I read a short story in The New Yorker recently. Nothing unusual about that. Since its inception in 1925, the magazine has been properly praised for its contemporary fiction, and over the years I’ve read its stories often and usually with admiration. The title of the piece was intriguing: “Barbara, Detroit, 1966.” I didn’t know who this Barbara was, but I certainly know Detroit and 1966.

The story’s author is Peter Orner, a prolific and highly praised writer of short fiction and director of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College. It was tagged by the magazine as Flash Fiction, which these days means a very short story, but at almost 1450 words it turned out to be a little longer than what I would call Flash Fiction. Of course, I’m quibbling here, and as I read the story I continued to quibble. You might call it carp, nitpick or complain, but I’ll stick with quibble, and I’m sorry to report that I’ve been doing a ton of it lately about way too many things.

Frankly, it’s a pain to be so constantly critical. For one thing it makes it so damn difficult to simply sit back and enjoy someone’s careful creation, get pleasantly lost in its intricate design, or just have a good old-fashioned read. For another, it reminds me of what an old fart I’ve become.

In any case, I became seriously irked in reading “Barbara, Detroit, 1966,” so much so that I promptly wrote a critique in a letter to the editor that was more than half as long as the story itself. As I expected, the letter became lost in one of the magazine’s many piles of slush, so I thought I’d make it available here. But first, I would strongly urge you to read the story in The New Yorker by clicking here.

Herewith, I quibble:

Dear Madam/Sir,

I started reading “Barbara, Detroit, 1966” with interest because it centers on an event on which I literally wrote the book, a detailed non-fiction account of the assassination of Rabbi Morris Adler, titled Murder in the Synagogue and published more than 50 years ago. Unfortunately, I found the story both confused and confusing. I certainly may be biased, but here’s how I read it.

The story’s opening device (dropped after a few lines) is a reference to moving pictures in which we are beckoned to find Barbara in one of the back rows of a new synagogue’s sanctuary in suburban Detroit. On Lincoln’s birthday, 1966, the temple is four years old but somehow still has fresh paint that smells like vanilla (one of several odd details). A service is in progress with 700 people present, but Barbara, eight months pregnant and feeling “woozy,” only wants to go home, where she didn’t want to be either. The rabbi is one of the most admired religious writers and speakers in the country, but Barbara is totally disinterested in what he is saying, thinks of his words as exploding little droplets and can’t wait for him to finish. When he finally sits down, Barbara is suddenly so ravishingly hungry that she thinks about actually eating her seatmate’s high heel shoe.

The cantor’s singing she likes and rocks to in her seat, but then she sees a young man get up, approach the bimah and fire a gun into the ceiling. This very dramatic event Barbara only vaguely registers, and the same for the speech the young fellow then delivers in (by all accounts at the time) a calm and direct manner. He is clearly accusing the entire congregation, including Barbara, of being “a travesty and an abomination,” and of “making a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy…” The young man’s completed thought (not included in the story) was “of the beauty and spirit of Judaism.”

Barbara now thinks about licking the ear of the woman in front of her and can’t “make heads or tails” of what the young guy is saying. But she is “entranced” by it because she finds it full of seething anger. And that makes her think of her husband Howard saying nasty, angry things about “the Blacks” over breakfast. She thinks he doesn’t really care, because he won’t even hire them in his business. The difference she finds here in the synagogue is that “this is passion, the genuine article.” So now we can begin to presume that Barbara’s dismal unhappiness is mostly because of her awful marriage to Howard.

At this point on the bimah the young man shoots both the rabbi and himself in the head, and the sanctuary erupts in bedlam, everyone rushing to get out of the temple. But Barbara instead tries to move against the crowd to get herself to the shooter. She hears a call for a doctor’s help, and the quick response from many men in the congregation she thinks are dentists, chiropractors, etc., almost makes her laugh. Barbara never reaches the shooter, is escorted out of the temple and tells people she doesn’t need a ride home because she has her husband’s car. (I guess like everything else in their marriage, including her, Howard owns it, or acts like he thinks he does.)

