The Wool Over Your Eyes

MICHAEL ROTHSCHILD has a button on his telephone so that he can turn off the ring when he's working. Rothschild writes fiction, in his isolated house in Strong. Maine, and if you call him while he's writing, the phone just rings and rings without getting picked up because he's got the button on and doesn't hear anything. If you're press and happen to call when Rothschild has wandered into his kitchen for coffee and momentarily turned the button off, he still isn't exactly dying to talk. The press is just another mechanical intrusion for Rothschild, who likes to be close to nature, up there in central Maine, in the lake region near the Sugarloaf Mountain.

So when the press calls, says Rothschild, he gets a little uneasy because he's not used to having a lot of questions fired at him by people he doesn't know and who seem to have no sympathy for him or any of the other characters they ask about. And he says he resents the presumption of newspapermen, to summarize what he has said in one or two paragraphs of newsprint in some daily paper. Ideas, he says, are communicated by whole conversations or whole books.

The press has been calling Rothschild lately because he performed about 20 days worth of expensive and intensive editing over the last year and a half for Doris H. Kearns, who for five years has been writing a book about President Lyndon B. Johnson Kearns's editor at Basic Books publishing house in New York. Erwin A. Glikes, never knew about Rothschild until recently , when Kearns suddenly broke off her contract with Basic--which included a $24,000 advance--and signed for a much more Jucrative advance at Simon & Schuster. He has since sued Kearns for breach-of-contract and Kearns has responded that Glikes never fulfilled his end of the bargain because, she alleges he supplied poor editorial assistance. As proof Kearns cites the fact, that she has to go to Rothschild.

There are more angles to this story. Kearns's new contract includes Richard N. Goodwin, her fiance and a former aide to Johnson. She says she's scrapping the original manuscript and writing a whole new book with Goodwin. Meanwhile, Kearns is also a nominee for tenure as a professor of Government at Harvard, by vote of that department's senior faculty last fall, based to a great extent on the strength of that disputed, 480-page manuscript. When kearns switched publishers in April, The New York Times ran a long story. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that Harvard should deny her tenure, a lot of people shook their heads in Cambridge, and the dean of the Harvard Faculty reconvened the Government Department.

One of the reasons this has been such a good story is that, like Rothschild, the main characters in the publishing scandal are very earnest and personable people--florid and loquacious reminders that the academic specimens around here who wear ties and sit behind desks, or infest libraries, or say 'No Comment' just don't make for exciting copy. Kearns is emotional and plaintive, Goodwin is garrulous and familiar, and Glikes is intense and a little self-righteous. They all call me Phil, they all love to go off-the-record and whine about the other characters in this story, no matter how minor, and they all have an axe to grind. And they're all trying to manipulate me by pretending to be utterly candid.

THE OTHER interesting telephone in this story is a squawk box in the office of B. Brooks Thomas, executive vice president at Harper & Row, which owns Basic Books. Three weeks ago Glikes and Thomas were in that office with the squawk box on so they could both be heard, explaining Basic's case against Doris to me. Both Glikes and Thomas were going on about how Doris's relationship with Basic and with Glikes had been unique, and Glikes was talking about how shocked he was at Doris's a postasy. And when I asked Glikes whether he had spoken to Kearns since the break, he sighed and--he must have been leaning back in his chair--said. "Well, I used to call her every night, just to ask her why she had done this, but Goodwin would always answer and hang up on me. But then, one morning I called, and Doris answered and said she was busy but she'd call back later. And I guess it was about a half hour later, I was in my office with a German publisher, and she called back. So I excused myself, and I got on the phone, and I said, Doris, I'm very glad and grateful that you called but I just want to say. I don't understand why you did this.' Her answer was, 'Erwin, you don't understand; there's a great deal of money involved...as much as a quarter of a million dollars.'" Glikes was speaking in a very deliberate and measured voice, and when I asked him if he was reading the whole dialogue back, he bridled. "No, no--I remember it all, line for line."

The way it ran in the papers, Glikes came off as a sap, a sweet guy who shared a few tender moments with Kearns until Goodwin swept onto the scene and left his nose out of joint. Kearns and Goodwin weren't so flattered by the newspapers' stage directions, but they both stressed Glikes's ingenuous attachment as a real wrench in the editorial works while Kearns had been with Basic.

Kearns, whose voice assumes a hurt and importunate tone, explained patiently, "You've got to understand; his feelings were so intense." Goodwin's well-used-and-gravelly Washington politics voice wasn't made for such subtlety: "He [Glikes] is trying to set himself up as a rejected suitor... He's living out his fantasy life in The New York times." Goodwin's theory in this publication scandal is that the whole thing has been cooked up against him and Doris buy a New York "literary cabal." He is defensive because he most feel somewhat responsible for Kearns's most. He says that some of the news and editorial accounts have been aimed more at him than at Doris, and be does not like the facile, tabloid image that he has gotten as the swarthy manipulator who has ruined the blonde ingenue.

GLIKES HAS been singing a different tune lately. He plays down the personal intensity of his editorial relationship with Kearns and when asked questions about it, he pauses signally, then, in a subdued and condescending voice, says, "Are you still writing that kind of stuff?" Glikes says that Kearns has launched a "vicious whispering campaign," a "desperate and dispicable attempt to justify something that cannot be justified." Moral outrage is brimming in all Glikes's statements. With an established scholarly reputation as an editor and publisher that he is not willing to hazard for one intractable writer, Glikes is looking forward to his day in court, when the facts will out. He has a utilitarian's faith in the ultimate triumph of Facts--"facts," he says, "that can be nailed to the wall,"

Glikes's contention is that Kearns's has been "badly hurt and badly used' by Goodwin, to effect contract that would assure them $130,000 more in advances. He has said that Goodwin's financial situation is "extremely dire," and the last time I spoke with him, he urged me to do more reporting, explaining, "Doris didn't need the $130,000, and that's the sad part about it--somebody else did... That's where this story can be broken wide open."

Kearns and Goodwin insist that they had only the quality of the book in mind and never expected such an outpouring of newsprint and vitriol when she switched publishers. Whenever I call Kearns, I ask, "Don't you think you made a mistake?" and she always croons. "No, I just didn't know all this would happen. I Just didn't know," Kearns, in this very sweet way, had the wool over at least one reporter's eyes for a long time. At first she would only talk about Glikes-as-a-rejected-lover off the record, and when she finally slipped, or pretended to slip, and said it on the record, in her fragile way, she knew I would print it, because she had guarded it like a terrible truth at first.

THE THING ABOUT the three heavies in this scandal is that they all have a precious scrap of integrity that they are anxious to protect with every manipulative bone in their bodies. Kearns has a tenured chair on the line. Glikes has a fine editorial reputation at stake, and Goodwin must fear his betrayal as the ogre. When you call them up, they talk a lot, to attempt to preserve that patch of integrity.