of the victims. Benetton’s name will appear, but it will have a stroke through it.
The company may be in legal hot water as well. Two months ago, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon, a pro-death-penalty Democrat who is up for reelection, slapped a civil suit against Benetton for trespassing and misrepresentation. At the time, it seemed imminent that other states that gave Toscani’s team access to their death-row inmates for the campaign would join Missouri’s fight: The New York Post reported that Nebraska, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon were threatening to launch civil suits on similar grounds.
All of these states granted Toscani access to their prisons on the basis that his team was there to produce a photo essay — only to discover later that the death-row shots appeared in a Benetton’s advertising campaign that began last January, and that two prisoners were paid as models for appearing in the ads.
“From my point of view, the Benetton people were not up front about what they were doing in the prisons,” said Nebraska Department of Corrections spokesman Win Barber. A spokesperson for the Missouri attorney general accused the firm of misrepresentation in the way it gained access to the prisons.
Benetton is unfazed by the backlash. “When the Missouri guy tries to say that he didn’t know it was Benetton, it’s either a baldfaced lie or they’ve got to be the dumbest people put on the planet,” says Gonzaga School of Law professor Speedy Rice, who was the managing editor of the catalog. He also served as Benetton’s legal advisor on the campaign.
Toscani is equally unapologetic. “I’m not a judge. I’m not a social worker,” he said. “This campaign is not about victims. It is about the death penalty. The death penalty is unreligious. The 10 Commandments say ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is against the law. “
Benetton and Toscani were already notorious for their unorthodox ad campaigns — the mixed-race models, multicolored condoms, newborn babies, dying AIDS patients — but the death-row ads moved the firm to a new level of controversy. They show convicted killers in their prison garb, glaring at the camera. Above each of the prisoner’s heads is the phrase, “Sentenced to Death,” along with the prisoner’s name, birthday, crime and the method of execution that the courts have chosen for them.
While some accuse Benetton of commercial exploitation, these images, which appeared in such magazines as Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, hardly seem designed to win the clothing maker new loyalists in a country that overwhelmingly supports the death penalty. In real estate terms, the ads don’t seem a clever use of expensive, downtown space, although Toscani insists that they’ve won the firm new business to make up for the loss of Sears and other clients offended by the campaign.
The Benetton-ad drama began in 1998, when Toscani approached Rice, a death-penalty opponent, to enlist his help in producing some sort of Benetton anti-death-penalty project. They met through Hands off Cain, an Italian movement to abolish capital punishment. In the past, Rice has worked to persuade the European community to boycott states that support the death penalty.
Last winter, on Toscani’s behalf, Rice wrote to Department of Corrections officials across the country to gain access to the death-row inmates. Along with what was basically a form letter sent to all the states involved, Rice presented the credentials of Toscani and the essay writer, Newsweek stringer and National Public Radio producer Ken Shulman. The pair, he explained, planned to produce a photo essay, or catalog, on the prisoners that would be published by Benetton.
“The point is not to portray the prison or conditions,” Rice wrote, “only the inmates themselves.” Rice also included previous catalogs sponsored by Benetton to give an idea of what the company’s brand of photojournalism was about. The catalogs, such as the “Enemies” series, a controversial take on Palestinian and Israeli relations, have the “United Colors of Benetton” logo on them.
Rice’s letter explained that Benetton would produce a “photo essay” and print 6 million copies in 13 languages, most of them distributed in Europe and Asia, with only limited distribution in the U.S. “No profits are generated from the publication of this photo essay,” he insisted. Early on the second page, Rice mentions that Benetton “is the sponsor,” and adds, “Benetton’s only condition is that the inmates be photographed in their normal prison clothes and not clothing which would promote another company, such as a Gap shirt.”
The commercial undertone of his letters, along with the previous catalogs emblazoned with the United Colors of Benetton logos, must have disturbed some states, because many gave Rice’s team the brush-off. “Most of the states turned us down because of the Benetton connection: Washington, Idaho, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico,” Rice said, and he went on to name others. “We made two trips to Louisiana, and each time the warden said: ‘I just don’t like this Benetton crap. Just go away,’” Rice remembered.
