Wish You Were Here (17 page)

When the final episode was broadcast, 12 April 1978, Douglas was famous, though as yet he did not know it. There was an identifiable moment when the penny dropped—but that’s for the next chapter.

SIX

Making It

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

L
ORD
B
YRON
on the instant acclaim for
Childe Harolde

A
ll over the West End, in restaurants where even the starters are in French, you can spot men in crumpled corduroy suits and beautifully turned-out women toadying abjectly to smug-looking media trendies. These are publishers lunching TV producers (on expenses, God forbid otherwise) in the hope that they will be persuaded to make a huge-budget, multi-part, prime-time serial based upon one of the books in the publisher’s catalogue. The so-called TV tie-ins are all over the bookshops, sometimes to bizarre effect. Some classic title, repackaged with so much foil the book looks oven-ready, as the old joke goes, and sporting the
embonpoint
of some currently hot actress, will look as if it had just sprung into being that very season. It may have been selling for a century or more. “Powerful” and “searing” are two adjectives to watch out for when some fat, magnificent but stodgy nineteenth-century novel is given the tie-in treatment. The original was probably written in serial form for a market so tragically bored and desperate that length was a virtue in itself.

But, in fact, the radio, though not nearly as huge as telly in terms of rating numbers, is in many ways much more reliable. The Radio Four listeners are particularly valuable. Demographers and market researchers at the BBC will have to forgive the simplification: Radio Four reaches the concerned and educated middle classes via unerring self-selection. Its audience is pretty well the book-buying public. Radio should never be underrated as a means of selling books just because, as Dennis Potter put it, TV is the occupying power of our culture.

When Douglas Adams’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
burst upon the airwaves in 1978, publishers took note. BBC Publishing had been given an early look at the property, as was their right, but had passed (something about which they felt immensely sick thereafter). In fairness to them, comedy and SF had always been a commercially vexed mix, and being invited to make a judgement early is not always an advantage. The world was, after all, taken by surprise. To those of us who tuned in with increasing enthusiasm every Wednesday evening, Douglas, with his wild verbal panache and wit, was clearly a wordsmith with all the instincts of a writer. It sounded so wonderful, it would surely work on the page. Pretty soon editors were beating a path to Jill Foster’s door. Dot Houghton of NEL was one of the contenders, and Nick Austin of Sphere wasn’t far behind.

It is odd to be writing a biography in which I, the author, have a small role. Other people’s lives are at least as complex as one’s own—and much more so in the case of Douglas. Just getting it down seems to do some of the subtleties a mischief. You cannot help tidying things up a little. So how should I describe myself? “Nick Webb, debonair, decisive, destined to be played in the movie by the young Clint Eastwood, swept down on the rights like a marsh harrier snatching up a vole?”

Alas, that would be a lie. The truth is that I bought the rights to
Hitchhiker’s
and then, at the end of 1978, left Pan for what I (mistakenly) thought was a grander job. I took no further part in Douglas’s astonishing publishing success.

In researching this book, I have found that a few people tend to overclaim about their relations with Douglas—maybe to be close to the glamour of fame—so perhaps it’s time to come clean and tell you that my part in the story is modest. I liked him a lot—and still do, despite becoming his biographer. We remained mates until he died, but we did not have one of those extraordinary and intense friendships in which Douglas invested so much. Instead we would meet up every so often, usually for lunch, and argue about science. Douglas’s voracious reading and piercing intelligence usually left me labouring along in his wake, but I knew enough to say from time to time, “Hmm, I dunno if that’s not bollocks, Douglas.” We always hugely enjoyed the ensuing argument.

At the time of the first broadcasting of
Hitchhiker’s,
I was the Fiction Editor at Pan Books whose staggeringly fashionable offices were above the Pan bookshop in the Fulham Road, opposite a wine bar where strangely beautiful women would lunch with each other after a heavy morning in the shops.