It turns out that Barbara is the favorite cousin of the narrator’s mother, who thinks she is something of an independent spirit. At a family breakfast some months later, after the newspapers had detailed the carefully planned murder-suicide at the synagogue, she defended the murderer and was roundly shouted down.

Finally, the narrator tells us he had vainly hoped that Barbara might have ended her unhappy marriage in the ensuing years to live on her own terms, but that was not to be, apparently because Howard continued to provide the family with a good living. The narrator says that in the parking lot after the shooting, she had wanted to hold the shooter’s “shattered face in her hands,” had considered him a “martyr” and “half wished” she were carrying his baby.

Really? After we are told that during her whole time in the synagogue Barbara was disoriented, distracted and only vaguely aware of what was being said and done, and that her only firm impression was that of the young shooter’s angry passion, we are supposed to believe that she somehow cared about that deeply distressed and murderous young man?

As I said, to me this portrait of Barbara is mired in confusion. And to graft it onto one of the most disturbing and revealing events of our troubled 1960s seems a rather misguided choice.

Thanks for your consideration.

Tom LoCicero

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Not long ago I was asked to give a talk to a Jewish adult education group in London, Ontario. The request had come from a member who had learned of two books I had written almost 50 years ago. Now I had spoken and written about those books often over those decades, but never from quite the angle being suggested. And for that reason, and because I was pleased there were still people around who were interested in the stories those books told and the issues they raised, I accepted the invitation. I began by quoting from the introduction to the book that had come first, Murder in the Synagogue:

On a Saturday morning that was Lincoln’s Birthday, 1966, in front of a gathering of over 700 people, including his parents, sister, and grandmother, Richard Wishnetsky, aged 23, stood on the altar of massive Shaarey Zedek Synagogue in suburban Detroit and read a short statement condemning the congregation as a “travesty and an abomination,” after which he used a sawed-off .32 Colt revolver to send a bullet into the head of Rabbi Morris Adler, one of the nation’s prominent religious leaders. He then placed the barrel of the gun over his own right ear and shot himself through the head.

I continued quoting:

When the shooting occurred, I was at work on a novel in my home only three miles from Shaarey Zedek. But before I read about them in the Sunday newspapers, I knew nothing of Rabbi Adler or Richard Wishnetsky. I am not Jewish and had not encountered the rabbi or known of his extensive reputation in the community. As for Richard, our paths had nearly crossed in Ann Arbor where we had gone to school and had a couple of mutual friends. He was two years younger than I.

On the following Wednesday Richard died. A day earlier both Detroit dailies had published articles containing writing that he had been doing in the last few weeks of his life, including an apologia for his fantasized murder of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. Rabbi Adler died three weeks later, and thousands mourned him in a funeral described as the largest in the city’s history.

And then I added a few details. First, the author of several books, Rabbi Adler was widely considered a wise and learned man, whose sterling reputation not only traversed the U.S. but crossed oceans as well. But he had also been a man of some controversy as the leader of Congregation Shaarey Zedek, whose large membership included many of Detroit’s most prominent Jewish families. A recurrent indictment from some Jewish quarters back then (particularly the ultra-Orthodox and the alienated young) had charged the Conservative congregation with leading the way in Detroit to a materialistic betrayal of true Judaic values.

Next, Richard Wishnetsky, the 23-year-old shooter. He had been a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at the University of Michigan and was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow bound for the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He was also a troubled intellectual seeker who knew Rabbi Adler both personally as a kind of mentor and as one of the nation’s most venerated religious leaders, yet he settled on this charismatic man as the appropriate target of his deepest rage. With gun in hand on the bimah of Shaarey Zedek’s 5 million dollar temple, this is what Richard read to his audience:

“This congregation is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy of the beauty and spirit of Judaism. It is composed of people who on the whole make me ashamed to say that I’m a Jew. For the most part it is composed of men, women and children who care for nothing except their vain, egotistical selves. With this act I protest a humanly horrifying and hence unacceptable situation.”