At first Missouri, too, rejected Rice’s request. “We were told no. Unequivocally no. We called Missouri back in late August, trying to reopen the door,” Rice said. “We were told not only no, but hell no.” [Missouri attorney general spokesman Scott Holste denied that the team made two tries.] But an abolitionist ally in Missouri eventually prevailed on prison officials and Rice’s team — Toscani, Shulman, Rice’s assistant Julie Wasson and others — gained access to the state’s prisons in October.
In January, a little more than two months after Toscani’s team made their last prison visits, the “We, On Death Row” campaign was in full swing. Talk magazine featured the photo essay as an insert. But the appearance of the advertisements on billboards and inside magazines sparked a legal brushfire. It wasn’t the catalog that the various attorneys general objected to — in their view, they had already consented to that. But several state officials began to complain that Benetton had no right to use the death-row photographs for an ad campaign.
“I have reason to believe that you misrepresented the nature of your intentions,” North Carolina’s attorney general, Michael F. Easley, wrote in a letter of protest to Benetton. “Your stated goals in this so-called ‘public information campaign’ appear inconsistent with the terms under which you were granted access and with the statements made by your agents to obtain it.”
“I read about the ads in the local paper,” Nebraska’s Win Barber recalled. “The materials we received said nothing about advertising. They said that Benetton was funding them, but not that [Benetton] would use the materials.”
Some journalists, including Slate’s Tim Noah, objected to the way the Benetton team used Shulman’s Newsweek affiliation to give the corporate project the look of journalism. Rice’s original letter included Shulman’s risumi listing his Newsweek experience, which is unobjectionable in itself. But later, once the team was in the Missouri prison, Shulman signed a consent form that showed Newsweek as the sponsoring organization/agency. Newsweek isn’t happy. “Our name was misrepresented,” Newsweek spokesman Roy Brunett said. Shulman, citing Missouri’s lawsuit, refused to comment.
Rice insists prison guards filled out the consent forms and that Shulman merely signed them. He also points out that the state had already given the team permission to visit when the consent forms were signed, so the Newsweek credential isn’t what got them into the prison. “It has nothing to do with access,” he insisted.
“The decision [to grant the team access] had been made prior to that point,” conceded Holste. “But the misrepresentation on the form is only a piece of it. We don’t believe that the information we got from professor Rice in trying to gain access to the inmates in the maximum security was the appropriate level of information.” If the state had known Benetton’s true intentions, he says, “then the Department of Corrections would have denied that request for access.”
But at least one state official, Larry Todd, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, rejects the claim that Rice and company had acted in a deceitful way. “They were right up front with us: They told us they were doing an advertising catalog or calendar,” he said. “Best I recall, they were very candid.” Texas declined Benetton’s request for a death-row visit.
Still, it’s clear that Benetton’s plans for the death-row photos changed at some point. Rice claims that around a month after the team wrapped up its prison shoots, Toscani’s assistant at Fabrica — the creative think tank with which Toscani and Benetton are affiliated — sent notice that Toscani wanted to commit most of his budget to posters, billboards and magazine ads for Benetton — what Rice and Benetton people refer to as an “expanded campaign,” not a completely new one.
“We did 26 inmates, but he only wanted to feature seven of them [in the ads],” Rice said. “They wanted additional permission from these seven inmates.”
It was at that point that Benetton got itself into more hot water. Because it was clearly using the prisoners in advertising, however unorthodox, it had to get permission and at least offer to compensate them.
To cover the legal bases, Rice contacted the lawyers of the seven convicts in early December and had them sign waivers to allow use of the image. He also offered each prisoner a $1,000 fee — but urged the men to turn it down, because of some states’ laws preventing prisoners from profiting from their crimes. “Our recommendation was ‘You should turn this down. It’s not a good idea.’”
Only Missouri’s Jerome Mallet, sentenced to death for the murder of a state Highway Patrol officer, and Nebraska’s Jeremy Sheets, on death row for the racially motivated rape and killing of a female teenager in 1992, took the money — but the state intervened and donated it to a victims’ compensation fund. Missouri has not been able to track down what became of the payment to Mallet.
In the end, the legal question may come down to whether Benetton was obliged to let prison officials know its plans had changed and that it was using the photos in its “expanded campaign.” Rice sees no legal need for the heads-up. “The only issue is: Should Benetton or us have contacted the prison to get permission to use an image already in the legal possession of Toscani? I still don’t think on First Amendment grounds you have to do that.”