Pan was then owned by a consortium of three large publishers, Heinemann, Collins, and Macmillan, and this ownership helped give it access to some of the most desirable paperback rights in the market. Paperback companies were distinct from hardback companies in those days, and most of what appeared in paperback was published under a licence, usually of eight or ten years, bought from the first publisher of the work. Back in the seventies, before the era of conglomeration, there were many of these independent hardcover publishers. Only a few remain. One of the tasks of a paperback editor was to scout these houses and negotiate for the mass-market rights in books that looked as if they would have a robust second life in paperback. Because at that time paperbackers did not originate as much as the hardcover houses (something that changed markedly over the next decades), they were often patronized (“not real publishers, old boy”) while at the same time being treated as chequebooks on the hoof whose sole purpose was to underwrite some hardcover publisher’s dodgier investments.

Ralph Vernon-Hunt, Pan’s Managing Director, just like the retiring generation of BBC producers, genuinely was an ex-bomber pilot.*
 
¹⁰⁴
He was a charming man with a long, bony face, a roguish smile and a salty no-bullshit manner—very brisk and no-nonsense when it came to business. Sonny Mehta, a handsome, aristocratic Indian with good taste and intuition, was the Editorial Director. He is now President and Editor-in-Chief of Knopf, and one of the industry’s élite. Sonny is often credited with starting what became the trade paperback revolution when he launched the Paladin list and published Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch.
(Trade paperbacks are larger, more expensive and usually more literary than the mass-market variety.) Simon Master, a clever, somewhat cool man with family connections to the firm, ran the systems, and there was a legendary Sales Director, grey, streetwise and tough, called Bob Williams, who ruled a formidable bunch of representatives with steel beneath a steel gauntlet. There were many others in what was a very competent team highly regarded within the publishing parish.

If they buy a winner, editors always shrewdly maintain it was their judgement and not luck. On the other hand, if they buy a complete dog, it’s invariably because some idiot in the art department failed to package the book properly, the reps never understood it and the big chains suffered a pusillanimous courage bypass by failing to order enough copies (or, in extreme cases, any). I was lucky enough to be tipped off. My soon to be brother-in-law in darkest Norfolk had told me to listen to
Hitchhiker’s
on the radio; I was completely overwhelmed by the humour, its bleak philosophical jokes and its sheer verbal dexterity. This bloke Adams, I thought, must write a novel. In all honesty I had not the slightest inkling that the book would go as bananas as it did.

But first, through the good offices of Jill Foster, I met Douglas and John Lloyd in a pub in Argyll St., near the London Palladium. It must have been about the end of May 1978. The Argyll Arms is one of those noisy pubs, a great rectangle of a room divided into smaller bars by Victorian glass, and full of youngsters flirting urgently. Despite this, Douglas and I, being much the same height, managed to talk above the hubbub. We discussed Wittgenstein and quantum physics. Actually that’s a fib. I could bluff and report what we said in immense detail, but all I can remember is that we talked about
Hitchhiker’s
and SF in general, and that he surprised me by not having a philosophy degree. Instead, much more valuably, he possessed a philosophical turn of mind. I thought he was rather wonderful. John Lloyd was also on good form, but harder to hear in this ill-chosen venue. I do recall how the women in the pub instantly clocked him even though Douglas and I did not register on their radar at all.

The three of us got on tremendously well, and I remember thinking, as I made my slightly unsteady way home that evening, that if the offer were not too mean, we would be successful in acquiring the book.

Sonny Mehta recalls what happened:

You came in [that’s me] in your usual shambling way, saying there was this radio series you’d been listening to that you thought was really something, and that you figured we ask the writer of the scripts if he could turn it into a novel. That’s roughly what happened. You gave me some of the tapes—I remember listening to them. It was a small contract, but when we published, it just went through printing after printing.

Editors are not sovereign in most publishing houses; they have to get the blessing of the right forum in order to spend the company’s money. They do this at the editorial meeting, an institution that authors have learned to dread. Suppose, they fret, not entirely without reason, the committee gets around to my book, in which I’ve invested years of toil and anguish, after a long, fractious meeting,
and it’s time for lunch.

