I loved working at Multimedia Product Development, Inc., with Jane Jordan Browne all throughout college, at least partly because it was in the storied Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, just across from the Art Institute. The location meant I could wander that museum’s halls and get acquainted with its many famous holdings by Munch, Van Gogh, Dal
í
, Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte, Paschke, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Tanguy—it was like the
Love Boat
of the art world—all the while feeling like Angie Dickinson if I spied a hot boy eyeing me up.
The Fine Arts Building was and is a gem, more so then because it still had a gaggle of employees who had been with it for decades, including head elevator operator Tommy, a white-haired Irishman who never let anything escape his notice. Tommy was so efficient it at times felt like he could make the manually operated elevator go faster just because he was the one in charge of it. If Tommy wasn’t around, there was also a Boris Karloff stand-in who manned the rickety box wordlessly, except for when a pretty girl entered and exited leaving only men on board, after which he would declare approvingly, in a thick, Eastern European accent, “Fresh.” One time, a greatly pregnant woman having shared the tiny car with me, he turned to me and said, “Not fresh.” His eyebrows looked like they held countless secrets, as well as particles that may have come from before The Great Fire.
Then there was the secretary to building management who we called Myrtle. She worked down the hall from us. She was always decked out in 1940s finery—it was the late 1980s—down to hand gloves and smart pocketbooks, but she was not dressing retro intentionally. Every month, like antique-grandfather clock work, she would gather our rent, rendered by Jane in long checks written out by hand from an ancient ledger, then exit in her pumps, looking ready to dance the Lindy on the cracked marble floors.
The pissoir looked like it could have been imported from a ruined Greek temple. I don’t think management was aware of the many little holes connecting the stalls. Considering the walls between were marble as well, those holes had to have been worn through after years of patient chipping,
Shawshank
-style. I envisioned the hungry expressions on the elderly queens’ faces the moment they broke through and could see into the adjoining toilet. None were big enough to do anything other than spy—they were vainglory-holes—but there were countless lewd messages scrawled around them promising a “grand” time to any “gentlemen with noteworthy endowments.”
It
was
, after all, the “Fine Arts” Building, so the graffiti had class.
Even the surrounding area was filled with characters. A malt shop downstairs was manned by three aging sisters who apparently took turns dipping their hair in India ink to save money on hair dye and shared a single, fire-engine-red tube of lipstick, making them appear to be triplets. Their matching uniforms didn’t help distinguish them from each other. They made the best fucking shakes I’ve ever tasted, but if you wanted one, and you did, you had to listen to them spout their belief that the San Francisco earthquake was due to that city’s many sins, among many other kernels of wisdom. I was less principled then, so began the not so grueling process of gaining back 20 of the pounds I’d shed in late high school, biting my tongue even as I suckled the straw.
A literary agency run by a woman, Multimedia was actually the first and only company to which I’d applied for a position from the jobs folder in the library. I’d sailed through my interview, which I had within days of watching Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl
. I did not have a bod for sin, but I had a bod for moving heavy boxes of manuscripts (it was multi-media, yet nothing we did was
digital
during my years there) and knew how to use a typewriter, so that helped me immeasurably. I was called in for a 10 a.m. appointment and met with Jane, who’d placed herself into her royal blue suit (not a power suit, a luncheon suit) and her assistant Sandra, clothed in her pink sweats and dripping with daunting competence and the kind of big-sister dominance that would pay me back for unfairly hating my real-life kid sister in my early teens. They’d grilled me on my ambition of being a writer, asked about my taste in movies (despite being a Republican lady, Jane was in love with Ken Russell flicks, which would invariably play downstairs in the building’s venerable movie theater), and most importantly, Jane needed to know:
“Do you pay attention to detail?”
“Yes,” I assured her, blissfully unaware that I did
not
, at least not on the level she required and Sandra enforced.
They’d made up their mind that they wanted a boy this time, so I was hired by 11:15 a.m.
