Wish You Were Here (26 page)

I remember Douglas with great warmth. When he first came over to do promotion, we went out to lunch and we got on famously. Then I took him to a bookstore, Colosseum Books, and said: “Go ahead, buy what you want. I’ll pay.” I always found it interesting to see what authors choose, and it’s a gesture they appreciate. We once did a deal with Maurice Sendak after giving him the run of our warehouse. Anyway, Douglas was modest at first, but eventually bought about $200 worth of books. Right on top of the pile was a title on how to overcome writer’s block.

Our first edition of
Hitchhiker’s
was a neat little hardback priced at $9.95. It had an illustrated jacket of the rings of Saturn making a rude gesture, and largely on the strength of that we got floor displays from Walden Books [a large, powerful chain]. Douglas enjoyed the promotion tours, too. A lot of authors find them arduous, but he seemed to like the travel, the hotels, the pretty girls, and doing the signings. He got a kick out of reading his work and liked meeting the audience.

I’ll miss him. He was always jolly, a gust of fresh air. He was terribly prescient about Information Technology and all that stuff. He foresaw its implications years before the rest of us. Once I was on a panel with him in Cannes to discuss the impact of the CD-Rom on publishing, something about which I knew little. Douglas rehearsed some of it with me before we went on, and then he gave a dazzling performance himself. I still recall him describing how it would be possible to view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as if walking along just a few feet beneath it.

It is interesting that Bruce mentions Douglas’s love of travel, because later in his life, when he found it excruciatingly difficult to write, he would use travel as an anaesthetic. The succession of airports and endless lonely hotel rooms, with their identical lay-out, mini-bars and anxiously polythene-wrapped plastic mugs, the jet lag, the permanent hum in the ears, the homogeneous malls, his polished production of the same speech—all this could induce a kind of hypnagogic trance, like lucid dreaming. It was flight—flight from deadlines and some of the responsibilities of home.

Bruce wasn’t the only American publisher to adore the book. Back in London, Marty Asher, Editor-in-Chief of Pocket Books, also loved it. Pocket Books was a large paperback house, part of Simon & Schuster (itself then owned by Paramount, and now part of the even more unlikely media cartel, Viacom). Marty is a modestly sized man with a quick wit and engaging manner. He was in London on a mission that was the reciprocal version of Sonny’s on the other side of the Atlantic. Marty was searching the British market for goodies,*
 
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and had seen a copy of
Hitchhiker’s
in Pan’s office and scrounged one for consideration of its US potential.

It had been a wintry day. Marty had just got back to his room at the Savoy Hotel, suffused with the honourable fatigue that comes after trawling publishers all across London, and from being politely noncommittal when offered complete dogs. He decided to take a bath. The baths at the Savoy are very comfortable for they are constructed on such a heroic scale that you have to swim to reach the plughole. Also they come equipped with stainless steel art-deco accessories for holding loofahs, sponges, soap and recent British bestsellers. Marty Asher (nothing if not professional) relaxed in the hot bath, reading Douglas Adams and laughing like a drain.

This book, he thought, is a must-have. He was disappointed to learn that he had just been beaten to the post by Bruce Harris, but as Pocket was a mass-market paperback house with considerable clout, Marty was able to buy the US paperback rights from Crown. In many ways this was an ideal combination. Crown was quirky, independent and trying hard, and still small enough to have the personal touch, while Pocket was a big marketing machine with powerful distribution across the US.

Crown’s Harmony hardcover sold out, but
Hitchhiker’s
did not become the huge bestseller that it had been in the UK. The radio series had been picked up by some of the cooler stations in the American National Public Radio network, but it wasn’t until March 1981 that all the stations took it and gave it a national airing. Pocket’s promotion for the paperback was quite inventive. They pitched the book squarely at the college crowd with lots of advanced reading copies given away at university and college bookshops. Douglas was embarrassed that more was made of his connection with
Monty Python
than was really the case, but he partly had himself to blame as he had solicited spoof quotes from all the Pythons. (“A lot funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written”—Terry Jones—gives a flavour). Besides, from the publisher’s point of view,
Monty Python
was exactly the right button to press, something quintessentially English that worked commercially in America.

