In the parlance of meteorologists and cliche mongerers, this would be the calm before the storm, a front expected to blow in late this spring and last well through summer.
Scott Turow, now, is almost nowhere public, with the notable exception of a recent appearance behind a lectern at Oakton Community College. One of Chicago`s most famous yet least fame-grabbing residents-a man once described by a crony of Robert Frost as ”such a harmless looking little fellow”-he is, at the moment, leading a seemingly low-key life as a partner in a major Loop law firm.
Scott Turow, three months from now, will be everywhere, when, once again, his burgeoning side gig pays off in learned analyses in major publications and in not a few lengthy interviews with the lit`ry lawyer himself, as he is so easily and so accurately cast.
Two times, once in each of the past two decades, Turow-a North Shore resident growing up and now-took publishing by surprise. The first unexpected success was ”One L,” the 1977 nonfiction account of Turow`s first year at Harvard Law School that continues to serve as a primer for law students in waiting.
The second, of course, was ”Presumed Innocent,” the 1987 potboiler about metropolitan justice that earned its author big bucks and big praise for a writing style that soared above the genre standard. Close to 5 million copies are in print, in both hard- and paperback, and the two versions spent more than a year, altogether, on the bestseller lists of Publishers Weekly.
The third time, almost sure to be a charm, will surprise only those recently returned from life among cave dwellers. Already, the drums of publicity are beginning to beat for the early June release of ”The Burden of Proof,” Turow`s heavily-bid-upon and ”much more ambitious” (in the words of his editor) follow-up to ”Presumed Innocent.” One week last month, for instance, Turow`s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, bought for the book the front-cover ad on Publishers Weekly, promising such author`s delights as a
”750,000-copy first printing” and a ”$750,000 marketing budget.”
Then, about the time all the fuss over the new book begins to die down, the movie version of its predecessor is expected out, sometime in August, prompting another round of meetings with the press. Starring Harrison Ford and directed by Alan J. Pakula (”All the President`s Men”), it seems as sure a thing as any Hollywood product.
”From everything I understand,” Turow told a rapt audience at the north suburban college, ”(Ford) has done a wonderful job” as Rusty Sabich, the married prosecutor who finds himself charged with the murder of his colleague and ex-lover, Carolyn Polhemus.
Turow recalled a conversation about the Polhemus character that he had with director Sidney Pollack, who originally had the film rights to ”Presumed Innocent.” Pollack told Turow that ” `every person, man or woman, who walks into that theater is going to have their own conception of this incredibly sensuous, intelligent, sometimes devious, sometimes desperate woman. Whoever I choose is not going to quite meet their expectations.` And, indeed, one of the interesting things they did was to choose a largely unknown actress, Greta Scacchi, to play the part.” Also in the film are Raul Julia, Brian Dennehy, Paul Winfield and Bonnie Bedelia.
Turow said he and his wife, Annette, an artist and sometime instructor at Oakton, spent time on the movie set, which used locations in Detroit and New York, and came away optimistic. He took the opportunity to tell Ford, ”I hope you enjoy being Rusty Sabich as much as I did.”
Proof positive
His comments about the forthcoming book were more circumspect, but he did say after the lecture that, in writing ”The Burden of Proof,” he was guided by the feeling that ”it would be foolish to squander the kind of success I had with `Presumed Innocent` by trying to parrot back to people their expectations of me.” In other words, he reached for something more, coming away, in a word, ”pleased.”
The book focuses on Sandy Stern, who showed up as Rusty Sabich`s defense lawyer (and which, incidentally, was the name of a student portrayed in ”One L”). Like ”Presumed Innocent,” it begins with a death, this time the suicide of Stern`s wife, and it deals also with Stern`s defense of his brother-in-law, brought before a grand jury on fraud charges. From these two events, Turow told Publishers Weekly, the novel explores the ”strange collision between the intimate, unspoken laws of the family, and our vast, formal legal mode of governing conduct.”