My spotty attention to detail would lead to embarrassing run-ins, like when I attempted to mail a business letter to an address in “BH CA,” as shown on the Rolodex.
“It stands for Beverly Hills,” Jane told me, incredulous that I didn’t realize this. She was a proud Angeleno who had come to Chicago to marry a charmingly stuffy lawyer late in their lives, so any disrespect shown to California would not be tolerated. Sandra and I could boldly inform her that Dan Quayle was clearly a nincompoop clearly even dumber than some of the pea-brained book editors she had to pitch on a daily basis, but we could never cast aspersions on Reagan Country. Of the ill-equipped Quayle, who Sandra and I could not fathom was about to be a bullet (fingers crossed) away from the presidency, Jane merely chirped, “On-the-job training.”
No issue is all that big of a deal when you’re rich. Except taxes.
In my dorm room, I put up a newspaper photo of an O-mouthed Quayle in mid-sentence and mounted it next to an erect pornstar’s body from a magazine, stuck through with a pin. Any time Quayle got on my nerves, I could just pivot the pornstar into Danny’s mouth. On-the-job training.
The office was tiny and cramped. As you’d walk in, there was an entire, floor-to-ceiling book shelf groaning with manuscripts and finished copies of books Jane had agented, which surely numbered in the hundreds even by then. Jane was proud to have brokered deals for famous books, such as Helen Hooven Santmeyer’s epic
…And Ladies of the Club
, published when the author was in her eighties.
I wasn’t thrilled that my early work was given to filing onion-paper carbon copies, hundreds of them at a time. I eventually got bored and my cuticles got bored of being sheared off from sliding the pages into Jane’s overstuffed files, so I would occasionally just grab a whole stack and bury them wherever they fit in the cabinet or even toss them in the garbage. If Jane had ever known about this, she would have fired me on the spot. I actually want to fire me on the spot right now thinking back, especially because as I proved myself to Jane as a good reader of potential manuscripts to represent and a solid editor, I came to rely on the sanctity of the very files I had secretly fucked up.
Jane’s files were crazier and more mixed up than Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s, but they were not without humor; we had a “Cat” file (which had “scratches” with “blood”-stained edges that we effected with twisted paper clips and red Sharpies) into which we would insert duplicates of Jane’s bitchiest correspondence, which included countless absurd demands from nobody authors who thought their barely worthwhile output deserved to be on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, and also Jane’s patented letters to publishers in which she was chasing late payments.
One guy, who had written us the most asinine query letter and had gotten a much-deserved snotty reply from me, wrote me a two-page diatribe in which he kept bringing up Jeffrey Dahmer and managed to slam the Kennedys. He later became a Fox News producer.
Jane didn’t call annoying women “catty,” she used the term “beady.” Her young employees were all fascinated by Jane’s lingo, but no word captured our imaginations quite like “beady.” As near as we could tell, if a woman—it was exclusively reserved for women—were beady, she would be exhibiting behavior that was a cross between petty, small-minded, pushy, and bitchy. Ladies who called to remind Jane that she hadn’t paid her club dues were beady. Writers of historical bodice-rippers who objected to having anachronisms pointed out to them were beady. Women who took all of Jane’s advice and then fired her by phone after receiving an offer to go with a bigger agent on their next book were the beadiest of them all. When discussing whether an “
alltooawful”
dealing we’d had with a new client or old editor or inquiring member of the media was something we should worry about, sometimes an entire conversation could be shortened with a diagnosis that explained everything.
“She’s beady,” Jane would declare before going back to reading a manuscript about how to create a garden that would attract nothing but hummingbirds. Case closed.
Then there was the “Deaf” file.