Pocket ran a large ad in the
Rolling Stone,
a magazine with some excellent journalism and impeccable street cred. The first 3,000 respondents who could bear to write to the Hyperspace Hitchhiking Club (c/o Pocket Books) would receive a freebie copy.

Marty recalls that when they published the paperback in August 1981, the initial impact was not huge but that the pattern of sales was very encouraging. He recalls:

It went out in the hipper independent bookshops, especially where there was a big student market. It was culty. We sold 50,000 and then reprinted, and kept on going back to press. By the time his second hardcover was published we knew we had something. The series kept on looping round on National Radio too.

I met Douglas at the ABA [the American Booksellers’ Association, a huge trade convention] in Los Angeles that year. We had a large, amusing lunch. He was wonderfully lunatic, and I was surprised at how much he loved California. He was like a kid in a gigantic toy store. He loved it even though there was another deadline imminent.

Meanwhile, back at Pan, publishing Douglas was both pleasurable and irritating. Publishers’ editors, for example, will often buy their authors lunch. It’s one of the perks in an industry that is not well paid. It is easier to establish a rapport with someone while sharing such a basic human appetite as food. From the professional point of view it also has the virtue of putting a frame around the encounter; even a really long lunch is not as dangerous as inviting an author to the office where he or she can hang about all day peering resentfully at other authors’ point-of-sale material.

But the margins in publishing are as thin as the paint on a French car, and editors do not have unlimited expenses. Inevitably the exes get scrutinized—sometimes with appalling rigour—by a clerk in the accounts department who cannot grasp why some spoilt media-trendy should be entitled to so much free lunch. So the deal, though inexplicit, with authors is that they do not trespass too much on the editor’s privileges. It’s just bad form always to order the most expensive thing on the menu and wash it down with wine that may cost a week’s wages. Dear old Douglas had no such inhibitions. It was partly that he inherited his father’s appetite for luxury. Also, though in many ways he loved fame, he could never quite believe it. Insecurity gnawed at him all the time: am I really a star? Perhaps if I act like one, and people clearly treat me like one, it will by some process of magical thinking become an unassailable truth. But, one has to concede, sometimes he was just thoughtless. His editor, Caroline Upcher, who combines emotional sensitivity*
 
¹³⁶
with an uncompromising determination never to be a corporate drone, was not amused when he ordered, not checking with her first, a bottle of champagne in a smart restaurant with breathtaking smart restaurant-type mark-ups. There is a legend, still whispered in lunching circles, that she told him he could pay for it himself.

As anybody who has worked in an office for more than a minute will appreciate, internal memoranda are more often a vehicle for politics than for information. The ease of email has only exacerbated the problem. Caroline is a fine editor, not a tactician; it is hugely to her credit that she could never be bothered with the nuances of the blind copy to the CEO; life is too short. Companies have their own style, and Pan’s idiom was racy and no-nonsense.

Here’s a memo from the Pan files that speaks of Douglas’s sometimes exasperating need for attention.

To: Sonny

cc: Jacqui [Graham]

Re: DOUGLAS ADAMS

From: Caroline

29 October 1979

Douglas is under the impression he is having dinner with you and Jacqui on Wednesday, 31 October (Halloween). He had assumed I would be there but I told him (quite truthfully) that I had a date for dinner that night but, if asked, I would be happy to be around here for a drink earlier on. I was actually intending to wait until we had tied up terms for the second book before getting him in for a drink with you, but now he has hooked onto you via Jacqui I guess it makes no difference.

BUT he is now PESTERING
me
about the fucking evening. Approximately three times on Friday and twice already today. I can’t dine with him on Wednesday and I’m sure poor Jacqui has had her fill of him for a while, but maybe I’m wrong. Do you or Jacqui want to finalize what you want to do with the fucker on Wednesday and let him know—or let me know so I can give him an answer next time he calls . . . ?

Thanks.

Underneath Caroline wrote in longhand: “Bet you ten quid he gets on to either one of us by noon today! C.”

However, coping with Douglas’s stupendous talent for restaurants was the least of any publisher’s problems with him. The shatteringly stressful vexation was getting the text out of him in the first place, for Douglas enjoyed
being
a famous writer, but he loathed the process of becoming one. That entailed writing.