True facts
Scott Turow`s story may have been billed as one of overnight success, but the facts of the case are more complex, as Turow, 40, took great pains to point out in his talk. In fact, from one perspective, the lecture could be viewed as a writer reviewing his career in the lull before it enters a new phase.
”I thought,” he began, ”I would sort of answer some of the questions which followed the success of `Presumed Innocent,` which was sometimes portrayed as an instant bestseller. . . . I basically have come to tell you tonight that it ain`t so.”
The career began rather at the bottom. The presence in the audience of a former teacher of his from New Trier High School made him, he said, ”recall something that I seldom remember: that I got a flunk notice in freshman English. Whatever heart you can take from that. . .
”I moved on beyond my flunk notice and became editor of my high school newspaper,” an extracurricular activity that can be found on the early resumes of at least as many lawyers as writers. ”Having succeeded in that sort of minimal way as a journalist, I sort of felt I had discovered my vocation as a writer.”
But nonfiction was not enough. ”I perceived myself as an artiste. So my life from that point on, freshman year of college, became bound up in the question of How does one become a writer? This is still a question that I am asked.
”The answer is very short: Write. Write. Don`t hang out in bars. Don`t talk about it. Write.” Not realizing that such was the case at the time, but following some sort of ”blind instinct,” he had completed his first novel by the end of his freshman year at Amherst College.
”It wasn`t bad-wasn`t bad, if I say so myself. It was the story of two boys from the North Side of Chicago who run away from home, like Huck and Jim, and follow the Mississippi to New Orleans. There, they witness the murder of a black prostitute,” an event through which the book attempted to reach truths about racism in America.
”As I said, it`s not bad. I think back on the plot, I see a lot of possibilities.” However, ”most of the book was set in New Orleans, and I, of course, had never been to New Orleans.
”The book did not find a fast home in New York. The only encouraging event. . . was the fact that one (publisher) did not send me a form letter of rejection. That publisher was the little literary publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. There was an editor who actually took the time to write me personally rejecting the book.”
The editor praised the energy ”but suggested that it would be better off consigned to the desk drawer. I was so encouraged at that audience of one in New York City that I followed his advice and began writing something else.
Scrambled `Omelette`
”My first sort of literary success came the next year.” A short story of his, ”Omelette Arthur,” was published in a campus journal. Unfortunately, the faculty member in charge wound up publishing it as ”Omelette Charlie.”
It nonetheless drew the attention of Theodore Baird, a famous instructor at Amherst who also happened to be the best friend of Robert Frost. ”One day before Professor Baird`s Shakespeare class, he wandered back to me and sort of rocked on the balls of his feet, and said to me, in a very crusty manner, `Oh! Read your short story! It`s not bad-and you`re such a harmless lookin` little fella!`
”With that kind of encouragement, I just had to go on.” Turow managed to publish one story, in the ”widely read journal,” the Transatlantic Review, before moving on to a graduate creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.
There, ”the novel that I spent my time working on, the second novel,
`The Way Things Are,` certainly taught me a great deal about the way things are.” It was about a returned draft dodger and his entanglement in a rent strike on the North Side of Chicago.
”It seemed good to me, but, in 1974, when I finished it, the Sixties were very much over in America. . . . So `The Way Things Are` was rejected, uh, 23 times. And, indeed, the only encouraging rejection I received was from the little literary publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux-where I had moved up the totem pole this time. One of the principals in the firm, Robert Giroux, read the book, praised the energy, but he was not interested in buying `The Way Things Are.` ”
While at Stanford, Turow became bothered, too, by ”the terms of the literary life,” which seemed to him rather unfair. He has a succinct way to express this: ”While many of the people around me did not write like Ernest Hemingway, they all drank like Ernest Hemingway.”
”I watched lives begin to disintegrate, even in their mid- to late 20s,” Turow said. ”I am not and was not the most talented writer in that group. The reason I am here is that I did not drink my talent away as some of the other people who surrounded me did. . . . I began to realize, again, that a writer writes.”
