Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [170]
This was an offer that was hard to resist, and it was another opportunity to wear my Stetson. Rationalizing this pleasure trip by saying that I couldn’t edit the book without knowing more about the background from which the music came, we met Hemphill and the band in some godforsaken parking lot in New Jersey. Short of the moment when I had plunged into the bright lights of Madison Square Garden at a canter on a palomino while the band played “California, Here I Come” and thousands of kids twirled little blinking flashlights in the audience, nothing had struck me with such an instant rush as standing onstage behind the Poor Boys in whatever New Jersey town we were visiting.
When Hemphill suggested that we really ought to go to Nashville and see the Grand Ol’ Opry before it moved out of its home in a former church, we flew down and joined him there. I had a whirlwind insider’s tour of Nashville: Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Broadway, the Recording Barn, in which the top country singers cut their records, and the odd experience of standing on the Opry stage next to the legendary blue-grass duo Flatt and Scruggs, and Ernest Tubbs, the grand old man of country music, while a chorus sang a Goo-Goo Candy Cluster commercial and fans fired off cameras with electronic flashes in the faces of the performers.
“It sounds like a joyride,” Dick said, not without reason, when I got back, but eventually I was to end up publishing the memoirs of Tammy Wynette, Minnie Pearl, and Willie Nelson. It was just a question of going there, after all.
ALL THE same, I was all too familiar with the fact that celui qui est absent a toujours tort. I put away my Stetson for the time being and decided to stay put for a while. As it happened, fate was about to throw a celebrity of a very different kind in my path. “Celebrity publishing” was then in its infancy, and the era in which millions of dollars were spent by publishers to persuade major celebrities to put their name on an autobiography they hadn’t written or even read and then go out and promote it was yet to come. “Lazarland” (since this kind of book was his specialty) was on the cusp of overwhelming publishers with what seemed at first like an easy way of buying books, since the book itself was in most cases the least important part of the equation. What the publisher paid for was the celebrity—the central, glittering attraction who got the big money. The next most important thing was the amount of money targeted for promotion and advertising. The person who got the least money, inevitably, was the writer—in most cases nobody except the editor ever expected to have to actually read the book. No better way to lose large amounts of money quickly in book publishing has ever been invented—you could publish hundreds, perhaps thousands of unsuccessful first novels, after all, for less than it costs to produce one celebrity autobiography—or pursued more zealously. It’s not that publishers are stupid, nor even that they don’t learn by experience—it’s that people who don’t much like reading books are always more interested in buying something that doesn’t have to be read than in something like a novel that does (hence the ease with which agents sell books from a two-page outline instead of a whole manuscript).
The celebrity autobiography was well suited to the growing symbiosis between books and television. The critical question was no longer whether the book itself would be any good, but how many weeks the celebrity would tour for it and how many talk shows could be counted