Want all three? Last month’s promotional offering was so well received that I thought we’d do it again. Send your check or money order for $25 directly to Barricade Books, 185 Bridge Plaza North, Suite 308-A, Fort Lee, NJ 07024. All three books will be shipped to you via UPS. We’ll pay shipping charges so you’ll save more than $20 on this special offering. Credit card orders may be placed by toll-free phone with Albertha O’Neill at 800-59 BOOKS. (800-592-6657) Tell her you want “the October trio.”

For a single book and not the trio, the cost would be the retail price plus $4 for shipping. End of commercial.

Yvonne Young Tarr Dies:

Attorney Vivienne W. Nearing sent me a newspaper clipping containing a long obituary of Yvonne Young Tarr who died recently in Sarasota, Florida. The report included the story of how she began writing cookbooks in 1965, after whipping up a complete dinner, in which no course took more than ten minutes to prepare.

My wife and I were her guests. We were much impressed and suggested she write it up. Thus was born The Ten Minute Gourmet Cookbook which my company published. She produced two more cookbooks for us, and then went on to produce 18 others – mostly for Random House. And it was her husband of 52 years, sculptor Bill Tarr, from whom we bought the ten-plus acres in Jamaica that became the site of The Stuart Place.

She was a delightful lady: lovely to look at, creative, witty, warm and genuine.

Restaurant Chatter:

In the 1970s I had a pied a terre in Paris on rue de Longchamps, which I leased from Salvador Dali’s manager, Captain J. Peter Moore. Several of the small but posh apartments were used as love nests by wealthy French business executives and so the doorbell register listed no names except those of racetracks.

My flat was called “Arlington.” In the five years I occupied it, I found new “friends” I hadn’t realized were “friends.” The calls were almost all similar: “Lyle, could I use your Paris apartment next month? That is, if you’re not using it.”

In those five years I don’t believe I learned ten words of French. Nor did I feel the need to do so. Though my arrondissement (the 16th) was away from American tourists, I somehow managed to get along fine with the local shopkeepers with those ten words, some gesturing and a smile.

My favorite restaurant was Lasserre. The food was fabulous and I enjoyed the roof which opens for a few minutes to reveal the moonlit sky, and then closes for a few minutes. The roof weighs nearly five tons, so those smooth openings and closings are a kind of engineering miracle.

Then there was the day that Carole was flying from New York to join me. I called Lasserre for a reservation but was told they were sold out for days ahead.

At the time, we’d published Guide Cortine, a guidebook to French restaurants by Robert Cortine, France’s #1 food critic. I happened to mention my problem to our American agent in Paris, Martin Wess, and he called Cortine and Cortine called Lasserre and lo! -- we had a reservation just like that. I was so grateful that I asked Martin Wess to join us.

The meal was, as always, incredibly delicious. But for some reason, people from all the nearby tables kept staring at us as if we were some kind of celebrities. Also, I noticed that the captain waiting on us seemed to serve only our table.

When the check arrived, a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine that we’d consumed were listed but with a red line through them. They were “on the house.”

The restaurant is one flight up and you take the lift down from the second floor. Our captain was there to bid us farewell. When we reached the ground floor, he was there again, obviously having run down the stairs. He asked if everything had been satisfactory.

The next morning I learned that the crowd was staring at us because our “captain” was, in fact, Lasserre’s owner, who never waited on people. Also, before we arrived home, he’d telephoned Robert Cortine to ask if we’d been happy with the meal.

Sometime soon we plan to return to Lasserre to taste their new dish. It’s lobster roasted in chestnut-scented honey, a creation of Lasserre’s new chef Jean-Louis Touchagues, who was trained by Alain Ducasse.

I look forward to it but I know there will never be another night like that one!

Book Advertising:

There was a time, many years ago, when we did so much advertising that we were among the top seven book advertisers in the pages of The New York Times.

Today we do little or none. The rates are prohibitive.

