Burt Levy built a career on the knowledge that a successful test drive depends upon a product the customer can’t resist. He has extended this philosophy from early stints as a car salesman and maker of leather vests to other areas of his life: racing vintage autos, managing a packaging and labeling firm and, most recently, promoting his first novel, an auto epic called “The Last Open Road.”
“You can’t have a product without PR,” Levy, 52, is fond of saying. He whipped up interest in his novel by pressing the flesh at the raceways where he competed as a driver. Before St. Martin’s Press accepted the novel and released it this spring, Levy had sold $150,000 worth of the self-published version, one customer at a time.
“I’d be out there at a racetrack corn-beefing (chewing the fat) with a guy, and I’d just say, `Read a few pages. Give it a test drive,’ ” Levy said during an interview at his Oak Park office.
These days Levy rides in the PR passenger seat, anxiously monitoring St. Martin’s efforts to promote his novel to a wider audience with a marketing campaign that could never be as fervent as Levy’s own. Relinquishing control both relieved him of responsibility and made him a little uneasy.
Not long ago, he admitted to being “sad” when he learned that St. Martin’s printed only 6,000 copies of his novel, a figure the editors initially kept from him. (A typical first press run from a large publishing house rarely dips below 15,000 copies.)
But Levy didn’t indulge his disappointment. “There’s a saying in vintage racing,” he said. “You have to go as fast as you can, no matter how slow that is.
“It’s chancy to have an unknown author with a screwy subject,” he acknowledged.
Levy’s good-natured pragmatism and natural salesmanship were some of the qualities that convinced St. Martin’s to take a risk on the novel.
“No book is worth it in itself,” said senior editor Michael Denneny, who championed the novel. “Burt’s smart; if he has a criticism or is trying to push us, he’s been a salesman long enough to know that having a tantrum on the phone is not the way to get something done.”
Levy developed his car smarts and business savvy simultaneously, though the process took years. Breaking into the brusque world of publishing with a niche-market novel wasn’t the first time Levy had been a pioneer of sorts. Growing up in Winnetka, he had an anomalous penchant for hot rods. Even as a teenager, Levy says, he wanted to do two things: race and write. Unfortunately, nobody in his family was particularly mechanical or literary. The closest he had to a role model was his Uncle Howard, who was well-read and drove a Porsche that Levy got to ride in at funerals.
Inspired, Levy began to scavenge car parts and haul them home. “I’d go out to the garage and sit around an engine like a kid around a campfire,” he said. “I started reading Road and Track and I bought a go-cart.”
After two attempts at college (he left Michigan State University and Columbia College after accruing 280 credit hours but no degree), he drifted to Colorado, where he worked as a dishwasher and wrote a futuristic novel that “stunk.” Then he headed out to California where he took a job at a leather vest factory in Oakland. “It was the ’60s,” the balding Levy said. “I had hair and it was long.”
Accelerate a few years to 1974, with Levy settled back in the Chicago area, newly married to Carol, an actress, and the owner of a Triumph TR3 with “Just Married” announced on the back in stick-on letters. A hybrid of other Triumph TR3s, the car contained several salvaged parts from Levy’s first racecar, named My Pound of Flesh.
“As a mechanic, I was like Dr. Frankenstein,” Levy said, “taking pieces from all different cars to try and make my car go faster.”
The method backfired, and the monster turned on Levy. At the first race after his marriage, he was out on the track fighting for the lead when the car’s throttle linkage fell apart.
“Some idiot — me — forgot to put a cotter pin in. When I came out of the pit, I was a couple of laps behind, but I took off anyway, like a scalded cat, and I rolled the car after everyone else was done racing.”
More lessons in hubris and humility followed, including the failure of Mellow Motors, the Chicago auto repair shop opened by Levy and his wife. Several years later, when he was a salesman for Chicago’s Loeber Motors, a Rolls-Royce convertible was stolen from him at gunpoint during a test drive. But none of these harrowing experiences — not even a raucous stint as a stunt car driver for the 1980 film “The Blues Brothers” — would quite prepare Levy for the brusque, high-speed world of New York publishing.
In 1994, after seven years of writing (in addition to his day job and frequent freelancing for several car magazines), Levy finished his novel manuscript. “The Last Open Road,” a nostalgic tour of racing in the 1950s, revolves around a young Italian mechanic in New Jersey who is mesmerized both by the engine of an XK120 Jaguar and by Julie Finzio, his boss’ voluptuous niece.
