Wish You Were Here (25 page)

For those who favoured the music the evenings were bliss. It was a privilege to hear musicians of the calibre of Robbie McIntosh, Wix, Margo, and Gary Brooker doing their stuff in a setting of such warmth and intimacy. Sometimes Michael Bywater would show off his virtuosity at musical parody on the big piano. Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd would occasionally join in, improvising with Robbie McIntosh with the ensemble precision of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a good day. (Douglas knew Dave Gilmour through two connections: Nick Mason’s wife, an actress, who was working on a show produced by a friend of Douglas’s, and Dave’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, knew Jane.)

Hearing such musicians enjoying themselves in a friend’s front room was like being allowed to eavesdrop on something very special. The music was intimate and lyrical; the sort of music to liberate the imagination. The musicians performing in Duncan Terrace were not just a bunch of mates having fun; they were the rock aristocracy having fun. You had to pinch yourself sometimes to remember that these were the finest in the business. It was as incongruous as having some violinist bear down upon you in a Hungarian restaurant—and realizing it was Nigel Kennedy.

Dave Gilmour was famously able to return the favour. Douglas and Jane held a particularly extravagant party for Douglas’s forty-second birthday in March 1994. This had a special significance—though Douglas’s tongue was lodged firmly in his cheek on the issue—because of the cultish preoccupation with the number forty-two.

Dave Gilmour’s imaginative present to Douglas was in the form of a permit that, with suitable flourishes and calligraphy (is there a font called School Diploma?), empowered Douglas to appear in concert with the Floyd and play one guitar solo. As the Pink Floyd had a gig coming up in the giant Earl’s Court venue in the autumn, this was a gift of more than academic relevance. Douglas was thrilled beyond measure. When the time came (28 October 1994), Dave Gilmour invited him onto the stage to warm applause, and Douglas played a solo at Earl’s Court with Pink Floyd backing him artfully and atmospherically as only they can. By all accounts he had practised and practised this number until the household could scarcely bear to hear it again. On the day itself he did not participate in any of the high-spirited backstage messing about beforehand, but holed up rather anxiously in a corner, and practised again. He was good, and played the piece with great skill. He finished—not that anyone minded—just half a beat behind the band.

The following year Douglas gave an interview in which he reported that he’d heard that someone in the audience had asked: “Which one is Douglas Adams?” His companion had replied: “The old, fat, balding one.” And the first bloke said: “But
which
old, fat, balding one?”*
 
¹²⁹

At this time the Floyd had just recorded what was to be
The Division Bell,
one of their most subtle albums; as yet, however, they had not decided what to call it. Dave Gilmour was agonising over this; nothing struck the musicians as quite right. Even when you are as big as Pink Floyd, so the name of the band rather than the album is the brand, you still want an engaging title.*
 
¹³⁰
According to legend, Douglas told Dave Gilmour that he had the title, but that Dave had to write a cheque for £25,000 on the spot made out to the Save the Rhino Foundation before Douglas would tell him. After some muttering, Dave agreed. “The title’s right there in the lyrics,” said Douglas—hence
The Division Bell.

Those musical evenings in Islington, surrounded by family, friends and celebrities, gave Douglas enormous joy. He’d sit close to the musicians with an ecstatic grin, moving only to fetch someone who he felt should share the pleasure. He always felt bereft if someone he loved was missing out on something wonderful. Sue Adams tells a story of staying in the house in Santa Barbara when Douglas and Jane had driven down to Los Angeles for a Paul McCartney and Dave Gilmour concert. In high excitement, Douglas phoned her from the auditorium. “Listen to this,” he said, holding his mobile phone above his head. “Just listen.” And Sue listened to a wall of sound relayed through the tiny microphone of a mobile.

Of course, it was gratifying to Douglas’s ego that he could persuade such artists to come to Islington. He would have to have been exceptionally free from vanity (he wasn’t) not to have felt at such times like a patron of the arts, the Cosimo di Medici of Islington. But anyone who saw him could not doubt that his was the joy of genuine musical appreciation.