Now because our subject is the congregation’s response to the tragedy that was about to occur, let me move to a passage near the end of the book that describes what happened after Richard spoke those words:

After the slightest pause Richard turned to his right, revolver in hand, to face Rabbi Adler, who, according to some, gestured for him to leave the bimah now that he had spoken his piece. Others thought the rabbi had beckoned for the gun. In either case, Richard moved two or three paces directly toward the seated man, said in a soft, almost tender voice, “Rabbi…” and then, with the gun aimed steadily at arm’s length, shot Morris Adler in the left forearm. The rabbi was in the process of rising, with his hands braced on the arms of the chair. The bullet ricocheted off the bone, then left his arm and entered the left side of his head behind the ear.

Afraid that she was obstructing the work of the doctors, she moved away a bit. An old man was standing on the bimah, screaming and pulling his hair. The mother in the first row, still terrified by her idea that there were others involved in an execution plot, refused the aid of a friend who wanted to lead her out of the sanctuary and into the lobby. “Don’t go there,” she said. “They’re out there too.” Others had run immediately out of the sanctuary, some going directly to their cars, some to call for police and ambulances. Many remained, shouting their demands to know what had happened and who had shot the rabbi.

Yes, a shocking, heart-breaking scene, but I think it is important to an understanding of the wide variety of responses to Murder in the Synagogue.

Next, here’s a quote from one of the early chapters of Squelched, the book I wrote about what happened to Murder in the Synagogue. While Squelched is a memoir, a carefully detailed true story of corporate deceit and criminality in the publishing business, I wrote it some 47 years ago in the third person, referring to myself as a young writer named “L.” The idea, perhaps a bit sophomoric at the time, was to achieve as much objectivity as possible, both in the writing and in reader’s experience of it. So here’s how Chapter 3 opens:

The book’s history had begun with L.’s treatment of the murder and suicide at Shaarey Zedek in an article that appeared a few months after the shooting in the respected Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary. It was his first published piece, and he had just turned 26.

He did not think seriously about doing extensive research for a book-length study until a few members of the aggrieved congregation encouraged him to try it. One man in particular, an old friend and colleague of his lawyer father, was especially enthusiastic and offered to arrange an interview with Goldie Adler, the slain rabbi’s widow. Reaction to the article was generally flattering, and a few people–one was Dr. Karl Menninger, known as the dean of American psychiatry–wrote to ask for permission to reprint it in different places, including a hard-cover collection of the best magazine articles of the year. By the time letters from five book publishers arrived, L. had decided the project was a genuine possibility.

Soon thereafter and really almost by accident I connected with a New York literary agent named Jules Fields, who auctioned my book idea to the highest bidder, the trade division of Prentice-Hall, Inc. As I saw it, the book would serve as a window on the volatile, riotous 1960s, a time of tragic turmoil and violence, including, of course, several assassinations. Also, one of the hot literary topics back then was the rise of the “non-fiction novel,” and according to my agent, Prentice-Hall saw the book as a kind of Jewish In Cold Blood. So in the same year that Mario Puzo got $5000 for what would become The Godfather, my advance was $8500. One quick note on these numbers. We’re talking here about 50 years ago. In today’s dollars that advance would be about 60,000.

At the time I was married to my first wife, and we had a 3-year-old son. I had been teaching at a college outside Detroit, but when I received the initial portion of the advance—$4500—I left that position to work on the book. Reading again from Squelched:

The task at hand then included a thorough-going history of the 23-year-old slayer, a biographical sketch of his victim, and an integrated description of their milieu. L. embarked with an optimism based largely on a lack of experience and, once involved in a quest for data, soon encountered a variety of hindrances: the traumatized emotions of some of those most deeply involved in the story, which would keep them from speaking of their experience to a stranger; a very live concern with what some saw as a possible invasion of privacy; fear in a few of perhaps appearing culpable in some fashion; and with a few others a claim to knowledge of the ‘real’ significance of the assassination-suicide, making less than desirable a book that might possibly arrive at a different view.

With the aid of Mrs. Adler, who would prove helpful through¬out, L. had hoped to secure the cooperation of the family of the young assassin, Richard Wishnetsky, the Adlers and Wishnetskys having been well-acquainted. But he was told the family had been advised against involvement with the book by doctors and others. He had tried other channels and wrote the Wishnetskys a long letter carefully explaining his intention–all to no avail. He couldn’t blame them. Under similar circumstances he too would probably have chosen silence.

