Many people know that Random House agreed to pay Edmund Morris $3 million for his forthcoming biography of Ronald Reagan, but what is not well known is that Morris had to scramble for a long time to make a living as a writer.
His biographical sketch, written in 1980 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for ”The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” observed that he had written advertising copy and mail-order catalogues. And even while writing his Roosevelt biography, money was in short supply.
”I had signed up the Roosevelt book and paid him his advance,” said John J. Geoghegan, who was the publisher of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan when it published the biography. ”But after about two years, when he had finished half of it, I learned that he was broke. When I read what he had finished, though, I was so struck by its energy and scholarship that I arranged to pay him a monthly sum so he could continue writing.”
Morris remembers Geoghegan`s kindness. ”His generosity saved a starving writer from a Salvation Army hospital,” he acknowledged recently. He added that he wrote Geoghegan a letter afterward, dated 1884 and bearing a faked signature of Theodore Roosevelt, ”thanking him for being so patient with my future biographer.”
In addition to buying the Reagan book, Random House, in a separate negotiation, also bought the second volume of Morris`s Roosevelt biography. It was able to do so because of an unusual ”editor`s clause” in Morris`s contract with his previous publisher–a clause that publishers generally resist on grounds that their investment in a book or author involves a partnership with the house, rather than with an individual editor.
After the first volume of the biography was completed, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan signed up for the second volume. But after Morris`s editor, Joseph Kanon, moved to E.P. Dutton, and Geoghegan resigned, Dutton acquired the contract to the book from Putnam`s Publishing Co., which owns Coward, McCann, as the company is now known.
”When the new contract was written at Dutton,” Kanon recalled recently, ”it had a clause built into it saying that if I should ever leave, Morris had the right to take the book elsewhere.”
Sure enough, a few weeks ago Kanon left–not to another publishing house but to a New York investment concern. In a contract separate from the multimillion-dollar deal for the Reagan biography, Random House bought the Roosevelt book for an amount said to be slightly less than $300,000.