He felt music deep in the heart of him, and his sensitivity to it was inextricably linked with his sensitivity to the cadences of language. Music was a passion that lasted all his life.

EIGHT

Whooshing By

“Farnham
(n)

That feeling you get about four o’clock in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done.”

The Deeper Meaning of Liff

“You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing’s vile hard reading.”

S
HERIDAN
,
Clio’s Protest

W
hen
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
went straight in at number one in the charts (number one with a bullet, as they say in the music world) and stayed there, two things happened. First of all Douglas, laughing hugely at his own self-indulgence, went out and bought his short-lived Porsche 911. The second was that, unsurprisingly, Caroline Upcher and Sonny Mehta at Pan wanted a sequel, and soon agreed terms, for much, much more money, with Jill Foster and Douglas for
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
*
 
¹³¹

Meanwhile the success of
Hitchhiker’s
had attracted the attention of publishers around the world. They all keep an eye on the charts and a lot of them in major markets, especially London and New York, employ scouts whose literary noses are trained to sniff out goodies for their clients. You can be sure that the phones were humming, and dear old postie was burdened with much excited correspondence. (The fax machine was not in general use in 1979 even though it is quite old-fashioned technology.) Germany,*
 
¹³²
France, Italy, Scandinavia, Japan, Spain, Greece . . . all the major markets of the world bought translation rights, followed smartly by the smaller ones. Estonia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (as it was then), Hungary, Israel, Poland, Serbia . . . Pretty soon there was scarcely a country in the world with a local publishing industry in which Douglas didn’t appear.

A blessed by-product of all these deals was, of course, a trickle, then a stream of money. Yen, Deutschmarks, francs, drachma, zlotys and whatnot, all came sloshing through the system in Douglas’s direction—but quite slowly. (Actually the smaller markets usually have to buy in US dollars.) Those of you unfamiliar with publishing might imagine that if, say, a German publisher buys the rights to a work for 100,000 Euros, then the author fairly promptly receives 100,000 Euros, perhaps minus the agent’s fee of 10%. Not a bit of it. First of all the acquiring publisher will disburse the advance using a schedule of payment that usually divides the total into at least two stages (signature of the contract and publication). Then a sub-agent in the relevant territory will take a 10% commission for executing the deal and deploying his or her local knowledge. Sometimes tax-exemption procedures can be glacial without someone on the spot. Then the proprietor—in Douglas’s case it was Pan handling foreign rights sales—will take the agreed percentage from the sale of those rights (typically 25%). Only if the original advance has been earned out will the balance then be passed on to the author’s agent, and probably not until the next royalty accounting date of which there are two per annum. The agent will deduct the 10% or sometimes these days 15% for his or her services. Only after the money has been transmitted down this long chain (no single link of which is motivated to be very speedy) does the author receive a share. It can take many months.

You can see that Douglas would not have been overwhelmed by spondulix, and this is just as well as he would only have spent it instantly. However, he now had a significant income from foreign sales, and in March 1980 he would also have received his first, and rather awesome, royalty cheque from Pan.

Douglas, frankly, loved the money when, in the eighties, it finally started rolling in like Pacific breakers. He’d tried not having money; not unreasonably, having money had the edge. His approach was innocently simple. He divided his income into three. One third was Monopoly money for play and pleasure. One third he put aside for a pension or a time when the wellsprings of creativity might dry up. One third, destined—as he believed—for the taxman, he gave to his accountant (about whom there is a macabre story to be told in a later chapter).

Douglas’s accommodation was still pretty cheap. Jon Canter was working as a copywriter in advertising, though his heart was in screenplays and sketches, and Douglas was bringing home veritable sides of bacon, so they decided to escape from the Holloway Road. The flat there may have had a kind of romance of the bleak, but by comparison their new digs near St. Mary’s Church in leafy Highbury New Park were heaven. Those versed in the geography of London will notice that each move was taking Douglas closer to Islington, though he did not buy any property there until 1981. Jon says it was strange to come home after a hard day writing fizzy selling copy to find Douglas being interviewed by some bright-eyed journalist.