Rice’s lawyer, Les Weatherhead of Spokane, Wash., says that the team wasn’t legally bound to tell the Missouri authorities about the change in plans. “The state of Missouri never asked Benetton to commit to any binding issues on the future use of the photographs. If there were any binding issues, I’d be concerned.” In other words, the team had no legal reason to tell the state about any future developments, and so they didn’t.
“Professor Rice’s comments don’t really address our allegations of misrepresentation to the state,” said Holste in response. “The state has a very serious obligation and responsibility to protect the integrity and security of the facilities such as the maximum security prison,” he added.
Missouri vows to press on with its suit, but so far other states haven’t joined it. Nebraska has officially backed off its threats of a civil suit. “Upon review, the state has decided that it would not be in the best interest of Nebraska,” said attorney general spokeswoman Jessica Flanagan. North Carolina and Kentucky haven’t advanced their grievances, nor has Oregon, which, despite the New York Post’s claim, said it never had considered a suit.
Was it worth the trouble for Benetton to provoke controversy on a delicate issue during an election year? “They’ve lost millions,” Rice said, but company spokesman Mark Major was quick to correct him. “Spent millions, maybe,” he said.
Whatever the case, Benetton isn’t the first group in America to unload a lot of money on a flagging political campaign.
To Matt Lauer, host of “Today,” “Riding the Bullet,” the 66-page novella by Stephen King that was released in e-book form by Simon & Schuster earlier this month, sure looked like the future of publishing. On his show, Lauer pressed Simon & Schuster trade publishing division CEO Carolyn Reidy with what he considered a trenchant point: “You get a proven author like Stephen King, who’s pretty good and has written so many books he probably knows how to do some editing. He could take his works right to the Internet.”
To readers and casual observers, Lauer’s proposal doesn’t sound that far-fetched. Time magazine, in a cover story featuring King, touted the Internet not just as an amateur’s playground but also as a professional’s potential gold mine, observing that “if you’re already a star, you can avoid the middleman by using the Net to keep most of the money yourself.”
Authors like King or John Grisham already enjoy extensive name recognition, and some of these writers often rely on their agents, not the editors at publishing houses, to edit their work. Several big names even hire publicists to spread the word about their books, making an end-run around the marketing campaigns that book publishers claim will still make them valuable to authors in the information age. Surely, outsiders like Lauer and many of his viewers have been thinking, it’s the publishers of name-brand authors like King who ought to be worried right now.
In fact, any e-book-initiated shake-up in store for the publishing industry is likely to strike hardest in other sectors. Several factors conspire to protect traditional book publishing houses from the prospect of seeing their bestselling authors defect to the still-evolving e-book publishers. The real threat, in fact, may be to glossy magazines, book distributors and vanity presses.
A case in point is Fatbrain.com, an online publisher and retailer in Santa Clara, Calif. Fatbrain.com had originally attempted to obtain the rights to “Riding the Bullet,” only to be slapped down by Simon & Schuster. “We met with [Simon & Schuster president] Jack Romanos,” said Judy Kirkpatrick, executive vice president and manager of Fatbrain.com’s new publishing division, MightyWords.com. “He did not want us to approach ‘Simon & Schuster authors’ directly, and if we did, he would perceive us as competition and act accordingly.”
Fatbrain.com contends that Simon & Schuster’s decision not to let Fatbrain.com join other online retailers like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in selling King’s book was a way of punishing Fatbrain.com for presuming to poach on the venerable publisher’s territory. (Simon & Schuster says it did this because Fatbrain.com allows purchasers to download a book twice.)
If Round 1 in the battle between the people of the old book and the people of the new book seems to have gone to Simon & Schuster, Fatbrain.com nevertheless has other irons in the fire. It has just launched MightyWords.com, a “digital marketplace” where writers and readers can publish and purchase “eMatter.” Fatbrain.com is kicking off the launch of this new division by making “American Perspectives,” a series of essays on the Bill of Rights, available free in PDF format for downloading and printing. Contributors include Whoopi Goldberg, Newt Gingrich and Pete Hamill, each writing on a different amendment.
“We’re the sweet spot of something that is longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book,” says Kirkpatrick. MightyWords.com anticipates that its customers will print out the content for “reasons of comfort and convenience.” The company is negotiating with Time Warner, Random House and John Wiley & Sons about other editorial projects as well. “One of the things we’ve talked to [Time-Warner trade publishing chairman] Larry Kirshbaum about is publishing early chapters of books before they’re made available,” Kirkpatrick said. “So we’re looking at chunking up content and selling it by the drink, so to speak.”