Continuing with Squelched in Chapter 5:

The family’s silence meant he had lost an important source of information along with access to a number of potentially helpful individuals and documents. But the reputable name of Prentice-Hall helped to open some doors, and L. soon found himself with a burgeoning list of witnesses and sources to track down, reassure about his purpose, and interview at length: a wide assortment of teachers, professors, classmates, roommates, girlfriends, boyhood chums, religious leaders, youth directors, attorneys, judges, doctors, hospital aides, police officials, chance acquaintances, and eye witnesses to the shooting.

Generally, those he approached in the congregation itself were cordial and helpful. In fact, though he occasionally heard of members who were displeased about his project, he couldn’t recall a single instance in which his request for information had been rejected out of what appeared to be a concern for the image of the congregation. The tone was seemingly set by the cooperation of both Mrs. Adler and the man who succeeded her husband at Shaarey Zedek, Rabbi Irwin Groner. One member, a wealthy entrepreneur and former president of the congregation, had been hesitant for a while, but after a reassuring phone call to Rabbi Groner, he spent a helpful 90 minutes with L. in his office on the umpteenth floor of the plush building he owned.

My research and the writing of a first draft took two and a half years, and early in 1969 I had a manuscript of 1000 pages. My extensive history of Richard and a biographical sketch of the rabbi had required, as mentioned earlier, more than 200 personal interviews, considerable correspondence and a substantial amount of reading in religious and ethnic studies and in the literatures of psychiatry and the social sciences.

I had quickly burned through the initial portion of my advance, and my wife had taken a teaching job at a local community college. Our son was in daycare. The senior editor who had bought the book for Prentice-Hall had moved on to a new job, and I was now in the hands of a junior editor. Doing most of the editing myself, I cut the manuscript down to about 650 typescript pages (the book as printed would come to 384).

After much back and forth, my edited version had been deemed acceptable, and my new young editor told me the company felt the book deserved a “major sales effort.” At that point, early in the fall of 1969, I asked Goldie Adler, Rabbi Groner and a few others in the Jewish community to read the book in manuscript. All the verdicts were gratifying.

And then came months of delay while Prentice-Hall’s lawyers raised concerns and objections, mostly related to how the Wishnetsky family might respond to the book. Word of final approval came in the middle of March. It had taken 5 months for the deletion of 2 short paragraphs, 5 sentences and a few phrases.

Don’t be concerned about the delay, said my editor, because Prentice-Hall felt the book’s success would not depend on its immediate topicality, but rather on the deeper interest that would bring a steady sale over a number of years. Later, however, this episode would take on a sinister look, because without my knowledge certain vital decisions had been made by the publisher during the delay. One was to inexplicably raise the book’s price from the usual $6.95 to $9.95 Another involved the size of the print run. But more on that later.

Now the remaining $4000 of my advance was due. The check should have been channeled to me through my agent, Jules Fields. But I hadn’t heard from him in several months, and then my editor urged me to formally disconnect myself from Fields so that Prentice-Hall could send the check directly on to me. That would of course deprive Fields of his 10% cut, but the editor claimed that Fields was “more or less out of the business” and that Prentice-Hall had experienced trouble lately in getting checks through him to some of its authors.

As I would learn much later, this piece of slander was completely untrue, the first of many lies, half-truths and misinformation the publisher began feeding me about this time concerning all the fine-sounding plans it had for publicity and advertising, for the distribution of hundreds of review and complementary copies, and for a full assault on radio and TV. But at this point, terribly naïve and basking in the glow of a first book soon to appear, I swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker.