Levy set the novel in the ’50s for several reasons: People still raced cars on open roads, and the racecars didn’t all look the same, as today’s do. In short, Levy yearned to return to a Norman Rockwell kind of time, when the “TV news didn’t bring misery into the world every night.”
Yet Levy claims not to have overly romanticized the time period, pointing to an African-American character in the novel who was an ace mechanic but was offered only the demeaning title of “car porter.” This character, Levy said, was evidence of people excluded from the “national consciousness.”
Once he finished the final draft, Levy naively thought the worst was behind him. He promptly sent out the 540-page manuscript to virtually “every publisher listed in Writers’ Market and the Manhattan phone directory.”
He waited, but no “big, fat check” materialized. Instead he quickly became a victim of discrimination — a host of publishers rejected his novel based solely on race. Not the kind of race related to skin color, but the sort that involves cars, tracks and checkered flags.
“There’s no market for racecar fiction,” more than one publisher told him. One editor said snidely, “Those people don’t read.”
Ironically, it was Levy’s background in car sales that told him not to abandon a product he believed in. Instead, he regrouped and did something that no agent ever would have recommended: He and his wife took a second mortgage on their Westchester home and published the novel on their own. Through two printings.
“We couldn’t even tell our family what we were doing,” said Carol Levy, “because they would have thought we were crazy. But everyone who read it liked it. Even our accountant told us to go ahead.”
The Levys were used to startling their families. Even their match, though not opposed by their relatives, was a bit unexpected: Carol came from an Italian, Catholic family and Burt’s family was Jewish and of Eastern European ancestry. “We couldn’t have been more different,” Levy said. But there was an even more fundamental gulf: Carol wasn’t especially a racing fan, a fact that she had to quickly reconcile with Burt’s boundless passion for the sport.
“Racing’s part of Burt, the whole package,” she explained. “Sometimes you have to stick your neck way out to support a person, and I didn’t want to be 70 or 80 and say `I should have.’ ” Still, she said, after refinancing their house to self-publish the novel, quite a few nights she and Burt lay awake agonizing about finances, particularly since their son, Adam, would soon be starting college. So Carol came up with a solution: She enrolled in a master’s fellowship program in early childhood education at Dominican University. Now she directs the university’s Richter-Brown Junior Citizens’ Center.
When they weren’t working their day jobs, the Levys promoted the book with a vengeance. They set up booths and posted fliers in Porta-Potties at such famous racing venues as Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., and Watkins Glen, N.Y. (both figure prominently in the book).
They made a cable-access commercial and placed ads in car catalogs that didn’t usually feature literature: A picture of the novel’s cover appeared nestled between glossies of traveling tool kits and brake pads. But Levy kept his eye on New York publishers as well, frequently faxing positive reviews of the book that appeared mostly in motor magazines.
A believer in “finding the head of a snake” or locating the big decision-makers in a company, he even made a trip to New York in his Ford Windstar van to meet with one large publisher’s senior vice president of trade, a move that in hindsight embarrasses Levy a little:
“Here I was like a kid with a scrapbook of racecar wins trying to talk the owner of a racing team into hiring me. . . . A third of the way into my pitch, she started looking at her watch.”
That night Levy slept in his van, on top of the copies of his book that he had brought, and the next day he raced — and won — at Watkins Glen.
Reinvigorated, Levy tried another avenue generally considered off-limits to self-publishers: commercial retailers. He began by “begging” Books-a-Million to carry his novel, and when the Alabama-based chain tentatively agreed, he sent holiday promotional posters picturing Santa Claus driving a Ferrari (he and Carol had colored them in by hand). The effort, however, didn’t pay off; Levy never received any revenue or had the copies returned to him.
Still undaunted, he tried W H Smith, a retailer with shops in many major airports, locations Levy thought sure to attract male travelers who might be interested in racing.
“I’d been talking to an assistant there and she was sympathetic,” he said, “so when the boss above her quit and she was in charge for a week, I lied and told her I was going to be down in Atlanta on business. So I went to the office and talked her into distributing my book for a month.”
Levy made photocopies of the surprising results: On the list of W H Smith’s August 1996 hardcover best sellers, “The Open Road” ranked No. 14, sharing the list with titles by Anne Rice, Jesse Jackson and Barbara Taylor Bradford.
Once again, however, his elation was short-lived. Since his book had been slipped “illegally” onto the list, he had to contact all the other distributors represented through Smith and receive their permission, a feat he was unable to accomplish.