Fatbrain.com claims to be the second fastest growing company in Silicon Valley (right behind eBay), with sales that rose 78 percent to $35.3 million in its fiscal year ending Jan. 31 — although its net loss mushroomed from nearly $10 million to over $30 million in the same period. Around 75 percent of Fatbrain.com’s revenue derives from the sale of in-house books and training materials to companies like Lucent Technologies and the Bank of America. In addition to corporate publications, Fatbrain.com offers more than 7,000 titles by 5,000 fiction and nonfiction authors, who in general pay Fatbrain.com a $1 per month hosting fee to keep their books available.
MightyWords.com authors also receive royalties at 50 percent of their sales. (That’s after they’ve earned out any advance.) That’s a sweet deal compared to the 5 to 15 percent royalties paid by traditional book publishers. Nevertheless, brand-name authors haven’t been rushing to such publishers to reap the rewards. “The first issue,” says David Gernert, Grisham’s agent, “is how many people can an electronically published story reach and how will those people know where to get it? So they offer [an author] the moon and the stars, but does John or Stephen King or any other author of that stature want to bestow that legitimacy, that superiority, on one electronic publisher? It’s almost a power I don’t think they want. No one knows at this point how these electronic publishers will perform.”
Gernert says that electronic publishers have approached Grisham, but none has succeeded in persuading him to go digital, partly because the needs of author and e-publisher don’t, as Gernert sees it, entirely coincide. “For an electronic publisher to say that they’re publishing Grisham is instant legitimacy and instant publicity and instant viability,” he says. “As an author you would want a story to go on as many computers, Web sites and devices as possible.”
Furthermore, heavyweight authors often prefer to do what most writers dream of doing but can’t for financial reasons: devote themselves to writing. They’d prefer to leave the business of promoting a book and getting it to readers to a publisher. “Writers are supposed to be writing books,” say Chuck Verrill, an agent who edited King for 10 years at Viking. “Publishers are printers and foot the marketing bill. The other problem for authors is distribution. Publishers know how to distribute books.” As many have observed, if King wanted to get into the business, he could certainly afford to buy his own publishing house.
Nevertheless, authors and their representatives are not indifferent to the lure of 50 percent royalties — they just want to see the kinks ironed out first. “There will be some serious attention paid to e-publishing royalties,” says Gernert. “I think we will be having a very different and interesting conversation about this issue in three years. I think a lot is going to change.” And traditional publishers have taken note as well. “Part of the problem will be finding a royalty structure that works for us, for the agents and for the authors,” says Kirshbaum.
Traditional publishers like Time Warner and Simon & Schuster obviously have no intention of loosening their hold on the reins as the book industry enters the digital era. If anything, they will seek to expand their dominion through this new medium. “I don’t look at electronic publishing as a threat,” Kirshbaum says. “I look at this as an opportunity for publishers to develop a supplement to their print business. On balance, we’ll hold onto our authors and we will exploit their electronic possibilities.”
As a result, e-book publishers who haven’t already got a toehold in print book publishing may wind up with lists limited to public domain classics and books that print publishers wouldn’t touch anyway. Vanity presses, who for a fee print up unpublished books (books that often wind up moldering in boxes in the authors’ basements and attics), may find their business undercut by “print on demand” publishers like iUniverse.com.
The Campbell, Calif., company takes an author’s electronic manuscript and converts it to QuarkXPress files so that copies of the book can then be printed and bound. Once ordered by a reader or bookstore, an iUniverse.com title is then manufactured in an “on-demand” printer (which resembles an enormous photocopier) built by Lightning Print, a subsidiary of Ingram, a national book distributor.
Authors pay iUniverse.com a minimum of $99 to publish their books and they have the option of purchasing a range of services in addition; publishing with a full editorial review, for example, costs $299. “Our fear is that incredible numbers of titles are being published” by traditional book publishers, says iUniverse.com publisher Kenzi Sugihara, a veteran of Bantam Books and Random House with 30 years of experience in the field, “but the exposure and selection of titles is narrowing. We feel we’re stepping into the gap.”
The peril, of course, is that the lists of electronic publishers will become virtual slush piles, refugee camps for books that only their authors could love, such as Fatbrain.com’s “Solo Explorations in Male Masturbation” and iUniverse.com’s “Chocolate Sauce and Malice.” Although their combined lists comprise 7,200-odd titles, iUniverse.com or Fatbrain.com have seen few, if any, of their books reviewed in major media.
