Put it all behind you – the grand jury, the special prosecutor, the sense that seamy behavior occurred in the Oval Office between President Bill and Monica Lewinsky. Abandon all these levels of outrage and debate about whether the special prosecutor is crazy (the Blind Friends of Bill view) or simply using standard procedure in pursuing presidential crime (the apoplectic blue-nosed Republican Clinton-hater view).
Flee this cheap media churning and get on to the main course, to the heart of what modern America is always about.
Are there huge dollars to be made in the marketing of Monica Lewinsky?
She wears her beret well.
She has a big, healthy smile.
She has lots of nice hair.
She has abundantly loony people around her, along with a “friend” who has betrayed her.
She could probably be all gussied up and trained to be very comely on television, where marketing dreams come true.
Can she package all of this, whatever it is, and make millions of dollars in the process?
That’s one of the things celebrity is valuable for in America, marketing. The nation has a penchant for embracing visible characters and helping them make gobs of money, no matter how questionable their behavior.
If the confessions of Dennis Rodman, one of the kinkiest basketball players ever to step into big shorts, can make money, then why not this steamy story of presidential sex, or not, depending on which side you choose to believe?
There have already been nibbles, including one from a big-dollar, media bottom-feeder. Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine says he would put $2 million on the table for those special art shots of Monica he would use to illustrate the true and sensitive story of what happened.
A Las Vegas radio station, KVBC, says it would pay $5 million for her story, and, being radio, she could keep her clothes on! But the manager says he wants a full briefing with documents before it would seal any deal.
This is what happens in America these days. If it is true that smart Wall Streeters know how to make as much money out of bad news as good news, there is a sense that the same also is true of the world of publishing and media.
Do something very good or very bad and there could well be a book contract in it.
What has evolved is a marketplace that responds to media buzz and hype. Put a book into that atmosphere and it is bound to attract at least enough of an audience to turn a profit, and maybe a handsome one.
Remember, toe-sucking campaign consultant Dick Morris made millions up front on his Clinton White House tell-all, which didn’t really tell all and didn’t sell well either.
How would a Monica marketing campaign work?
Welcome to “Kiss and Tell, What Happened in the Oval Office.”
It’s not a real book. It’s a concept to show how and why these things can happen.
Could it work? Maybe yes and maybe no.
Time is passing quickly on this story. It won’t stay juicy for very long, because nothing does.
A Very Successful New York Literary Agent speaks even as though he were at the center of everything in Washington — off the record and not for attribution.
What he says indicates this hypothetical Monica book is not an easy sell.
“There are a lot of problems,” he says.
“Two right up front, the challenge of producing the book and selling it to a publisher.”
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Producing a book?
Yes. The assumption would be that Monica Lewinsky, no matter what her story might be, simply could not write this book all by herself. A collaborator is needed; call her “Paige Turner,” renowned fictional ghostwriter and producer of other people’s books.
She doesn’t know squat about Monica or her troubles or her story. But she knows how to produce a book from not much of anything. She will structure it and write it and inject all of the drama it needs to make it feel as though it were actually revealing something.
Paige does breathless better than anyone in ghostwriting. And she is tough enough to handle anything Monica and her attorneys (always part of these deals) can deliver. Publishers love her. She is known as the queen of on-time text delivery.
This happens a lot, even to famous authors who have big names but who no longer have the skill, drive or imagination to produce an endless string of novels. Publishers bring in book doctors and collaborators to fix things up.
Assume for the purposes of pretend that Paige agrees to write Monica’s book and will be paid, say, $100,000 for the task. That is about what a ghoster or collaborator makes these days. For her money, Paige will face a lot of stress crammed into a short period of time. If her agent negotiates well, she will get a good percentage of the proceeds if the Monica book actually becomes a hit.
Voila, Monica’s book is sold to Concupiscence Press, a rich New York house that trades on sexual tell-alls. There was a bidding war. Give any good agent two bidders and the prospects for a fortune become very strong. She got $2 million.
A brief digression is necessary here.
The insider agent notes it is entirely possible that no one in the world would touch a Monica book for a couple of good reasons: a) Maybe she is just a big liar with no crediblity who got stuck in the Clinton mire; b) Maybe this is one of those things that will pass so quickly that by the time the book hits the market, there will be no interest in it; or c) There is a grand jury and special prosecutor at work here and who knows where that will lead? Publishing hates uncertainty.
Publisher Janet Regan, president of Reganbooks and host of “This Evening With Judith Regan” on Fox cable, says a Lewinsky book could be a big sell if it is truly a kiss-and-tell story about sex in the White House. She also thinks it would be great to market it as a cautionary tale, a good piece of advice for young women who are intrigued by the prospect of making it with a married man who happens to be president. It would demand a lot of detail and honesty.