For example, I used to take small classified ads on the front page of the daily Times

for about $35 a line.

Remembering that, I thought I’d run this classified ad for five days:

Protect your children. Read Conversations

With a Pedophile by Amy Hammel-Zabin

$21.95. Published by Barricade Books.

In the old days, such a campaign would have cost us about $500. Now it would

cost nearly $8,000.

Short Tales Without Heads:

¥¥¥ Marilyn Cole Lownes has written Lord of the Ring, a marvelous article about Jake LaMotta. It appeared in the London Morning Telegraph but, unfortunately, hasn’t been published yet in America. Some bright magazine editor should grab this!

¥¥¥ Carole and I and son Rory attended Albert Ellis’s 90th birthday party. It was held at the Albert Ellis Institute on East 65th Street in Manhattan. It was the Institute’s first fundraising event and 200 people paid $100 or more to attend. Someone gave the Institute a $200,000 gift. Among those prominently present was actress Nicole Kidman. (Her father runs an Ellis institute in Australia.) I was asked to speak aboiut how my relationship with Dr. Ellis began. There was big applause when I said that we were about to publish Sex Without Guilt In the 21st Century.

Incidentally, Rory was there because he’s on the Institute’s Board of Directors.

¥¥¥ Helen Gurley Brown gave one of her fascinating talks at the newly opened Coliseum Book Shop at 11 West 42nd Street in Manhattan. Her Sex and the Single Girl has just gone back to press for a second printing. A couple of nights later, Carole and I joined Helen and her producer husband, David Brown (who is also one of our authors) at Elaine’s. There we broke the news that David’s The Rest Of Your Life Is the Best Of Your Life will be translated and published in Japan. Meanwhile, Helen, now editor of Cosmopolitan’s international editions (there are several dozen of them) has just launched an Israeli edition.

¥¥¥ A few months ago, Carole and I attended the Albert Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. It was interesting. I’m a big Einstein admirer. The only new information I picked up was that Einstein didn’t believe one could return to the past but he did believe that, in time, man might penetrate the future. (Think about that one you race horse betters, stock market traders, etc.!)

¥¥¥ In November, Tallfellow Press will publish We’ll Never Be Young Again by Spencer Green, Chuck Fries and Irv Wilson. It recalls the last days of John F. Kennedy. The title was a comment by Senator Pat Moynahan when he learned of the Kennedy assassination. Tallfellow is owned by two tall fellows: Larry Sloan and Leonard Stern. With the late Roger Price they built Price, Stern, Sloan, which they sold to Putnam for big dollars. Larry was a brilliant casino press agent in the early growth days of Las Vegas. Leonard is a TV writer and producer and the creator of the sitcom, “Get Smart!”

¥¥¥ Jennifer Itskevich, once an intern at Barricade Books, is now our Publicity Director.

¥¥¥ A few days ago, inspired no doubt by our publication of my The Secret Life of Walter Winchell, Reuters news service carried a profile of me written by Aleksandrs Rozens. He’s the Reuters correspondent who recently quoted Helen Gurley Brown as saying, “I stopped being a virtuous girl when I was 19 and got married at 37. There was plenty of time to indulge in whatever activity you wanted before marriage.”

Barry Farber & The Committee:

Conservative talk show host Barry Farber recently introduced me to a Norwegian Church on East 44th Street where one can have a sumptuous buffet lunch for $15. What pleased me most was seeing Gjetost, my favorite cheese.

One good deed deserves another, and so I’ve joined the Committee to Bring Barry Farber Back to New York Radio.

Some fifty or more major politicians, celebrities and fellow talk-show hosts are expected to lend their names to this effort.

Margaret Sanger, An American Treasure:

??? Library Journal published an enthusiastic review of Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words. It said in part: “Miriam Reed, the actress who created Sanger (1879-1966) in a one-woman performance, here collects 39 letters, articles, and speeches, including excerpts from the famous What Every Girl Should Know and Family Limitations to present the birth control crusader’s life in her own words.

