Regina O'Numb
War Child
Special agent .
He represents Nigella Lawson, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins, is invited to all the best parties and has name-dropping down to a fine art. So what is the secret to literary agent Ed Victor's charmed life?
Tim Dowling.
Monday March 1, 2004.
The Guardian.
Ed Victor can't find the thing he wants to show me, so he just tells me. "I'm going to New York tomorrow to auction a book which is very exciting." U2 have asked him to sell their very big coffee-table book. "They've never done a book before," he says. "This is their book, and their manager asked me to represent it. And my new best friend Bono and I talk." He smiles; he's joking about being best friends with Bono, but he is clearly still amazed by the strange avenues his work takes him down. "That's the kind of thing that happens to me," he says. "Paul McGuinness, their manager, is a social friend." He's not joking about that.
Victor's social whirl is a fairly sparkly affair. As one of Britain's most successful literary agents, he is second only to Andrew Wylie, the self-styled wolfish predator of the book world in terms of profile. But if Wylie is known largely for poaching big clients from other agents, earning him the nickname "the Jackal", when Victor's name appears in print it is usually between two others, say Jonathan Newhouse and Manolo Blahnik, in the list of people who attended a Vogue party sponsored by De Beers. He goes to a lot of parties. "I'm at the parties, and what's more I enjoy the parties," he says.
We are sitting on opposite sofas in his genteel offices just off Tottenham Court Road in London, and Victor, besuited and elegant, with swept back grey hair and a nimbus of a beard, is telling me about another of his clients, the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who has just published a memoir called Hollywood Animal. "Joe is coming over to promote the book, and he's become quite a friend; that's one of the nicest parts about my life is that clients become friends. And friends become clients. It goes both ways."
Others inhabiting Victor's friend-client continuum include Nigella Lawson, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Kathy Lette and Anne Robinson. He made the deal for the River Cafe Cookbook and its sequels. He handles Iris Murdoch's estate. And when he wants to, Victor can really drop a name - though he doesn't just drop them; he lobs them, bats them past you, overhand and underhand. It is a little disconcerting until you get used to it. He is not really trying to impress, I don't think. It is just his world. It may be partly promotional, but it is not self-promotional.
I ask him if this work-play mix doesn't make things a bit complicated, what with all the poaching that goes on, with so many sharks circling in the tank. "I don't think so, but I've never poached anyone from anyone else. I just don't believe in doing it," he says. "But people do it all the time. Andrew Wylie's made a big point of it. And there's no law against it; he's not committing a crime. If he were, he'd go to jail."
That's not to say that there aren't some friends out there who he would also like as clients. "Oh listen, I would love to represent certain people. I mean, Ken Follett is one of my oldest, closest friends, Ken and Barbara, I represent their daughter who, by the way, just phoned me from Switzerland where she's skiing. I would adore to represent Ken, but he's had an agent since the age of 22. He's always had the same agent, and the last thing in the world that I would do is question someone's loyalty to their agent. It's a very big, important bond."
Though born in New York, Victor has mostly lived in England since he came to Cambridge on a scholarship in 1961. His parents were Russian immigrants and his father owned a camera store in New York. After Cambridge he went to work at Oborne Press, which was part of the Daily Express, and soon moved to Weidenfeld and Nicolson. After a failed marriage and disastrous project starting up a newspaper called Ink with the founders of Oz magazine, Victor returned to America and publishing, becoming a senior editor at Knopf. He got married again, and moved back to England to be near his sons, Adam and Ivan, from his previous marriage.
When he left publishing to become an agent in the 70s, it was viewed as a backward step. "It was a cardinal sin. It was a completely inexplicable act. Why would anyone leave publishing to become an agent?" In those days some publishers still wouldn't look at a book if came through an agent. One publisher described the whole notion of agency as "a lamentable postwar trend" and told Victor that being an agent was "work for a woman". Soon after the career switch he secured a ?1.5m film and book deal for a now-forgotten novel, The Four Hundred by Stephen Shephard. His cultivation of powerful connections and willingness to demonstrate a formidable aggression on his clients' behalf has made Victor, in part, responsible for altering the perception of agents, though he is reluctant to take too much credit for it. "I think I have been one of several people who have helped to change the relationship," he says.
He approaches very few people, he says, "and this is probably a fault". Eight years ago he stopped accepting unsolicited manuscripts. "After 15 years of keeping the door open, which I thought was some kind of sacred duty, I realised I'd taken on - you want to guess how many books I've taken on from the slush pile?" He holds up one finger. "And I made the guy a fortune. And then his next book was terrible." Who was he? "Some guy. I can't even remember his name it was so long ago."
