See
a graphic of the path to Caroline Michel
The last time Britain’s literary establishment felt this exhilarated, engaged,
appalled or obsessed by a story was in 1995, when Julian Barnes terminated
his friendship with Martin Amis, in a terse Dear John letter in which Barnes
expressed the “hope” that his old tennis partner would be happy being
represented by a man (Andrew Wylie) whose clients included a victim of
fatwah (Salman Rushdie), another who died of Aids (Bruce Chatwin), and
another who had spent time in an asylum (a famous American novelist). On
this small point Britain’s agents, authors, editors and publicists can
agree.
On every other point, the usually sedate, dignified, slow-moving world of
books is in uproar, transfixed by one of the bitterest and most gripping
feuds to have affected the literary world. Phones are ringing off the hook,
rumours are flying about rampantly, long-held grievances are aired as knives
are sunk deep, and usually anonymously, into the backs of old rivals. “On
the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all
f***ing loathe each other,” as the editorial director of one of the
country’s largest publishing houses cheerfully confided yesterday. “I’ll
tell you everything but it’s career death if I go on record. In my view
what’s happening in publishing in the past few days is a catastrophe.
Everyone is horribly excited.”
Battle commenced on August 24, when Pat Kavanagh, a legendary figure at
Britain’s oldest and most venerable literary agency, Peters Fraser &
Dunlop, quietly resigned after negotiations for an attempted £4 million
buy-out by the firm’s agents failed. By coincidence, both PFD and Kavanagh
were at the centre of the Amis/Barnes falling-out in the 1990s, which had
been provoked by Amis when he left Pat Kavanagh, his long-standing agent and
Barnes’s wife, for Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, who had negotiated a more
handsome, £500,000, advance for his novel The Information.
Kavanagh, now in her sixties, neatly rose above that little disagreement and
remains a commanding and terrifying presence in literary circles. The
much-envied list she has built up over the years includes many prominent
names: as well as her husband she represents William Trevor, James Fenton
and Ruth Rendell.
To CSS Stellar, PFD’s parent company, Kavanagh’s resignation might have been
tolerable had it not been for two crucial factors. First, as a rule, when an
agent goes her clients go with her. Second, Kavanagh did not resign alone.
Rather, she precipitated a slew of resignations that now threatens to
destroy the firm. David Buchler – an accountant and insolvency expert,
former vice-chairman of Tottenham Hotspur football club and chairman of CSS
since August – downplays the affair and claims that only six agents have
resigned, but documents confirm that 18 agents have now given in their
notice, the most recent yesterday morning. Combined, the agents claim they
account for 75 per cent of PFD’s business.
On September 11, Caroline Dawnay, Nick Hornby’s agent, handed in her notice.
Soon after, Maureen Vincent resigned. What has not so far been publicly
revealed is that the crisis has permeated through to the firm’s other
departments: its entire actors’ department has also resigned – although not
yet literally walked out, as they are contractually bound to work out their
notice. On September 6, Keira Knightley’s agent, Lindy King, handed in her
notice. The next day, Dallas Smith, who looks after Kate Winslet, did the
same. Together, the “rebel agents” are said to be scouring London for new
premises in which to set up a rival firm around Christmas. A property in
Covent Garden looks to be ideal. Their spokesman, Anthony Cardew, confirms:
“Many of the agents have been increasingly unhappy about what has been
happening at PFD. It is their view that although PFD is very profitable, not
enough money is being reinvested in the business. When the buy-out didn’t
look like it was going to happen, the agents resigned and started thinking
of setting up on their own. Yes, they have since worked out a business plan
to set up a new agency. They have identified suitable premises but have yet
to sign the lease.”
Robert Harris is in no doubt about whether the firm’s authors will stay, or
follow the mentors who have bolstered and shaped their careers for decades:
“I’m loyal to the individuals I have worked with over many years, I trust
their judgment and integrity if they decide to set up their own agency. I
believe Tom Stoppard feels the same. My hunch would be that the great
majority of the writers would leave because they don’t have great confidence
in what would be left behind. Whoever these people are, making the decisions
at the very top – if they think they can get by without their agents, some
of the most respected names in the industry, they are hugely naive. Writing
is not a corporate thing – we are not assets.”
Clare Alexander, one of the country’s most powerful agents and former
editor-in chief of Macmillan, now works at PFD’s rival firm Gillon Aitken
Associates, who represent Sebastian Faulks, V.S. Naipaul and Pat Barker,
agrees: “PFD is nothing without its agents. If the agents leave, the
authors’ allegiance is not to the agency it is to the individual.”