Two snapshots of their life there: the first cordless phones, about the size and weight of a brick, had just been manufactured. Douglas just had to have one, and took to wandering about the flat with it making calls, even taking it to the loo. “Blimey,” or words to that effect, said one caller, “reception is not so great on those gadgets. The interference sounds like someone having a piss from a great height.” Another detail Jon remembers was giving a dinner party when Douglas wandered in and rather commandeered it by deciding the theme for the evening would be the greatness of Ringo Starr’s drumming. Jon was not angry about his party being hijacked. “It wasn’t anarchic,” he says, “and it wasn’t intended to disrupt. It was just ingenuous to a fault . . .”

But more often than not, Douglas would eat out. The restaurant trade in London in the early eighties has a lot to be grateful for: Douglas did much to sustain it. He was wildly hospitable about taking friends out for exotic meals; sometimes, though, his mates resented it. Douglas had never intended his wealth to be seen as triumphalist and, when he was accused of a lack of sensitivity, he was mortified.*
 
¹³³

Douglas himself had little envy in his make-up and liked to see his friends succeed, and this could lead to a certain naïveté about money. He was recklessly extravagant. It did not occur to him to feel jealous of those with more (though much later, in California, he came to lose his innocence in that regard) and he could be taken by surprise by those who were jealous of him. Other writers who knew Douglas at the BBC could be a little satirical. There is a writers’ room at the BBC, in a grim office block in Langham Street just behind Broadcasting House, where the writers of topical comedy are housed in uncomfortable chairs and fed all the daily papers. Once Douglas was spotted on the pavement from the window of this retreat. Several scriptwriters yanked open the window, and one of them, believed to be a witty, short, scruffy git with a beard, yelled out: “Oi, Douglas, toss us up some dosh!”

Douglas’s love of computers, he said “gave a whole new meaning to the term disposable income.” Once he was extolling the virtues of the new Apple laptop to me, and urged me not to delay. “Nick,” he said, after a brilliant exposition about the superiority of its operating system over that of the PC, “You simply must get one immediately.” It was about £2,000. I pointed out to Douglas that he had simply forgotten what it was not to be wealthy. He went quite pink.

But he was not unaware of the apparent contradictions of having passionate views about the state of the world while not being put to the test by his privileged life in his beloved Islington—famously the home of “champagne socialism” and, at one time, Tony Blair. “Apparent” should be in quotation marks because it is hard to see why having money in the bank
ipso facto
disqualifies you from caring about the planet, especially if your opinions are supported by well-informed and rational argument. Later Douglas gave unstintingly to such causes as the Save the Rhino fund. In
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,
Douglas teases those suffering from subtle liberal guilt by inventing a prostitute who provides an intimate and specialized service: she tells wealthy people that it’s all right to be rich.

Initially, though, amid the welter of foreign rights being sold, the biggest English language market of them all, the United States, did not go for the book at all. Within five years, however, the US was to become Douglas’s biggest source of income.

The publishing industry in America is largely based in New York, though there are pockets of publishers in California and Boston. New York is an exciting city, but the problem is that it knows it. New Yorkers are convinced that they are the pivot around which the world turns; in many ways, they are right. Think of that famous cartoon by Steinberg on the front of the
New Yorker
magazine. It was captioned “The view from Fifth Avenue” and three-quarters of the image went as far as Eighth Avenue. Almost out of the frame, on the horizon it said California and Japan.

Certainly in publishing it is New York and not London where the major deals are executed, and there is a vitality and buzz about the business there that is hugely exhilarating. The native wit is wonderful, but it’s the humour of people under fire. Even buying a sandwich is combat. “We’ve got the money, we’ve got the smarts, we’ve got the style, and you’re a bunch of Brits who are, by and large, charming but useless—and not invariably charming either” is an attitude often encountered when doing business over there.