So how does an aspiring writer go about attracting the attention of Ed Victor? "People tend to come to me by recommendation, by friends, by other clients, or by me going to a party and running into someone," he says. "The reason I took on Josephine Hart is I was having dinner with her husband Maurice Saatchi, now Lord Saatchi, and her, and Maurice said, very famously, 'Josephine's writing a novel.'" If you don't find that a particularly helpful example, you're not alone. When he was giving a talk at the Hay literary festival alongside Hart, somebody raised his hand and asked, "If I'm not at a party or a dinner with you, how do I get my manuscript to you?" Victor's answer was, "You don't."
In return for his 10% (or in the case of Victor and an increasing number of others, 15%) the modern agent is required to be both best friend and fearsome advocate. "I'm the one who kicks ass; they don't, because they're adorable," he says. "But they want me to kick ass." The office door opens slightly and a secretary leans in. "I'm sorry, but the photographer's here," she says, "and Sophie Dahl is on the line for you." "Tell Sophie I'll give her a call back," says Victor. "Tell her I loved her story."
If Victor knows all about the neediness of authors, it's because a few years ago he wrote a book himself, called the Obvious Diet: Your Personal Way To Lose Weight Without Changing Your Lifestyle, for which he called in dieting tips from famous friends and clients. Nigella Lawson wrote the foreword. He says he wrote the book to see what it was like to be a writer. "And it's not fun being an author. You feel very vulnerable. And I had an agent who..."
He had an agent? "If you want to replicate the experience of an author you need an agent." He didn't just get any agent. He got Jeffrey Archer's agent: Jonathan Lloyd, the managing director of Curtis Brown.
Ultimately, Victor is realistic about his role in the literary process. "We are very much in the middle of the process, and although we agents are getting stronger and stronger, the lynchpins of the process are the writer and the bookseller." There is, nevertheless, he says, a special bond between author and agent, which he describes as a "perfect symbiosis" of shared interests: "You go through crises with people, you solve problems with people, and last but not least making money with someone is a big bond. You make a lot of dough together. They make it, you make it. It's fun."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1159036,00.html
He represents Nigella Lawson, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins, is invited to all the best parties and has name-dropping down to a fine art. So what is the secret to literary agent Ed Victor's charmed life?
Tim Dowling.
Monday March 1, 2004.
The Guardian.
Ed Victor can't find the thing he wants to show me, so he just tells me. "I'm going to New York tomorrow to auction a book which is very exciting." U2 have asked him to sell their very big coffee-table book. "They've never done a book before," he says. "This is their book, and their manager asked me to represent it. And my new best friend Bono and I talk." He smiles; he's joking about being best friends with Bono, but he is clearly still amazed by the strange avenues his work takes him down. "That's the kind of thing that happens to me," he says. "Paul McGuinness, their manager, is a social friend." He's not joking about that.
Victor's social whirl is a fairly sparkly affair. As one of Britain's most successful literary agents, he is second only to Andrew Wylie, the self-styled wolfish predator of the book world in terms of profile. But if Wylie is known largely for poaching big clients from other agents, earning him the nickname "the Jackal", when Victor's name appears in print it is usually between two others, say Jonathan Newhouse and Manolo Blahnik, in the list of people who attended a Vogue party sponsored by De Beers. He goes to a lot of parties. "I'm at the parties, and what's more I enjoy the parties," he says.
We are sitting on opposite sofas in his genteel offices just off Tottenham Court Road in London, and Victor, besuited and elegant, with swept back grey hair and a nimbus of a beard, is telling me about another of his clients, the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who has just published a memoir called Hollywood Animal. "Joe is coming over to promote the book, and he's become quite a friend; that's one of the nicest parts about my life is that clients become friends. And friends become clients. It goes both ways."
Others inhabiting Victor's friend-client continuum include Nigella Lawson, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Kathy Lette and Anne Robinson. He made the deal for the River Cafe Cookbook and its sequels. He handles Iris Murdoch's estate. And when he wants to, Victor can really drop a name - though he doesn't just drop them; he lobs them, bats them past you, overhand and underhand. It is a little disconcerting until you get used to it. He is not really trying to impress, I don't think. It is just his world. It may be partly promotional, but it is not self-promotional.