However, iUniverse.com, which offers 20 percent royalties and insists that it does sometimes reject books, can boast at least one break-out success (at least by its own modest terms). Natasha Munson, a New Jersey real estate agent who grew impatient waiting for New York publishers to respond to her manuscript and went with the e-publisher instead, has sold several thousand copies of her inspirational title “Life Lessons for My Black Sisters.”
Steven Gooderich, the company’s strategic channel program director, was intrigued by the title one day when he was on the site, read it and showed it to his colleagues. “We were all impressed by it,” Gooderich said. He then alerted a Barnes & Noble buyer. (B&N owns a 49 percent interest in iUniverse.com.) “I will share a book with anyone who will listen,” he said. Munson “fits the mold we want,” adds Sugihara. “She came to us as a novice who wanted us to publish her and we saw her commercial value.”
IUniverse.com CEO Richard Tam concurs. “The current industry perpetuates this myth that if a book is rejected by them then it must be because of quality. In fact, most of those books are rejected because of economics. They don’t know how to publish a book if it only sells, say, 10,000 copies. Their current economic model doesn’t work”
Literary agent Richard Curtis, who plans to launch a new retail Web site called E-Reads this spring, sees a huge gap that companies such as iUniverse.com could potentially fill. “The 1,000- to 10,000-copy authors don’t attract attention the way they used to. The smartest minds in the world just haven’t been able to do it. [Print] publishers just cannot make a living publishing two books and taking one back.”
Curtis is referring to the book industry’s standard practice of accepting “returns.” Booksellers order a number of copies of each title and are permitted to return them to the publisher for a full refund if the books don’t sell. On-demand printing makes this costly and increasing untenable policy obsolete, and to literary idealists it promises a future in which no book ever need go out of print.
As large publishers catch on to on-demand publishing, they may save themselves a bundle of cash and many bushels of returns. “In the past publishers would have had to print thousands of copies to make it economically justifiable,” says Random House chief spokesman Stuart Applebaum.
(With conventional book printing and binding methods, the cost of an individual book goes down as the total number of copies printed goes up. As a result, to price single copies reasonably, publishers need to order a substantial “print run.”) “Now they can print hundreds of copies and drop-ship. So suddenly everything’s in good shape.”
But for all their Utopian promise, publishers who offer print-on-demand books aren’t really publishing electronic books; iUniverse titles are only available on paper, even if the ink is barely dry. Real e-books like “Riding the Bullet” present their own set of problems, as MightyWord.com’s remarks about the “comfort and convenience” of printing out e-matter suggests.
“Riding the Bullet” is only available in a format that prevents it from being printed out, so King fans have had to read the novella on their PCs, their Palm Pilots or other PDAs or an “electronic reader” like NuvoMedia’s Rocket eBook or the SoftBook Reader. Readers are notoriously and vocally resistant to reading long documents on a screen, so it’s no coincidence that the big crossover eBook of 2000 was a story that, if printed as a paperback book, would only be 66 pages long.
It’s hard to imagine anyone reading all 1,153 pages of King’s magnum opus, “The Stand,” on a PC or laptop — let along printing the thing out on a laser printer and hauling all those loose pages around. “The platforms need to be resolved for these books to have popularity,” says Michael J. Wolf, the managing partner in charge of Booz, Allen & Hamilton’s media and entertainment consultancy group and author of “The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Companies Are Transforming Our Lives.”
Until manufacturers solve the tricky problem of providing readers with a comfortable and convenient device for reading e-books, shorter works will probably dominate the fledgling e-book market. In that case, MightyWords.com has a head start and is aggressively pursuing a niche that once belonged to magazines. In an era when writers often feel that magazines won’t accommodate in-depth articles and essays, a publisher like MightyWords.com provides an attractive alternative.
For fiction writers, it may even appear to be a godsend. A master of the long short story such as Alice Munro or a novelist like Arundhati Roy, who recently penned essays protesting the Indian government’s dam and irrigation projects and its testing of nuclear arms, could well find a suitable publisher in a company like MightyWords.com. “For an author of short stories, I may ask myself why I should bother with a magazine,” says Chuck Verrill. “And why should I be buried in ads?”