Ultimately no reviews ever appeared in Detroit’s two major newspapers. But when my dad brought a copy to an old friend who was an editor at the Free Press, that paper’s magazine included excerpts from the book. About 15 reviews, nearly all with strong praise for the book, appeared in localities scattered around the country in a pattern that seemed odd and unlikely, in publications like the Pomona Progress-Bulletin, the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, the Canadian Jewish News, and the Allentown Labor Herald. When the Fort Worth Star Telegram called the book “a look at Jewish life of remarkable scope and depth, of intimacy and charm,” and The Dallas Times Herald said it was “…surprising, sobering and frightening,” I became fond of telling friends, “I’m a hot topic in Texas.”

But in the New York area with its Jewish population larger than Israel’s and where the shooting had drawn front-page headlines, there was no mention of the book at all.

One of my favorite reviews came in the Reconstructionist Journal by Rabbi Jack Riemer, who called it “…a fascinating double-portrait of the Rabbi and his killer that holds the reader spellbound from beginning to end.”

I had personally sent copies to a few of the authors and experts whose work had been most helpful to me. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist regarded as one of the country’s leading authorities on violence, wrote in the American Journal of Psychotherapy: “The data in this book have been collected with such meticulous care and are presented in such an undogmatic way that the book has enduring value. It is not enough to recommend this book; I should express the hope that it will be widely read, understood and heeded.”

And another psychiatrist, Robert Coles, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had recently been on the cover of Time, wrote to me: “I was absolutely enthralled by it. It’s one of those non-fiction novels that one simply cannot put down.”

Prentice-Hall had all of these quotes and blurbs, but used none of them in the four small ads they placed in publications like the Hadassah Magazine and the National Jewish Monthly. As for TV, I appeared on one local show in Detroit, only because a friend called to tell me I was listed as a guest in the TV guide. The publisher had failed to tell me about it.

Finally, in October, 1970, Murder in the Synagogue was officially published. The first retail copies had begun to trickle into some Detroit stores in September, 2 books each, for example, at Doubleday’s and B. Dalton’s. Later a bookseller whose shop was a few miles from Shaarey Zedek described the approach of Prentice-Hall’s salesman: “He said, ‘You should probably take one of these, because, you know, it’s about something that happened in the neighborhood.’”

For a period of more than 7 weeks that fall the book was not available at all from the busiest bookstores serving the Jewish community. Later I was told by an operator of a Little Professor shop, “Well, I tried to reorder it a couple of times during the fall, and the publisher sent me T.O.S. slips.” Temporarily out of stock. But the book was selling so few copies that it was never out of stock. By the start of the new year, the evidence was overwhelming that Prentice-Hall, for whatever reason, had essentially pulled its support for Murder in the Synagogue.

Then one night in February, 1971, my wife came home with a story from one of her college English students. The woman claimed that she had heard a wealthy and well-known Detroiter and member of Congregation Shaarey Zedek say that he had arranged the book’s premature demise.

My informant turned out to be a 30-year-old housewife and mother whose maiden name had been Avren Foreman. Raised in Detroit and educated at Congregation Shaarey Zedek, she had been married by Rabbi Adler in 1965 to a young engineer named Melvin Strager. Over a period of many weeks I spoke with Mrs. Strager almost daily either on the phone or in person; I talked privately with her husband and checked with others outside the family who had known her for many years. I inescapably concluded that she was a dependable person who was telling me the truth.

As for her motivation in doing so, she explained it at one point in a letter she wrote to Fredric Wertham: “There are two reasons why I feel the injustice committed against this book and its author must be reversed,” she wrote. The first involved the fact that as a teenager she had twice contracted an often fatal illness:

“Although many people tried to help, it was Rabbi Adler who gave me the strength, in fact, the very will to keep on living. I don’t think two people can go through an experience such as this without feeling some kind of bond, and in the subsequent years I saw the many facets of Rabbi Adler’s personality….Mr. LoCicero has written a truthful portrait, and in doing so, a great tribute to Morris Adler.

“The second reason is because I love the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. The basic tenets of our religion are based on dealing with others in a just and truthful manner. Since these are the values that make my life worthwhile, I feel that my knowledge leaves me no alternative but to defend these values. The suppression of this book was accomplished by a few Jews who felt they were doing the right thing. I know they are not bad people, but I also know what they have done is wrong.”

