Scoundrel stars

I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t. When many of the Watergate defendants, some convicted criminals, got lucrative book contracts and became media stars, I wondered. Why weren’t they committing suicide or running off to New Zealand and changing their names? Since when was scandal a credential for fame and fortune? I’m reminded of this phenomenon reading two newspaper stories today. A columnist in The Miami Herald reports that “Jayson Blair, the plagiarizing, fabricate-as-you-go former New York Times reporter, was invited to speak to journalism students at Washington and Lee University, on, of all things, ethics.” Blair’s talk was about losing his ethical way, but it seems to me that a fine university like Washington and Lee might have found a more virtuous lecturer on journalistic ethics than one whose claim to fame — or infamy — is having ignored those very ethical standards about which he was recruited to lecture.

The other story, in The New York Times, is the brilliant Michiko Kakutani’s review of Sarah Palin’s about-to-be published political memoir, Going Rogue, for which she reportedly received a $5 million advance and which already has engendered breathless media attention. Palin has many fans, no doubt, but her book was written “with an assist” from Lynn Vincent, an evangelical magazine writer. Few of her readers, and no doubt her publisher, who paid so well for her book, expect that Palin is an author worthy of a huge advance. She is a celebrity, and one whose intellectual talents have been mocked widely. But notoriety sells books, her experience reminds us.

As one who writes books (11 so far) and has negotiated sales of many books by serious writers, it irks me to have to beg for modest advances for talented authors with interesting and often important things to say. Monica Lewinsky received a larger advance for her book about the Clinton scandal she participated in than did professional authors who wrote serious analyses of the same subject. Sour grapes, some would say. But I deplore the value system that underwrites this phenomenon. After all, it is the world of “literature” under discussion, a world that has been eclipsed by the public interest in entertainment, and often scandalous entertainment at that.