At the editorial meeting (nomenclature may vary), the editor makes a pitch about a book to his or her colleagues, usually with the sales director or some professional hard-nose also present. Publishing is a business to some extent concerned with managing failure (axiomatically most of what’s published does not become a bestseller), so the people around the table are pretty cynical. They’ve heard it all before, and regard its repetition as an unnatural act. You might think this is a tough test for the work of a delicate author to endure, but it’s not unreasonable. The editor can get the benefit of the pooled experience of those present, and if he or she cannot sell the book in-house, is it fair to expect the sales team to sell it to the trade?*
 
¹⁰⁵
After all, if you think the editorial meeting team sounds blasé, let me tell you its members are sweetness itself compared to the professional buyers in the big bookselling chains like W.H. Smith. These world-weary, etiolated people are so gorged on publishers’ hype that they could scarcely raise a flicker of interest if a mile-high silver starship landed on their Swindon warehouse; they rank as amongst the most jaded on Earth, possibly in the entire history of the species.

But at the Pan editorial meeting, in an airless room in the middle of the building, Sonny Mehta and the rest of my colleagues smiled at my enthusiasm. After some haggling with Jill Foster over royalties and sub-right splits,*
 
¹⁰⁶
Pan acquired the world rights for an advance against all earnings of £3,000, half payable on signature of the agreement and half on publication. Douglas and John Lloyd were the original parties to the contract, but John Lloyd’s name was later deleted—and thereby hangs a tale.

Although not a huge risk for Pan, in 1978 £3,000 was a decent sum. John Lloyd says that at the time he was badly in debt, with an overdraft.

It seemed like a fortune. Writing together was perfectly natural. We’d written lots of things together—a pilot for the BBC, a film treatment, a cartoon series for that Dutch company. We’d tried lots of things and we were very close friends, we’d shared a flat together. We got on very well as writers because we weren’t the same sort of writer, so there was very little competition; it was just a sort of cooperative thing. We laughed a lot; we had great fun.

Douglas, living in squalor with Jon Canter off the Holloway Road, was also thrilled to get an advance. He embraced the possibilities of having some spare change with childlike glee. Jon recalls Douglas nipping out to the local off-licence to buy some Coke, and coming back with an almost unmanageable crate of the stuff—because he could. He’d woken up to the realization that he could afford to buy in quantity if he wanted. Douglas, literally and figuratively, was never a single bottle purchaser again.

But when Douglas sat down to write the novel, he felt—as with his script and sketch writing—that he should do it on his own, without John Lloyd. He wrote to John suggesting that he alone write the book, and that he was sure that John would see the sense of doing things that way.

For all the complexities, John and Douglas were friends, and for many months they had been the thickness of a brick away at home and at work, so the fact that Douglas put all this in a letter was particularly hurtful to John. Why not talk, for goodness sake? It may suggest that Douglas found it a difficult subject to broach, but it is just as likely that he did it in all innocence, not anticipating that it would be a problem, but only knowing that one had to be formal about such understandings. It was, as he explained in an interview with Neil Gaiman, his project. Although he had felt it might be fun to collaborate, when he realized he could do it himself, he changed his mind. He was within his rights, but as he admits:

I should have handled it better. John Lloyd and I are incredibly good friends, but on the other hand we are incredibly good at rubbing each other up the wrong way. We have these ridiculous fights when I’m determined to have a go at him and he’s determined to have a go at me.*
 
¹⁰⁷

Douglas was taken by surprise by the vehemence of their row. But John was furious. Being fired off the book was a burning coal in his heart. He was humiliated. Years later, when both men were reconciled, it was still a subject that had to be stepped around as delicately as a sapper probing for a mine. Douglas, by then fully aware that he had been a clodhopper, rationalized that it had been good for John, for it had pushed him into telly where he became hugely successful. John, suffused with the benignity that follows the passage of decades and the extinction of a friend, says that Douglas’s need to write the book on his own was vindicated by results. Nobody else could have captured his voice or done it so well. Of course, John explains, he sulked for a while, but now he understands that Douglas did the right thing.