“Reed appears to have read everything Sanger has ever written, and here she provides voluminous notes and introductions to each document. They create an overall picture of the long active life of the woman who coined the term “birth control,” opened the first birth control clinic in the United States and founded Planned Parenthood.

“Sanger heard Susan B. Anthony speak and yet lived to proselytize on Mike Wallace’s talk show!…”

Library Journal gives the book a Recommended rating.

Confirmation
Another review, this one in Booklist begins: “Sanger became committed to sex education and birth control after watching her mother die at age 50, after enduring 18 pregnancies, and witnessing the suffering of poor women and children as a nurse on New York’s Lower East Side.”

This review ends with the comment: “Sanger comes to life in this essential resource on a persistently controversial subject.”

Three Books We Didn’t Publish:

From time to time, I’ve reported on various book properties that Barricade Books has acquired. It occurs to me it might interest you to hear about some that we didn’t land or decided not to publish.

1.

Sharon Bush and I had long conversations about her story. She’s angry. After more than two decades of marriage to Neil Bush, the president’s brother, her husband sued her for divorce. A Houston attorney told her she had no choice but to accept his offer of $2,000 a month for four years. Then the money would stop and she’d have to vacate their house.

Neil Bush says he’s broke. No one has ever fully accounted for the $1.6 billion that disappeared from the failed Silverado Banking, Savings & Loan Association where Neil was a director. He admitted that he failed to reveal his business relationship on a conflict-of-interest form when he got a $100,000 “loan” from a developer after he approved loans of more than $100 million for that same developer. (It took six years before Bush reported the $100,000 on his income tax return.)

Sharon Bush told me she wanted $5 million for herself. I explained it was unlikely that she’d make anything like that from book royalties. Despite my urging that she stop gossiping to gossip columnists and to writers like Kitty Kelley, she persisted in doing so.

We decided there was no real book here, and so we passed.

2.

Jack Gordon is a colorful character. When he approached us with the outline of a book about his five-year marriage to LaToya Jackson and his involvement with Michael and the Jackson family, it sounded interesting -- but only if true.

Carole liked it. I was skeptical. After weeks of discussion, publishing terms were agreed upon and a contract was drawn up. Before one word of the script was written, and based on a general proposal, Carole sold $60,000 worth of subsidiary rights.

When the negotiated contract went to Jack Gordon, he started to negotiate all over again.

This was the kind of experience friends tell me they sometimes have with Iranians. They say that for Iranians, negotiations begin after the contract is signed. I promptly told Gordon that we were withdrawing our offer of publication.

3.

I knew who Gabe Kaplan was, although I confess that I’ve never watched his sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.” I also knew that he was a winner in a poker tournament. That’s about all I knew.

He approached me to publish a book about his sexual contacts with women. He was striving to break the record of Wilt Chamberlain, who claimed to have slept with 10,000.

It could have been an amusing book if written with the right mix of humor. But before we could come to terms, he asked if I would match an offer he’d received from a west coast publisher who deals largely in audio cassettes. I explained that our company specializes in controversy and we don’t get into bidding wars -- and that was that. The west coast company has since gone bankrupt.

A Personal War Story:

Danna Goodyear’s 9-page profile of Stanley Kunitz in The New Yorker awakened some amusing memories.

It started in the summer of 1942 when a Lieutenant, known to have made anti-Jewish remarks, summoned me to the office in “secret hangar #6” at National Airport.

He ordered me to sit at attention while he lectured me regarding a letter of mine that had appeared in Yank. Then he criticized me for having organized the ostracism of a WAC captain who shared his sentiments.

“You wouldn’t talk to me like that if you weren’t wearing those bars,” I said.

“Really?” he said. “Then let’s go outside and I’ll take off these bars.”

We went outside, surrounded by two officers and two dozen enlisted men.