One thing that made working with Jane a challenge was that she was almost completely deaf. She knew it, we knew it, and the existence of the file—filled with Xeroxed literature on cures and ways to cope with hearing loss—proved it. But it was rarely openly acknowledged. Instead, Jane would just make a show of adjusting her hearing aid and chastise us for not speaking in the correct
tone
that she could hear. It wasn’t about yelling, it was about speaking in a lower register. Sandra never mastered it, so the office often sounded like a spirited episode of
All in the Family
. Sandra later became a union lawyer, so all that experience yelling was no doubt put to good use.
In spite of Jane’s flaws, she was also a mentor for me. She demonstrated the importance of hard work (granted, she’d been able to launch her business thanks to a family mini-fortune), of fairness as she fought for her authors’ rights, and also of creativity. She was a cultured lady with strong ties to the Lyric Opera, and yet she had no snobbery when it came to what she would represent. She handled the movie-book deals for some Spielberg classics, biographers of questionable character, lesbian sports authors, unfuckable writers of torrid romance novels, assholes who churned out hard-boiled thrillers, and also a great many truly talented, kind, industrious writers both new and experienced...anyone Jane thought she could sell, she would take on. That said, I could have lived without her taking on
How to Prevent Your Child from Becoming a Homosexual: What Parents Should Know About Sexual Deviance
.
As one of the only established literary agencies not in L.A. or Manhattan, Jane was a magnet for queries, many of them breathtakingly off-kilter. The “Ultimate Classic Queries” file we kept close to us at all times.
That file had some real winners, such as the Texan lady who described herself as “only slightly (okay, very) demented…slim and trim, somewhat haggard (until I can afford a facelift)” who sent us a Sears portrait of herself as part of a pitch for a book on how to catch a man, which included tips like hanging out at garages and crashing father/daughter pool parties. It was called
Obsession…as a Hobby
(narrowly rejected as a title for this volume).
Then there was the one about a straight boxer who is kidnapped and given a sex-change operation, but honestly, that sounds pretty pedestrian today, like something you could see on Hallmark Channel. There was a guy who wanted to do a novel about a “a brilliant but unbalanced (for reasons I shall develop later in the story) woman, a lesbian and a radical women’s libber” who ran an all-female money-management firm as well as an all-female agency devoted to sabotaging male enterprises. Then there was the pornographer who pitched us
Heavy Duty Honeys
, and whose parody
The Fountainheadache
would have sold tens of copies.
The best one was a good friend of Jane’s, a charming, gone-to-pot, silver-haired gentleman she’d gotten to know as a neighbor in Lake Geneva. Jane and her husband Bill visited the enclave to get away to his familial home, a retreat of such luxury and history it was eventually given to the state of Wisconsin as a house museum. You’d think handing a state a multi-million-dollar manse would be a snap, but the neighbors waged legal and political battles for
years
trying to keep it from happening because they hated to think of the riff-raff who would be driving through their precious neighborhood.
“I don’t know why they mind,” Jane told me, exasperated and beaten down after the struggle. “They’re all nouveau-riche anyway.”
That thing had a dollhouse inside that I could have lived in, so I sure wish they’d given it to me instead of Wisconsin. What did Wisconsin ever do for anybody?
Anyway, the silver-haired man was a bosom buddy of Jane’s, and pressed into her hands a manuscript representing a novel he was working on. We read it before Jane and then had to try to explain to her why there was no way in hell she could take it on. The truth is, it was unapologetically male chauvinist bilge, which was uncomfortable since her friend was a closeted gay man who always had 20-year-old Jockey models trotting around with him up by the lake, so a woman-hating novel felt a little on the nose. Jane demanded to know exactly why we thought it was so embarrassingly bad, so we read out loud to her a passage wherein the female protagonist suffers the worst humiliation of her life, driving her to suicide: She overhears it at a bar when her boss, with whom she’s having an affair, brags to his friends that
she licks his asshole
.
Jane couldn’t stop laughing, but we still took him on and did our best to make the book more John Grisham and less Amanda McKittrick Ros meets Xaviera Hollander. It was never sold.