At the end of her letter to Dr. Wertham, Avren Strager included the name of Rabbi Max Kapustin, the Hillel director at Detroit’s Wayne State University, who had agreed to serve as a character reference. The Orthodox rabbi had known Mrs. Strager for several years and described her to me as a person of integrity and responsibility. “Of course,” he said, “I have no knowledge myself of what was done, but let me put it this way: I am morally certain that what she says is true.”

Later when I related the details of Mrs. Strager’s story to Goldie Adler–after the obvious initial shock and dismay and after the rabbi’s widow recalled that in years past, she herself had taught the young woman in a Sunday school class–there was no hesitation about Mrs. Adler’s endorsement of Avren Strager’s honesty. Of course Avren was telling the truth, she said; it was impossible to believe that she would ever make up such a story.

Goldie Adler told me she had long known and respected the man named by Mrs. Strager as primarily responsible for the book’s suppression. Nonetheless, shortly after talking to me, Mrs. Adler phoned Avren Strager and praised her for coming forward with the truth.

As told in the letter already quoted, this was Mrs. Strager’s story:

“The knowledge that Mr. LoCicero, a gentile, and therefore an ‘interloper,’ was writing the troubling story of Rabbi Adler’s murder had upset many people because they felt it might have a detrimental effect on the congregation and the community. I had heard the talk, but it wasn’t until the High Holidays, when I sat in on a conversation, that I began to think seriously about the subject. The essence of what I heard was that one of the men, particularly wealthy and powerful, had used his influence with Prentice-Hall to see that this book would be ‘squelched.’

“He went on to say that he had been assured by the publisher that every means they had would be utilized to accomplish this. Someone asked how, and he said, ‘By not advertising the book, setting the price too high, etc.’ I thought that not selling the paperback rights would be another effective way to kill a book. It was also mentioned that the important New York reviewers would not deal with this book.”

The conversation had taken place early in October of 1970, soon after the book had first gone on sale. The scene was a dinner party at the Southfield home of Avren Strager’s father, Sidney Foreman, to which the Stragers had been invited, along with several long-time members of Congregation Shaarey Zedek.

Mr. Foreman operated a suburban-based accounting firm, and the man who claimed responsibility for having “squelched” Murder in the Synagogue on this particular night was an old family friend who had frequently done business with Mrs. Strager’s father over the years. She called him “Uncle Max.”

Detroiters knew him as financier and civic leader Max M. Fisher.

According to Mrs. Strager, the effort against the book had been the work of a handful of congregation members upset at the prospect of a “best-seller” spotlighting the painful events of the murder and suicide at the synagogue and the embarrassing charges of materialism and hypocrisy made by the young assassin. And Max Fisher had been the man with enough power in his pocket to seek a favor from Prentice-Hall.

That power stemmed from both financial clout and political connection. A multi-millionaire, Fisher was one of President Richard Nixon’s leading supporters and fund-raisers. A wide variety of financial interests and real estate holdings contributed to Fisher’s personal worth, reputedly pushing $100 million. He was a board-member of 8 corporations, and among his close personal friends were some of America’s most powerful tycoons, including Henry Ford II.

Widely acknowledged as one of the country’s most influential Jewish leaders, his political leverage alone meant that he could have asked for the squelching as a favor. But it was also true that if only a few of the companies he and some of his friends controlled decided to switch to another house for their business and technical texts, newsletters and bulletins, Prentice-Hall’s profits could suffer.

Ultimately, of course, Max’s pal President Nixon would soon be forced to resign in disgrace, revealed to the world as a liar, a criminal and, with the release of those infamous White House tapes, as a virulent anti-Semite. Transcripts of those thousands of hours of White House tapes are littered with Nixon’s references to “Jew boys” and “kikes.”

For decades rumors had circulated that Nixon was anti-Semitic, no doubt making it more of a chore for Fisher to fund-raise for him in the Jewish community. When the tapes were finally released by court order, many Jews expressed outrage, or at least dismay. Not Fisher. Still loyal even decades later, he was quoted as saying:

“I just felt, well, that’s all part of history. Have you ever said things in private that you didn’t want anybody to hear? That’s the same thing that happened. I’m sure that every president has some nasty words to say or used some profane language.”