The law beckons
In the midst of his musings about the writer`s life, he began to realize how drawn he had become to the law, especially in his research for ”The Way Things Are.” The fact that an implied legal covenant between landlord and tenant was a large and, to him, fascinating element in the book`s plot
”probably goes to describe the problems with `The Way Things Are.`
”My father is a doctor, and he was very much a prophet in his own time-which is to say, he despised lawyers long before it was fashionable. So I was somewhat surprised to find that most of my best friends were not writers, but for the most part lawyers.”
Off he went, in the spring of 1975, to Harvard Law School, with a will to be a lawyer and a contract to do ”a good nonfiction account of what a law student`s life was like.” Or, put another way, ”to make new friends and to write about them. And I did just that.”
”One L,” published during Turow`s third and final year there, caused a stir on campus from the start. Its very existence was broken to the proud and proper law school by the comedian Chevy Chase. Chase`s father, Turow explained, was the book`s editor, and he convinced his then wildly popular son to include mention of the book in a speech he gave there.
”When `One L` came out in the fall,” Turow said, ”it proved to be the case that people had a reaction to the book that corresponded directly to the way they were portrayed. I changed the names and combined some characters, but, of course, people immediately recognized what they had done. Those people who were well-portrayed thought that this was a discerning work, an incisive account of life at a law school. Other people had other opinions.
”I have never accounted publicly for who was who, but the heavy of `One L` was a character I named Professor Rudolph Perini. Perini was a brutal utilizer of the Socratic Method,” a method of in-class interrogation that can keep one student on the spot for an entire class period.
The now-ubiquitous Professor Arthur Miller ”immediately called a news conference and announced to the assembled press that he was Perini and he was madder than hell about it.
”Just how mad he was I did not realize until the beginning of my last semester.” A fellow student came out of an exam in Miller`s copyright course desperate to show the test to Turow. The first question, Turow said, ”read something like this: `You are an associate at a large law firm. A senior partner comes to you and introduces you to a valued client, Professor Rudolph Perini. Professor Perini has undergone the humiliating experience of having a student, Ray Ripoff, write a book about him. Under what theories can Prof. Perini sue Ray Ripoff?` ”
Turow has seen Miller since-once when both were booked on ”Good Morning, America,” and Turow prayed that it was Arthur Miller, the playwright-and ”he really was extremely gracious to me.”
Birth of a bestseller
From Harvard, Turow took a job as an assistant United States Attorney in Chicago, where he would stay for almost a decade. His most notable prosecution was of Judge Reginald Holzer, convicted of extortion as a result of the Operation Greylord investigation.
”Presumed Innocent” has been portrayed by some as a rather calculating book, but Turow describes its birth as somewhat haphazard. Working as a federal prosecutor, he began to write it, in a by now familiar story, every day on the commuter train into Chicago. He wrote away until he came to a point, sitting on the train, where he had just introduced into the story a mysterious, missing file. Realizing that not only didn`t he know who his murderer was, but also that he didn`t know what was in that file, he decided it was time to more carefully fashion the plot.
And when he described what he was working on to his agent at one point, she said, ”Well, there`s a trial in there, isn`t there?” ”Of course, I was too bashful to say no.” The trial ended up as the centerpiece of the book. The forensic details of the trial, he said, were taken from the first murder trial he sat in on as part of his work-study program with the Suffolk County, Mass., District Attorney`s office during school at Harvard. The book`s election element was drawn from that experience, too.
When ”Presumed Innocent” was finally done, this product of a lawyer who hadn`t published anything for 10 years became the subject of intense publisher interest in New York. Although the book`s eventual publisher put ”a little less money on the table” than others, he said, ”I suppose you can understand why I chose the little literary publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.” Turow said that ”in some ways my favorite moment” is still the time when he was sorting out the offers, decided to go with FSG, and received a phone call from the firm`s chief operating officer. ” `My God,` ” the man asked him, ” `Where have you been all these years?`
”You now know the answer.”