Back in 1979, publishing in New York was madly fashionable (and still is, despite having become much more corporate). At the time it was set mainly in mid-town Manhattan; all the publishers knew each other, many of them socially, quite a few had slept with each other, and a fair number had places on Long Island in the Hamptons (the right Hamptons as opposed to the wrong Hamptons), where the hierarchies of office life would continue in different form. God help us, New Yorkers use expressions like “restaurant culture” without laughing and worry about getting a table
by the pool
at the Four Seasons. In that tough city it matters if the sneakers do not quite go with the jeans. It was a hothouse full of clever people working in a debauch of self-regard. Yet for all its gloss, New York can be very parochial.

“It’s far too British . . . British humour does not travel. We cosmopolitan city slickers from Gotham City understand it, but how will it go down in Oshkosh, Wisconsin?” Such were the sentiments employed by American editors to keep their chequebooks inviolate when faced with
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In fairness, America is the dominant culture of the world and it exports its entertainment in such extraordinary volume that the industry is up there with armaments and agriculture as one of their big three foreign exchange earners. There must be kids in villages in North Wales or rural Japan who are more familiar with Los Angeles police procedural slang than they are with their own culture. Innumerable TV series and movies have made the American landscape known to us, but the reverse is not true. Why should it be when the United States manufactures a home-grown product that is so seductive that it sells all over the planet?

Douglas was beside himself. He so wanted to be a success in the USA.

“Bloody, bloody publishers,” he would snarl, “they always say that stuff is too British. They said that about
Monty Python.
The sophisticated media people say it. They all bloody say it. The only people who don’t say it are the audience. You know, the readers, the actual public. I’ve met some of my American fans, lots of them, and they get it. They are very much like my British ones.” You had to tease him to nudge him out of his Tourette-ish riff. And, of course, eventually the rights were sold.

Sonny Mehta remembers the process:

I was on a trip to New York [the winter of 1979], right after we’d published
Hitchhiker’s
and it was number one in the charts. I was actually rather hooked on Workman Publishing in those days. They only did non-fiction of a very specific sort. They were a small, very focused publishing house, and I just loved the type of things they did and the energy with which they did them. Then Bruce [Harris, of Crown], who was a friend, happened to come by and take me out to lunch or something. I said I had this extremely odd novel . . . It’s not exactly science fiction; it’s very eccentric. So he said: “Let me see it,” and I said, “Well, actually another publisher has it.” I kept waiting but [name deleted to save embarrassment] has had it for a week or ten days, and hasn’t come back to me. So Bruce said: “I’ll send someone to pick it up.” And the very next morning the phone rings at about 7:30 and I’d been getting wasted the night before. It’s Bruce Harris. I said: “Bruce, do you know what time it is?” And he said: “Now listen, I just want to tell you that last night I read that manuscript you gave me, and I really want to do it.” And I said: “You call me at 7:30 to buy a manuscript?—forget it.”*
 
¹³⁴
Bruce must have thought it was a negotiating ploy, because he rang five times.

Anyway, they did see it immediately, and actually Bruce was the other person I wanted to read it, so he bought it straightaway.

Bruce Harris is an affable, civilized editor of the old school. Now the Publisher at Workman, he was then the Publisher at Harmony Books and Marketing Director of Crown, a feisty independent house, with the memorable address of 1 Park Avenue. Crown has long since been absorbed by a pseudopod from one of the industry’s giant cartels. Bruce says that when he read
Hitchhiker’s
he laughed out loud. (You should appreciate that it takes a lot to produce this response in a publisher for whom the joys of reading have often been crushed by routine.) It was, he says, the proverbial light bulb going off in his head . . .

And the fact that I could pick up two books for a sensible advance of only $15,000 in total, when smarter publishers than I had passed, was helpful. I had to clear it with my boss, for Crown did not publish much fiction. We always tried to do good stuff, and Douglas Adams proved to be helpful for the imprint.