What you just heard if you were listening to business news is the sound of the other shoe dropping.
Loudly. Abruptly.
Judith Regan, the Regan Books publisher behind the widely reviled — and ultimately withdrawn — now-it-can-be-told theoretical story of how O.J. Simpson WOULD have killed his wife IF he had ACTUALLY killed her, has been fired by HarperCollins, part of Rupert Murdoch’s company.
So it is time to write a business obituary…but will Regan rise again?
Perhaps. Her story is the classic one of someone on the cutting-edge of controversy who overreached, was staunchly and wearily defended by her corporate associates (that usually happens the first or perhaps second time) and then suddenly invited to spend more time with her family or move on to other challenges when it seemed as if it could be controversy deja vu all over again.
Just think about it. Within the space of a month, the books printed and pre-sold by (or, rather ghost-written for) O.J. Simpson (during a break in his relentless hunt to find his wife’s real killers on the best golf courses in America) was withdrawn after a firestorm almost as great as what ignited when Michael Richards (without a ghost writer) opened his mouth and emitted racist words that didn’t seem the kind of thing Kramer (or a nonbigoted person) would say.
And then there was the Fox TV spectacular, a quintessential “synergistic” event where O.J. would be peppered with tough questions by a detached reporter — Regan — during a break from his tireless search for the real murderers (see photo above). The outcry caused Murdoch to nix it even though it was in the can.
And now Regan has been canned.
What happened? Here’s one of the news stories:
Extra! Extra! The press release arrived with a headline worthy of Rupert Murdoch: HARPERCOLLINS TERMINATES JUDITH REGAN. So ended, at least for now, one of the book world’s most profitable and provocative careers.
So what does that tell you about Regan? She belonged to that canny media species that realizes the number one goal is to attract numbers (TV ratings, readership) — and that it’s almost irrelevant how BIG the controversy is but controversy, dramatic proclamations and conflict sell. MORE:
Regan, O.J. Simpson’s would-be publisher, has been fired, her sensational tenure at the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins finished off with the tersest of announcements.
“Judith Regan’s employment with HarperCollins has been terminated effective immediately,” HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman said in a statement late Friday. “The REGAN publishing program and staff will continue as part of the HarperCollins General Books Group.”
That’s about as brittle a corporate parting-of-ways statement as has been issued.
Even Adam had a bigger fig leaf than that…
Friedman offered the AP no details, it was basically just: “Don’t let the door hit ya, where the good Lord split ya…”
The AP further notes what’s obvious to anyone who hasn’t been orbiting the earth in a space station. Friedman’s statement came weeks after Simpson’s “If I Did It” book and Fox interview had been scrapped by Murdoch after being greeted by a festival of national indignation, repulsion and revulsion.
And that was a telling moment. Because Regan attained prominence by not underestimating the American public’s seemingly insatiable thirst for books soaked in confrontational rhetoric, promoting polarized and demonization politics and varying degrees of cutting-edged sensationalism from varying part of the country’s news and entertainment cultures.
She rose during a time when Americans in publishing, comedy, political rhetoric and other areas pushed the envelope and pushed the envelope and pushed it some more — until the envelope started to tumble off the counter.
She symbolized the revival of a kind of publishing that had always been around in American history but not quite as popular on a national scale. It was a kind of publishing that sought sensationalistic or polarizing topics to market. Notoriety = $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
But Regan surprisngly ran up against what many Americans began to feel the country did not have: actual LIMITS. The country did indeed have a sense of what was tasteful and seemly — and what was NOT.
You can tell how unfriendly Regan and HarperCollins parting was from the news story, which notes that not only didn’t HarperCollins return phone calls and email messages but Regan’s publicist and lawyer didn’t return calls in time for the story’s deadline. Still, many news stories contain all the expected formula stuff.
They note how she was an innovative publisher (you always look for quotes to counterbalance the other side). And they contain details about how the 53-year-old Regan once worked for the National Enquirer as a reporter. Yet, what’s the big deal about that — since starting in the 1980s the mainstream press has largely been emulating the Enquirer and other tabloids in the kind of stories they report, how they report them, and some of the confirmation standards some publications have used.
And, as in any obituary, it lists her career accomplishments: big selling books by bigwigs such as Howard Stern, Drew Barrymore and Rush Limbaugh. Info about her penchant for self-promotion — turning herself into as much of a story a story as her books.
In addition, the news stories note that ReganBooks’ long list of titles included “racy smashes, among them Jose Canseco’s “Juiced” and Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” —. But she also was instrumental in launching critically acclaimed books by Jess Walter, Wally Lamb and Douglas Coupland.
So she was fired due to the OJ book and TV show which probably cost Murdoch a bundle?