The Lieutenant removed his jacket. Then he swung at me. I ducked and he missed. Then I swung at him, my fist smashing into his eye and knocking him off his feet. It was a lucky but well-deserved punch.

I Go Home

As he lay on the floor, being consoled by sympathetic fellow officers, I turned and walked away. I slipped out of the camp and managed to get home to my mother in Brooklyn.

MPs picked me up on the train but I fast-talked my way out of trouble thanks to my attachment to the Air Transport Command.

One week later, a Western Union telegram arrived. It ordered me back to camp.

The telegram was as good as a pass on the train ride back to Washington, so the MPs gave me no trouble.

I managed to slip into the base camp where I was quickly warned that the MPs were looking for me. I was told they had orders to arrest me on sight.

I wanted to stay free until a dance that night -- after which time I’d accept my fate. Fellow GIs assured me that striking an officer could cost me twenty years in the stockade.

Where to hide? A strategy hit me. I made my way to the kitchen where unhappy soldiers were doing KP. Three were sitting peeling potatoes for the several hundred men on base. I grabbed a peeling knife and joined them.

My hunch was a good one. I was in the last place on the base that the Military Police would look.

Potato Peelings
I mentioned to one of my fellow potato peelers that my buddy in the camp was an American Indian named Eugene American-Horse. He told me that the writer Oliver LaFarge was stationed at nearby Air Transport command headquarters. LaFarge had written Laughing Boy about an American Indian and it had won a Pulitzer prize in 1929. This literary talk aroused my interest and we got into animated conversation.

My fellow potato peeler was Stanley Kunitz. He said he was a poet but before the war, had made a living editing biographical dictionaries of English and American authors. I asked him a dozen questions about contemporary writers. What had happened to Kenneth Fearing? Where was Gertrude Stein? He had all the answers.

We developed a nice empathy. We kept in touch and after the war, he sent me an autographed copy of his 2nd published volume of poetry, Passport to A War.

We didn’t meet face to face again for 40 years, at which point he gave me a warm embrace. By then he had become America’s official Poet Laureate.

Facing the Music

Meanwhile, back at the base, my evading arrest was successful and I showed up that evening for the dance, to the consternation of several officers.

I was ordered to come to the Base Commander’s office at 9 AM the next morning.

I didn’t own a hat so I borrowed one from Eugene American-Horse.

The following morning, I climbed the three flights of winding spiral metal stairs to enter the office of Colonel Frank J. Collins.

“Corporal Stuart reporting, sir!” I said, standing at attention.

“At ease.”

The Colonel didn’t look up from the papers on his desk.

“Stuart,” he said, still not raising his head, “I wonder if you would do me a favor?”

“If I can, sir,” I said.

“I’d like you to promise to stop beating up my officers. Can you do that?”

I was stunned but managed to stammer, “Yes, sir.”

He looked up for the first time. There were elements of a smile on his face. “Dismissed,” he said.

Only later did I realize that since the Lieutenant had taken off his jacket and invited me to fight, I hadn’t committed any military infraction.

By the way, Stanley Kunitz is now 98-years-old.

Me? I still wear my World War II dog tags.

Thoughtful Bequest:

Last month I wrote about Carole and I attending Eleanor Green’s 100th birthday party.

Eleanor died, a few weeks later. She’d wanted to make 100 and she did.

Recently, her will was probated. Most of her assets were left to her brother, with a $350,000 gift to Cornell University.

There was one unusual bequest. I quote the Will: "I leave the sum of Twenty Thousand ($20,000.00) Dollars to the NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY, New York, NY, to be used for the Music Department, such funds to be used in that department, as my friend RORY STUART, shall direct."

Personal note:

In all the 40 or so years that I have been issuing this newsletter, I don’t recall anything that brought more response than I received from the few paragraphs I wrote in the last issue under the heading, Personal Musings. I thank all of you who responded.

Until next time ---
Lyle Stuart
lyle@barricadebooks.com