I ask him if this work-play mix doesn't make things a bit complicated, what with all the poaching that goes on, with so many sharks circling in the tank. "I don't think so, but I've never poached anyone from anyone else. I just don't believe in doing it," he says. "But people do it all the time. Andrew Wylie's made a big point of it. And there's no law against it; he's not committing a crime. If he were, he'd go to jail."
That's not to say that there aren't some friends out there who he would also like as clients. "Oh listen, I would love to represent certain people. I mean, Ken Follett is one of my oldest, closest friends, Ken and Barbara, I represent their daughter who, by the way, just phoned me from Switzerland where she's skiing. I would adore to represent Ken, but he's had an agent since the age of 22. He's always had the same agent, and the last thing in the world that I would do is question someone's loyalty to their agent. It's a very big, important bond."
Though born in New York, Victor has mostly lived in England since he came to Cambridge on a scholarship in 1961. His parents were Russian immigrants and his father owned a camera store in New York. After Cambridge he went to work at Oborne Press, which was part of the Daily Express, and soon moved to Weidenfeld and Nicolson. After a failed marriage and disastrous project starting up a newspaper called Ink with the founders of Oz magazine, Victor returned to America and publishing, becoming a senior editor at Knopf. He got married again, and moved back to England to be near his sons, Adam and Ivan, from his previous marriage.
When he left publishing to become an agent in the 70s, it was viewed as a backward step. "It was a cardinal sin. It was a completely inexplicable act. Why would anyone leave publishing to become an agent?" In those days some publishers still wouldn't look at a book if came through an agent. One publisher described the whole notion of agency as "a lamentable postwar trend" and told Victor that being an agent was "work for a woman". Soon after the career switch he secured a ?1.5m film and book deal for a now-forgotten novel, The Four Hundred by Stephen Shephard. His cultivation of powerful connections and willingness to demonstrate a formidable aggression on his clients' behalf has made Victor, in part, responsible for altering the perception of agents, though he is reluctant to take too much credit for it. "I think I have been one of several people who have helped to change the relationship," he says.
He approaches very few people, he says, "and this is probably a fault". Eight years ago he stopped accepting unsolicited manuscripts. "After 15 years of keeping the door open, which I thought was some kind of sacred duty, I realised I'd taken on - you want to guess how many books I've taken on from the slush pile?" He holds up one finger. "And I made the guy a fortune. And then his next book was terrible." Who was he? "Some guy. I can't even remember his name it was so long ago."
So how does an aspiring writer go about attracting the attention of Ed Victor? "People tend to come to me by recommendation, by friends, by other clients, or by me going to a party and running into someone," he says. "The reason I took on Josephine Hart is I was having dinner with her husband Maurice Saatchi, now Lord Saatchi, and her, and Maurice said, very famously, 'Josephine's writing a novel.'" If you don't find that a particularly helpful example, you're not alone. When he was giving a talk at the Hay literary festival alongside Hart, somebody raised his hand and asked, "If I'm not at a party or a dinner with you, how do I get my manuscript to you?" Victor's answer was, "You don't."
In return for his 10% (or in the case of Victor and an increasing number of others, 15%) the modern agent is required to be both best friend and fearsome advocate. "I'm the one who kicks ass; they don't, because they're adorable," he says. "But they want me to kick ass." The office door opens slightly and a secretary leans in. "I'm sorry, but the photographer's here," she says, "and Sophie Dahl is on the line for you." "Tell Sophie I'll give her a call back," says Victor. "Tell her I loved her story."
If Victor knows all about the neediness of authors, it's because a few years ago he wrote a book himself, called the Obvious Diet: Your Personal Way To Lose Weight Without Changing Your Lifestyle, for which he called in dieting tips from famous friends and clients. Nigella Lawson wrote the foreword. He says he wrote the book to see what it was like to be a writer. "And it's not fun being an author. You feel very vulnerable. And I had an agent who..."
He had an agent? "If you want to replicate the experience of an author you need an agent." He didn't just get any agent. He got Jeffrey Archer's agent: Jonathan Lloyd, the managing director of Curtis Brown.
Ultimately, Victor is realistic about his role in the literary process. "We are very much in the middle of the process, and although we agents are getting stronger and stronger, the lynchpins of the process are the writer and the bookseller." There is, nevertheless, he says, a special bond between author and agent, which he describes as a "perfect symbiosis" of shared interests: "You go through crises with people, you solve problems with people, and last but not least making money with someone is a big bond. You make a lot of dough together. They make it, you make it. It's fun."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1159036,00.html