“I actually think there is a way to do it tastefully and seriously,” said Regan. “There are a lot of women who think it would be great to diddle the president, but it hurts a lot of people. If she writes it in a serious way, she would have to tell the truth. If the whole thing didn’t happen and it’s all a setup, then there’s no book here.”
The whole project moves into the marketing division of Concupiscence Press.
Now the agent disappears and marketing types, also anonymous, step up.
The first rule for the Monica book: “Don’t go blabbing to the media!”
If that happens, “Kiss and Tell” and Monica are toast.
Regan agrees. No Barbara. No Katie. No nobody until the day the book comes out.
The first rule in book marketing is to keep the story under control. If it shows up in The New York Times or Washington Post, it is as though someone took a big pin and stuck it right in the bottom of the balloon. All the hot air escapes and the publisher is left with a devalued project.
Of course you want all the publicity you can get in those papers, and on the networks too, but on your own terms. It’s easy to manipulate reporters. Just give them a simple story with a compelling character at the center and they will do the rest of the work for you. A one-hour interview translates into a 3,000-word story with pictures. Even if they call the author a manipulative slut, it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Maybe 100 people will rush out to buy the book just to see what a manipulative slut has to say.
The second rule: Be careful about what you say about President Bill. Remember, people have been pouring dung all over him for six years. Somehow, the scent of roses remains so strong that his standing with the people is very high. Good character or good deodorant? It doesn’t really matter. You just don’t want to land on the wrong side of what the public thinks of him.
Assuming she stays suitably quiet, the first step is getting Monica and her book “Kiss and Tell” on Oprah, one of the marketers says. Regan disagrees. “No, not Oprah.” The best place would be with Barbara Walters, in the evening at Monica’s house.
“Small and intimate. Barbara would get her crying at home. Oprah for the daytime. Barbara for night!” says Regan.
But a simple narrative of what the author and ghostwriter say happened just won’t cut it.
One of the marketers says Monica has to be one of two things to make this effort work: a) a clear victim, or b) a repentant sinner. It would not do to just blurt out, “OK, Bill and I did the deed. Grow up. I’m allowed. I’m an adult.”
There’s no marketing edge to that.
You need to give Oprah either a victim or a repentant sinner to play with. She is golden with each of those. Regan adds a third route, the contrite-but-experienced woman who tells the story of what happens when you end up behaving badly in the wrong place.
1. The victim route would have Monica rambling the corridors of Washington power, the innocent from the West Coast now overwhelmed by the magnificence and history of the place. She’s young and she’s pretty and the sharks would smell her splashing in the water even before her Honda Civic hit Bethesda.
She becomes Bill Bait!
Meanwhile, President Bill’s enemies, purple with envy and anger for lo these six years now, notice the thrashing too. They have been trying to catch him for years, pants down or not, in any kind of compromising situation they can use against him. And so this bright young innocent becomes the vehicle for their nefarious schemes, most of which are aimed at getting people to say, “Bob Dole wouldn’t have done that!”
Bingo! A two-fer victim. Perfect.
2. The Repentant Sinner. This would involve, first, a confession to a sex addiction that ultimately would lead Monica to some publicly known 12-step program. That’s the traditional way in the marketing of celebrities to defuse questions about behavior. Take drug abuse, for example. This generally happens in the wake of an arrest: “Ooooo. I didn’t know cocaine was addictive! I’m not bad. I’m sick, but I’m getting well now.” The same can be said of shoplifting, car stealing, wife or husband beating, wild sexual behaviors, eating until you get as fat as the Goodyear blimp, generally anything that might show up in those thick manuals psychiatrists use to figure out how to send bills to health insurance companies.
One of those two themes, or maybe both, must play out on Oprah. Oprah then concludes “Kiss and Tell” has earned a spot on her book list, which means everyone in America who loves Oprah (which is everyone who watches her) becomes the target market.
Oprah is the launch.
Excerpts are sold to People magazine.
They don’t make a lot of money, but they carry the Monica story deep into the American heartland, where morning Twinkie eaters at laundromats page through her story between Benson & Hedges breaks. They are looking at her picture even as they toss sheets of softener into the dryers. Hundreds of men who still get regular haircuts at places named “Al’s” or “Flip’s Clips” see People magazine. Aging women with blue hair see People at their beauticians’.
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If the marketing people play this one right, no one will be able to avoid “Kiss and Tell.” Ever alert, the media will scour the text to look for contradictions between this true story and what their sources wanted them to believe. They will write newspaper articles and air the issue on television news magazines. Serious Lunches will be had at expense-account restaurants all over Washington.
Pompous commentators will pompously commentate about the sheer mendacity of it all and about the filthy prospects of collecting lucre from such a sordid event.
“Kiss and Tell” will build big buzz and create such a huge wave of interest that it sells 350,000 copies in the first week. It’s so strong it bumps the latest Princess Diana book, “Royal Malice: A Pimp In the Palace,” out of first place.