“They needed me like they needed a festering leg wound,” he said. “All I could do was be a problem to them in the greater scheme of things. I was like a guy with a handful of silk shirts walking up to the buyer at Sears and asking him to carry them in all the stores.”
Levy’s creative and relentless marketing was far more successful on the racetrack, surprising even some of the car nuts who bought and read the novel.
“Racers don’t normally read a lot,” said Bonnie Gladish, a former racer who now manages the office of the Chicago chapter of the Sports Car Club of America out of her Glenview home. “They get so focused on their cars that they’ll only pay attention to the specs on their engines.” Yet Gladish and many of her fellow SCCA members (2,000 locally, 53,000 nationwide) were drawn in by “The Last Open Road.” “The history and mechanical parts were marvelous,” she said.
Said Levy: “The general public thinks of racers as greasy appendages to a machine that are only interested in racing around in circles and trying to kill themselves. Anyone who becomes more exposed and sees what the subculture is like sees that a lot of these people are intelligent. You walk into the paddock (where drivers and mechanics work on their cars) and you’re as liable to hear Mozart as country and western.”
“Burt’s a gearhead,” said Joe Pendergast, competition director of Historic Racing Limited in Tampa. “He likes all kinds of racing and he has an ability to talk people into things. Every time I see him he’s driving a different car,” he said, referring to Levy’s self-proclaimed knack for “ride mooching” or persuading racecar owners and motorsport magazines to sponsor him in races.
Now that St. Martin’s has published the novel, it might seem as though Levy has mooched all the rides he’ll ever need. “The whole goal from the very beginning was to get a major publisher,” he said. “If we could just break even and churn some numbers.”
He accomplished his goal, but both Levy and his editor will tell you it’s not yet time to break out the champagne or wave the checkered flag.
“The problem is convincing people other than those fanatically into sports-car racing to be interested in this novel,” said Denneny, who worked closely with Levy to slim it down by nearly a third to a more marketable (and less costly) length.
It was Denneny who plucked the novel from St. Martin’s reject bin. “What I had to overcome was that 12 or 16 publishers (who) had seen it or passed on it,” he said. “That always raises a question.”
Denneny, who didn’t even own a car until a year ago, explains that the novel has a “universal appeal” that he hopes will draw in readers who aren’t sure of the difference between NASCAR and drag racing.
“It’s a classic American novel that happens to be situated in this world of cars, mechanics and road races,” he said. “Burt’s sort of like a male version of Colleen McCullough (“The Thorn Birds”), someone who’s a great storyteller who’s been underestimated.”
Levy’s prose waxes poetic about motors, a subject not normally the recipient of lavish literary praise. The first time the protagonist, Buddy, peers beneath the hood of a Jaguar, he’s dazzled:
“I popped it and walked around front, pausing to wipe my hands on my coveralls before daring to lift that crocodile-snout Jaguar hood. Underneath was the single most beautiful automotive power plant I’d ever seen, what with two long, gleaming aluminum valve covers fastened down with neat little rows of chrome-plated acorn nuts and these strange, stately S.U. carburetors standing at attention off the side like a pair of medieval guards in shining armor. It was like a piece of sculpture, honest it was.”
One motor magazine, Road and Track, has hailed “The Open Road” as an auto equivalent of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and On Track magazine enthused, “Buddy takes us on one heck of a right-seat journey.” Even non-motor media have praised the book; the Toronto Star said, “Burt Levy’s breezy narrative brings us a well-balanced history of road racing in its formative years.”
According to Denneny, Levy represents an American demographic in need of a comeback. “I’ve been convinced for a number of years that the straight white male voice that used to be utterly dominant isn’t being heard from,” he said. “The culture has tended to go to extremes: If you’re gay, Chinese, black or lesbian, it’s easier to publish books.”
Levy doesn’t seem to think he fits any special demographic, unless there’s one that includes people who long for the 1950s and are good at “putting together (sales) pitches.” But even his trademark resilience sometimes flags and he allows himself a few moments of grimness:
“This is my one shot. I hope the book’s an incredible success, but if people aren’t aware of it, I’ll be selling plastic bags for the rest of my life, and I’ll be the guy with books on the remainder tables for $1.98.”
But then he’s back in gear, detailing upcoming races, handling business calls from vendors seeking “T-wickets” to hang their bags, arranging to pick up his wife after work, and preparing to attend his afternoon class in step aerobics.
Next morning he’ll be up at 5 to work on the sequel to “The Last Open Road,” which is already well under way. Its title? “The Fabulous Trash Wagon.”