So who will succeed? The largely Oxbridge-educated coterie who brought us
Flaubert’s Parrot, About a Boy and Enigma? Or the besuited,
golf-awayday-loving perusers of Accountancy Age?
It is a cliché in this context to claim that a written narration of these
events would make a bestseller. The story that is rapidly unfolding on their
doorsteps is making it difficult for those working in publishing to
concentrate on their manuscripts, so dull do they seem in comparison – and
now one of the most glamorous and polarising women in publishing has joined
the fray, buoyed by an estimated £450,000 salary and given the task of
dragging the literati screaming and kicking into the corporate world.
Elegant, independently wealthy and super-charming, Caroline Michel announced
only last Wednesday that she would be abruptly leaving her post as managing
director of the rival firm William Morris Associates in the UK to become
chief executive of CSS Stellar. David Buchler announced that Michel’s
appointment formed “part of the long-term reshaping of CSS”, while PFD’s
agents merely raised a cynical eyebrow: “I think David Buchler and Caroline
Michel have some sort of vision that I don’t share," Kavanagh
says.
The literary elite, increasingly depressed by publishing’s love affair with
the mass market, its desertion of the mid-list, the relinquishing of their
power by publishers to the booksellers, identified in this move a plan to
further “streamline” this still vaguely eccentric and mercurial industry
into a profit-driven conveyor belt in which authors and actors would be
expected to become all-singing, all-dancing “products”. A world in which
glamour models can dominate the bestseller lists with autobiographies that
they happily admit to not having written. A world in which the oversixties,
that is to say more than a handful of PFD’s leading agents, would be
considered well past their sell-by dates and where authors such as Louis de
Bernieres, who became widely read only with the publication of his fifth
book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, would, in these more marketing-orientated
days, never have retained the complete confidence of his publishers unless
by happy chance he had been discovered by Richard and Judy. The
intellectuals hate to admit it, but this is what a meritocratic,
market-driven landscape looks like. Literary agents have been known to open
their advice seminars aimed at aspiring novelists with the words: “You don’t
have to live in Hampstead to write.”
Neither CSS nor Caroline Michel were available to speak, but many of those
involved in the business say they assume that CSS, a publicly listed sports
and events company that bought PFD in 2001, was in part keen to follow the
American model in which talent agencies such as ICM and CAA pursue a hugely
aggressive recruitment and deal-making policy. Working for a publicly listed
company means effectively working for shareholders, a state of affairs with
which it seems that some of PFD’s agents, having made a fortune from the
sale of the company to CSS in 2001, have now decided they are not entirely
comfortable.
British agents and authors alike fear an environment in which agents would
spend more time managing their client’s profiles and dealing aggressively
with the media than copy editing. It has not been unknown for an American
agent to hire a private detective to stalk rival clients. To the disgust and
irritation of even those agents who are intending to stay at PFD, the parent
company has already brought in the management consultants. “If someone comes
from outside you’ve got a problem. They’re there to do something even if
nothing is wrong,” says the head of one of PFD’s big rivals. “But from where
I’m standing there’s nothing at all wrong with that company, it is hugely
profitable and is run by agents who know what they’re doing. Why are they
bringing in the consultants? That company doesn’t need juicing.”
Duncan Heath, chairman of the Independent Talent Group, whose clients
including Daniel Craig, Michael Caine and Steve Coogan and who engineered
the company’s £4 million buyout from the American giant ICM five year ago,
puts it more plainly: “The idea of streamlining the agenting business is
bullshit. It’s just incredibly ignorant. It’s a very simple business and the
key to it is the relationship between clients and agents. Agents tend to
know how to run things very well. It’s a tougher and tighter market today,
but the corporate route is wrong.”
It is not clear whether Caroline Michel was fully aware of the extent of the
defections at PFD when she agreed to leave William Morris Associates, her
employer of barely two years – or whether, as one of her allies put it last
night, Michel’s move to PFD was “like the Americans going into Baghdad”. Or
indeed whether there were other motives in her leaving the American giant:
there have been rumours preceding her CSS appointment that she had intended
to leave WM, and that it was Michel who, via her old friend Michael Sissons
(one of the few agents who have not retired from PFD), who initially
approached CSS.