The stories of his delinquency about deadlines are, sadly, all true. Famously he said he loved deadlines because he loved the sound of them whooshing by. The reality was that his dilatoriness was just not funny. It caused a deal of grief for his publishers, but for them it was just a matter of professional inconvenience and commercial pain. Poor Douglas suffered agonizing despair when he felt he just could not do it. He was known to fall to the carpet and weep.

Publishers are used to authors running late; over the years they have evolved a nicely judged scale of responses. When an author confesses to lateness, as a publisher you cannot afford to be too urbane (“Don’t worry . . . par for the course . . . get it right rather than do it now . . .”), even if you haven’t scheduled the book in question and it’s not particularly time-sensitive. Many authors are so chronically insecure that they interpret a forgiving response as indifference (“Oh no,” they think, “my publisher doesn’t appear to want it”). This may legitimize further dilatoriness on their part. No, you have to be distinctly disappointed, but not so narked that you induce a paralysing degree of anxiety in your wayward author. On the other hand, if the work in question is a major chunk of turnover, the absence of which will make a noticeable dent in the annual accounts, and the entire trade is geared up for its arrival on a particular date, your need to get the work on time acquires an unusual sincerity. Even more so if you have paid a large advance for it.

With his third book,
Life, the Universe and Everything,
Douglas had decided to change agents. Jill Foster is smart, but Douglas felt that he needed representation from a high-profile heavy. Ed Victor is such a man; with his mellifluous mid-Atlantic voice, he is one of nature’s great salesmen. He is celebrated in the media world and was once listed as the man who, with his wife, Carol, a lawyer, went to more parties in London in one season than any other human being. (Henry James is supposed to be the all-time record-holder, having attended more dinner parties in one year than there are days in the year.) For Douglas’s third and fourth books, Ed had negotiated a lorry-load of money.

Now Douglas loved serious money and all the options that it could buy, but at the same time he told his friends that he felt trapped by the huge advances that imposed a pressure all of their own. If someone is paying £5 a word, they had better be bloody well-chosen words. He found it terribly difficult to get down to any work. Being preternaturally smart, he understood what he was doing and then despised himself for being so weak-willed. His crude subterfuges for not writing were never convincing, least of all to Douglas himself.

It was with
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,
*
 
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Douglas’s fourth book (and the first not to be based on his radio scripts) that matters took a drastic turn.

Sonny Mehta recalls what happened:

There was always the problem of when the manuscripts were going to be delivered. I don’t think it was writer’s block so much as he hated doing it. I’m sure he always meant to write, it’s just that more interesting things came up. Either thinking, or going to the pub for a drink, or meeting some mate for lunch, or something like that. I can understand it entirely—I’m much like it myself when you come down to it. I did have a great deal of sympathy for him.

But I did lock him up in the hotel room—that is absolutely true. We were really up against the wire. We had the jacket done and all the rest of that kind of crap. Then, of course, I speak to Douglas. “How’s it going?” I say, and he says, “Oh, pretty well. You should have it in a couple of months.” This used to go on and on and on. Then I’d phone Ed, and Ed would say, “Listen, I think Douglas is working. He said you should have it in a couple of months.” And as I recollect, Ed finally said, “I think we ought to have a meeting about this.” So we all turned up at Upper Street, where Douglas and Jane were, and we sat down and had a long talk, and it became clear, actually, that Douglas had only written about twenty-five pages. So then I went back to the office, and I spoke to Simon [Master] and I said, “Look, you’re not going to have the manuscript.”

This was important, because we’d made a big fuss about the fact we were publishing it in hardcover*
 
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and all the rest of it—apart from the fact that we were counting on it, just in financial terms. So I had a long talk with Ed the next morning and I said, “Look, Douglas has got to finish this book, and if we just wait, we may be waiting eighteen months, two years . . .” Clearly I was enormously concerned, and I’m sure Ed was too, because there was money in it for him too. So I said, “Why don’t I put Douglas in an environment where he’s really
got
to work?” Ed said, “It’s an interesting idea.”