Of course, many established writers (some of whom don’t even have e-mail) find new technologies as bewildering and daunting as do their most timid readers. Electronic publishers seeking to woo name writers away from the cozy and prestigious medium of paper and cardboard may find the talent more resistant than anyone else. Stephen King is the first of them to venture into this new territory, but in terms of marquee literary attractions, the trail is still being blazed. Still, there are those fat royalties beckoning. “It’s going to be years until electronic books have the wide approval to be able to replace paper books,” says Wolf. “But it does provide the specter of an author saying, ‘Well, I’ll do it myself.’”
Richard Blow, former executive editor of George magazine, recently sold his proposal for a book about his relationship to the late John F. Kennedy Jr., a George co-founder, to Little, Brown amid a flurry of literary allusions. “A bit of [Willie Morris' acclaimed memoir] ‘North Toward Home,’” Blow told the New York Daily News, “and a bit of George Stephanopoulos’ ‘All Too Human.’”
The book, as yet untitled, will focus on Blow’s five-year tenure at the Hachette publication. The proposal promises that Blow will reveal what it was like to work alongside Kennedy, who died in a plane crash last July. That Blow signed a mid-six-figure deal with Little, Brown appeared to confirm his publisher’s faith in that promise.
Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton placed Blow’s future book in an unimpeachable line of Kennedy memoirs. “Ted Sorenson wrote about his friendship with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So did Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ben Bradlee,” she said.
Crichton is almost certainly the only person who found herself reminded of Schlesinger while reading the 33-page proposal, which has been making the rounds in New York publishing circles. Blow himself seems to be decidedly under the shadow of Stephanopoulos, whose “disloyalty” to President Clinton and “hunger for fame” he claims irritated Kennedy. Unlike the disillusioned Stephanopoulos, however, Blow intends to write a book about his former boss that’s admiring to a fault. The proposal is written in the form of a letter to agent Joni Evans because, as Blow puts it, “It’s just that [the] story I have to tell is so personal.” (When reached, Blow refused comment and said to direct queries to Evans. Evans, who on other occasions has commented to the press about the book proposal and its contents, did not return a phone call from Salon.)
“No one else has the experience with and perspective on John that I do,” Blow writes. “I hope that doesn’t sound like boasting, Joni, because I don’t mean it that way — and there were times I wished for someone else to be in that position.” But despite several heavily dropped hints about being “the last person to share a meal with John,” knowing “exactly why John failed the bar exam twice,” possessing an “unedited” version of the editor’s letter Kennedy wrote for George about his misbehaving relatives and witnessing a Kennedy confession of “something personal” that had been distracting him “just hours before his death,” Blow’s proposal offers surprisingly little dish.
Instead, it positively quivers with the ecstasy of being so close to “the face of modern power, the awesome power conveyed by politics, wealth, sex appeals [sic], and, above all, celebrity.” Whether or not Blow was as blown away by his exposure to Kennedy as he claims in his proposal, it certainly made good business sense for him to emphasize it: Who wants to read a book about a Kennedy who doesn’t make you go weak in the knees?
Blow, who describes himself as Kennedy’s closest colleague and standard-bearer, claims that his boss’s “awesome” power was so overwhelming that George staffers were in constant danger of losing their very identities. He compares the magazine to a royal court in which self-conscious courtiers seek to endear themselves to the king. “We had no defenses, no preparation, against someone so charismatic, so charming,” he maintains. John, aware of his fatal charm, was noble enough to intentionally keep people at a distance, Blow says: “He knew how damaged they could be by their exposure to him.” And indeed life after John, according to Blow, was a mere shadow: “Normalcy would ever after seem so unsatisfying.”
And why wouldn’t one feel that way, after rubbing editorial shoulders with “the face of modern power”? What mortal born of woman could resist the glory, and glamour, the “thrill” of wearing the hand-me-down ties that John had tired of? Blow describes being sought out at parties by people wanting an introduction and at entering an exclusive George party as crowds of JFK Jr. fans looked on: “For just a moment, I knew what it felt like to be famous. It felt great.”
There were drawbacks to all this glamour, of course, as when, as Blow relates, the Amazonian model and volleyball player Gabrielle Reece met with him to discuss writing for the magazine — only to call up later and ask if he could set up a lunch with Kennedy.