Others speculate that Michel may be orchestrating some sort of merger between
CSS and William Morris: “The question is, what can she add?” one leading
leading agent says. “If you want to run a salon, then marvellous, but
Caroline isn’t an agent. Does she not have a notice period at William
Morris, and if not then why not? I’m referring to gardening leave. You can’t
just go from one job to another, so I’m wondering whether William Morris is
still involved.”
What is clear is that the Chanel-wearing publicist-turned-publisher-turned-MD
and wife of Lord Evans turned up for an introductory meeting at PFD last
week, but walked into a suspiciously empty office. Cardew says: “My feeling
for Caroline Michel is one of sympathy.”
To properly understand the psychological impact on some of the world’s most
experienced and respected agents of having Caroline Michel – a woman still
sniffily (and inaccurately) referred to behind her back by her peers in
publishing as a “glorified PR girl” with “a management-type profile” –
parachuted in over their heads, look first into her history. The daughter of
a German commodities dealer, she never went to Oxbridge but studied Sanskrit
at Edinburgh. Next she joined the publicity department of tktk, where she
displayed a natural flair for marketing: as a lowly minion, she was lumped
with a book on kitchen utensils but managed to arrange a book tour and
television coverage within 48 hours.
Envy, the inevitable byproduct of any meteorically successful woman’s career,
has accompanied Michel wherever she goes. Her less immaculately connected
rivals are said to be excessively envious of her marriage to the Labour peer
and former chairman of Faber, Lord Evans of Temple Guilting, with whom she
has three children.
Insiders at PFD report that Michel is doing what she does best: assiduously
attempting to win over the renegade agents and persuade them to change their
minds, in discreet one-on-one chats in their offices. To authors, her charm
is formidably persuasive. She famously persuaded Alan Clark to place his
diaries with the publishing house Orion in 1992 by wearing a very short
skirt to the meeting, and later clinched Helen Simpson’s short-story
collection by wearing a Voyage dress – a reference to one of Simpson’s
stories. It may initially seem odd that when an author is at the receiving
end of a hyperbolic letter from Michel that reads: “The biggest misery for
me is finishing a book by you” (as Jeanette Winterston was), they do not
react with cynical suspicion. But that is to underestimate the
susceptibility of often lonely housebound authors to the beam of flattery
from a beautiful and intelligent woman. Male writers regularly drool over
Michel. “She was tanned and smelled gloriously expensive...she did not walk
down the stairs so much as descend to earth, a deus ex machina in Dolce e
Gabbana.” Last week the popular philosopher Alain de Botton is understood to
have been reprimanded by his agent Caroline Dawnay after he publicly
compared Michel to Eve.
Will her charm work on the agents? We now know the outcome of a
conversation between Michel and the PFD agent St John Donald earlier this
week in which Michel is reported to have perched on his desk and said: “I
always knew you were very talented but I never realised you were so
good-looking.” Donald, PFD’s co-chair, resigned yesterday morning.
Had Michel not been quite so successful, rich, attractive, ambitious or
ruthless, no doubt fewer of her rivals would have been so ready to report
her sins. Former colleagues at Granta talk fondly of the time Michel sent a
memo to the the Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski in which she misspelled
his name three times (“We keep it in a drawer and look at it every time we
needed cheering up”); the time she fell out with her then close friend and
colleague Frances Coady, now editor of PicadorUSA. More recently, she
ruffled the feathers of one of literature’s grandes dames when she told her
that Eric Fellner, the film-maker, had assured Michel that she was the only
literary agent worth anything in London. The grande dame in question is one
of the country’s top ten agents. Further, she is thought to have overpaid
Jon Snow and Greg Dyke for their autobiographies, although she has defended
the mistake as a “group decision”. A typically backhanded compliment about
Michel goes like this: “She’s an absolutely lovely woman who has close
friendships with Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. Seamus Heaney is godfather
to one of her children. It’s funny how they don’t follow her.”
One other question preoccupies those following the PFD case. What, in the long
run, is going to happen to the authors? Are we on the brink of a literary
future in which Tom Stoppard presents cookery programmes and Richard Harris
appears in a new series of Rome, dressed for the part in a toga?
Nonsense, says one top agent: “How many of the authors are multi-platform
authors? It is fine if you are JK Rowling or Dan Brown or Jamie Oliver, but
most authors are just not like that. It sounds like a wonderful idea and I
think it’s inevitable if you’re in Hollywood. They’ re talking as if they’re
William Morris or CAA, but we’re in England. Try dealing with the BBC with
that attitude. It is English hubris to pretend to be American players.”
