An Interview With Andrew Wylie

L.G.: William H. Gates [father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates].

A.W.: This is a matter of satisfying my curiosity and education. One of the benefits of the job is if I become interested in an area, I can go charging off in that area and find the person that I want to have write about that. For instance, we got involved in representing historians, really quite recently, I mean within the last five years, and we now represent a raft of historians—but that was a program, really.

L.G.: And you seem to have a lot of Washington people. [former Federal Communications Commission chairman] Reed Hundt, the Gore family, all the writing Gores, [former Treasury secretary] Larry Summers. I guess your very first client was a Washington person.

A.W.: Izzy Stone, yeah. [I.F. Stone]

L.G.: So are you going to be trying to "poach" clients—I use that word in scare quotes—from [Washington lawyer and publishing power broker] Bob Barnett?

A.W.: No. I think Barnett does a very good job, and it's a different model. What he does that we don't do is he allocates world rights to the publisher in the U.S. And I guess as a structure, it makes sense. It's not a good use of his time or of his client's money to have him micromanaging, territory by territory, the foreign rights of his clients. But I would say that not to do so leaves more flexibility in the disposition of those rights than some people would be comfortable with. For instance, I think that with David Rockefeller's memoirs, if a U.S. publisher had the world rights and had made a strong financial commitment and wanted to get the best return in, say, Italy, there might be an arrangement that would be made that would, in turn, surrender the first serial magazine rights to the Italian publisher-who might make an inappropriate sale to the wrong kind of magazine, which might publish with the wrong context, etc.

L.G.: So are you on the side of micromanaging? Is that what you do?

A.W.: We deliver micromanagement. And some people don't care about it too much, but I think it's important for most of our clients. And I think it is the area in which we deliver, I would say, a different service than Bob Barnett delivers.

L.G.: Some of your recent deals that have gotten attention-and tell me if I leave any out-include selling the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. papers to the New York Public Library, supposedly a seven-figure sale. Do you want to give the readers of Portfolio.com any guidance on that?

A.W.: Not really.

L.G.: You were said to be having a little trouble placing William H. Gates' book on philanthropy. Is that placed?

A.W.: Trouble?

L.G.: Well, that's what I read somewhere.

A.W.: We sold it in a few hours. Moments after we submitted it. Didn't feel like trouble. It's at Doubleday.

L.G.: Really? There was some suggestion that because Bill Clinton's book, Giving, did so badly-below expectations-that Gates' book didn't...

A.W.: This is Gates Senior, but no, it was a sale everyone was very happy with.

L.G.: Oh, good! When did that happen?

A.W.: Where are we? We haven't even signed the contract yet.

L.G.: And what's the status of Tess Gallagher's hope to publish pre-Gordon Lish-edited versions of her late husband Raymond Carver's short stories? [Lish edited Carver's work at Esquire magazine and at Knopf.]

A.W.: Moving along nicely.

L.G.: Is it? Now that was a case where [powerful ICM agent Amanda] Binky Urban represented that estate-and now you do.

A.W.: Yes.

L.G.: How did that come about?

A.W.: Well, I think probably this is a story that needs to come out later rather than sooner.

L.G.: Oh, come on.

A.W.: No. It's a complex story, and I think your audience would cancel their subscriptions to Portfolio if they knew the details of it-because it's what Salman Rushdie refers to as a "P2C2E," which is a "process too complicated to explain."

L.G.: So if you run into her at a restaurant over lunch, do you speak?

A.W.: Oh sure, we're friends. But we don't go to the same restaurant. I go to San Domenico she—

L.G.:—goes to Michaels.

A.W.: There you go. So, yeah, no, it's just business.

L.G.: It's not personal, as they said in The Godfather, it's business?

A.W.: Correct. It's a tricky and very specific question, the whole Carver question, but I have a pretty firm view of what's right, and I'm pretty confident that it will out.