As if anticipating that some readers might find his invocations of “raw power” and “dangerous” seductiveness a bit of a stretch, Blow hastens to compare George with another legendary Kennedy-centered milieu: “the group of men who were forever changed by working for John’s father in the White House.” Blow likens the position of editor-in-chief of George to that of president of the United States. (As an occasional freelancer for the magazine, and as someone who has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. only once on a school trip, I can neither endorse nor critique Blow’s analogy.) One of his objectives, Blow writes, is to argue that “George was one of the most influential magazines of the 1990s.”
“I know that’s not a widely shared estimation,” Blow adds with massive understatement, going on to argue that, compared to the likes of In Style and Maxim, George was “too smart.” It was “not only ahead of its time, but good for its time.”
Like the Camelot of King Arthur to which he compares them, the editorial offices of George were torn asunder on account of a woman. Blow confirms that rumored dust-ups and an eventual “divorce” between Kennedy and George co-founder Michael Berman were the result of Kennedy’s relationship with Carolyn Bessette. “In what may have been the most fateful moment for the future of George,” he writes, “John was forced to choose between his partner and his future wife.”
Despite this “Behind the Music”-style teaser, Blow doesn’t ever get around to explaining what Berman objected to about Bessette. He alludes to tensions in the Kennedy-Bessette marriage revolving in part around her reluctance to raise children in the fishbowl environment of New York. Though Blow maintains that the two were “passionately in love with each other,” he also intimates that Bessette was uncomfortable with “John’s evolution,” that is, with the political career Blow suggests that Kennedy was on the verge of launching.
Since Stephanopoulos stands at center stage for most of his own memoir, one may wonder where Blow will locate himself. Judging by his proposal, Blow will cast himself as Nick Carraway to Kennedy’s Gatsby: “He had a little-boy-lost quality — you wanted to forgive him everything.” After comparing Kennedy to Princess Diana, Blow strikes another Fitzgeraldian note by saying that Kennedy was killed by who he was.
Given that Blow describes Kennedy as “scornful” of “publicity-hungry” people like Stephanopoulos, it’s only logical to wonder how Kennedy would have perceived Blow’s book. (In fact, one former George contributor maintains that she was fired by Blow for speaking too freely to the press after Kennedy’s death.) Blow justifies his plan by explaining that his book, unlike the disillusioned Clinton aide’s, will reflect the fact that he “wound up as one of his most committed admirers — despite his imperfections.” Moreover, he adds, “thanks to congressional investigations,” Stephanopoulos couldn’t keep a journal.
Blow, to his own good fortune, was not so constrained.
After John F. Kennedy Jr.’s private plane crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard last July, stunned staffers at his magazine, George, maintained a remarkable silence about their grief to the public. But now Richard Blow, the magazine’s former executive editor who enforced that silence, is circulating a book proposal about his four-year experience at the magazine.
“It’s his appreciation, or a reflection, or a memory, or however you want to look at it,” says Blow’s agent, Joni Evans of the William Morris Agency. (Blow could not be reached for comment.) While Evans did not want to give any further details about the proposal, many are wondering how deeply into Kennedy’s personal life this book could go.
One insider who worked with Kennedy and Blow maintains that while the two were friendly, they weren’t especially close. “They knew each other well in the sense that they worked together in the office every day,” says RoseMarie Terenzio, Kennedy’s former executive assistant, who worked for him at the magazine for five years. “I wouldn’t call Rich an authority on the mission of George or John Kennedy.”
As executive editor, Blow censured George writers who spoke publicly about the magazine’s late co-founder after his death. Historian Douglas Brinkley was dismissed for going on the television talk-show circuit after the crash. And although veteran contributor Lisa DePaulo’s reminiscences about Kennedy in New York magazine were warm, Blow fired her for it. “I’m shocked, but not surprised,” she replied when told of Blow’s proposal.
Some insiders may also be shocked because Blow, like most George employees, had signed a non-disclosure agreement when he came to work for the magazine. According to the same sources, the agreement prohibits employees from giving proprietary information about Random Ventures, George’s parent company, and its joint-venture partner, Hachette-Filipacchi, or their principals. But Evans said that Blow signed the agreement only with Random Ventures, which according to him, is defunct.
Peter Olsen, the lawyer from Battle Fowler who represents (or represented) the company, would not comment, nor would Sen. Edward Kennedy’s spokesman, Will Keyser, who has occasionally issued Kennedy family statements in the past.