Not necessarily. WE BET it was really this:
Two men who wrote about Mickey Mantle have come out against plans for a fictional novel about the New York Yankees hall-of-famer.
Mickey Herskowitz and Phil Pepe — who both wrote biographies on Mantle — say author Peter Golenbock portrays Mantle in a negative light in his new fictional novel, the New York Daily News reported.
“Mickey wasn’t a choir boy, but this is a terrible insult to his family to have to read something like this,” Pepe said of Golenbock’s “7: The Mickey Mantle Novel.”
“And (author Peter) Golenbock is saying it’s fiction? Why?” said the author of “My Favorite Summer 1956.”
In his novel, due out in March, Golenbock portrays Mantle as a foul-mouthed womanizer, who even had a sexual relationship with film star Marilyn Monroe.
Can you guess which publisher planned to put out this book? MORE:
“Sometimes we pay a high price for free speech,” Mantle family spokesman Marty Appel said yesterday, a day after learning that Golenbock has written an “inventive memoir” about Mantle, who died in 1995.
In the book, titled 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, “Mantle” writes explicitly about having sex with Marilyn Monroe — then married to teammate Joe DiMaggio — and how he and Billy Martin persuaded two sisters to undress each other in a hotel room while the two players watched.
“If the lawyers are correct, it means you can say anything you want to say about someone who is deceased, especially if you call it a novel,” Appel said from his New York office.
The book is due out in March.
Appel said the Mantle family has not decided whether to consult with a lawyer.
The New York Times has this:
The burst of attention for “7� rests in what it says about Mantle and the predictable feeling of shock from his adoring public. But also noteworthy is its publisher, Regan Books, which acquired, and last month embarrassingly canceled, O. J. Simpson’s questionable book of murderous hypotheticals, “If I Did It.� Maybe it was nonfiction, maybe it wasn’t, but Judith Regan, who runs her eponymous imprint for Harper Collins, called it a confession.
In a statement released by Regan Books, Regan defended the “use of fiction to get at the deeper truths of a historical figure’s life,� and noted that Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo used public figures as fictional characters.
About “7,� she said: “It is frank, unflinching, warts-and-all, and there is nothing shameful or ‘sacrilegious’ about it.�
Golenbock declined to be interviewed by telephone or by e-mail.
The viability of Golenbock’s approach will soon be tested in a way he has never experienced in his autobiographical collaborations with Sparky Lyle (“The Bronx Zoo�), Graig Nettles (“Balls�) and Johnny Damon (“Idiot�), his biography of Billy Martin, and his numerous sports oral histories.
Brian Nielsen, an owner of Augur’s Bookstore, five doors away from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., said he probably would not stock the book.
“Everybody knew he used to party and they just don’t talk about it,â€? Nielsen said of Mantle. “It’s not like he took steroids.”
You can just imagine someone in Murdoch’s office (perhaps Rupert himself) getting wind of this book and saying: “Oh, no, not again. We have to defend her and our company’s choices all over again?!!”
Several years ago a talent agent from Texas explained to this writer why he refused to book some popular acts into fairs.
“Joe, I won’t book them because they have a high P.I.A. Factor. They’re a Pain In The A–.”
So was it the OJ book? The fat contract with him? The recalled books? Was it the Fox TV special that was canceled? Most likely those were all part of it.
But, in the end, Regan probably was on the verge of pushing the envelope too far again and her corporate boss had enough of having to defend her and explain what her choice of projects said about his company’s values.
Her firing may not be due to OJ.
It may be due to to P.I.A.
UPDATE: An L.A. Times story suggests it was indeed a case of the corporation feeling overdosed on Judith Regan:
For weeks, publisher Judith Regan had been in trouble with higher-ups over the debacle of the canceled O.J. Simpson book and TV deal. But her firing swiftly followed a Friday afternoon phone call from her Los Angeles office to a HarperCollins attorney that included comments that were characterized as offensive, two highly placed corporate sources said Saturday.
The comments, the precise nature of which was not disclosed, came just before News Corp., the parent company of HarperCollins, held its annual holiday party, an expensive hotel bash in Manhattan attended by more than 4,000 people. Regan’s company, Los Angeles-based ReganMedia, is a unit of HarperCollins.
Futher down:
Senior executives at News Corp. said Saturday that although Regan was let go not because of the controversy over either the O.J. Simpson project or another contentious book, a forthcoming fictional “reimagining” of Mickey Mantle’s life that had drawn advance criticism for its salacious content, both incidents contributed to her downfall at the company.
“It was an accumulation of her behavior,” said one of those executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the legal sensitivity of the issue.
And Regan is in talks:
One well-placed publishing industry source said there were reports that Regan had begun preliminary talks with several TV networks for a possible job.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.