It was Avren Strager’s intention to work quietly behind the scenes to induce Max Fisher to “reverse the injustice.” She would appeal to his conscience or, if that failed, threaten to make her story public if he didn’t act to lift his pressure from Prentice-Hall and make amends. But in the end she could not get anyone else who had also heard Fisher’s words to support her, and alone she was much too honest and good-hearted to succeed against those arrayed against her, including her own father and others close to Fisher. All her well-intentioned efforts came to naught, and she finally agreed with my decision to put the whole sad story down on paper in what would turn out to be my book, Squelched.

Now to backtrack just a bit, as soon as I had become convinced that Mrs. Strager’s story was the real deal, I traveled to New Jersey and confronted the president of the trade division at Prentice-Hall. His first response was to admit an acquaintance with Max Fisher and to describe his “one experience” with the man.

A few years back, he explained, Prentice-Hall had published a political biography of George Romney. And while the book was being prepared—this was at a time when Romney was a leading presidential contender—Max Fisher had placed an order with the company for 10,000 copies. Then later, on the book’s publication date, in fact, Romney had withdrawn from the race. “And the following day,” said the president, “Max Fisher called me and cancelled his order.”

When I repeated the details of my story and described the company’s numerous failures to support the book, the fellow finally suggested renewed efforts for the book–perhaps they could still make a deal with a paperback house, etc. I said Avren Strager’s story had undermined my trust in the company, and I simply wanted our contract cancelled and all of the book’s rights reverted to me. In a letter a week and a half later, less than 6 months after publication, the company agreed.

From my visit to Prentice-Hall I also learned that, about the time of my lengthy back-and-forth with its lawyers, the company had made a crucial decision. It would print a total of only 4000 copies, not from plates, in the standard fashion, but from standing type, which was then “pied” or dismantled. That’s the method used for a limited edition, and just to break even they would have needed to sell at least twice that number of books. So the company had made a clear decision to take a bath on the book, at a time when I was being told that Prentice-Hall had high hopes for it.

So how common was what Prentice-Hall did to Murder? I would soon hear directly from two prominent literary agents on the subject. The very successful Julian Bach gestured at his office window overlooking 48th Street and told me, “Look, this 20-square-block area of Manhattan is the publishing establishment in this country, and they’ve all had their experiences like this. They’ll understand Prentice-Hall’s position in this thing, and they’ll close ranks and pull together and you may never get another book published.”

And the famed Scott Meredith, once an agent for Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, advised me that this kind of thing happened with enough regularity that no one of importance would even care if another instance were publicly revealed and documented.

They were both telling me that publishing was a very close-knit business, with gossip being a coin of the realm. Chalk this up as a learning experience and move on, they said. Neither would have anything to do with either of my books. And as it turned out, they knew what they were talking about. I tried offering the rights to Murder to more than 30 publishers. There were no takers.

When Squelched was finished, I thought it was a compelling story of corporate deceit and criminality. But facing a sure-fire, deep-pockets lawsuit from Fisher, a guy who hung out with the likes of Henry Ford II and Richard Nixon, not one of the agents and publishers I approached would even look at my new book.

And then there was my fellow victim of criminal shenanigans at Prentice-Hall. Gerard Colby is the author of another ill-fated book, entitled Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. Four years after it purposely “botched” Murder, Prentice-Hall did the same thing to the Du Pont book. That story was first told on January 21, 1975, in the New York Times.

It was told again more recently by the author Colby in “The Price of Liberty,” one of several essays about suppression in the media collected in a book called Into the Buzzsaw. Colby’s research found that the occurrence of this kind of soft squashing was sufficiently common that insiders had a term for it: “privishing.” Instead of “publishing.”

By the way, I’m often asked why Prentice-Hall did not simply shut down the project and not publish the book at all. My response: doing that would have risked my taking it to another publisher where Fisher might not have had as much leverage. Better a quiet, seemingly natural demise.

In any case, my once-budding literary career soon withered. And in order to move on, I gave away my last manuscript copy of Squelched and then embarked on a busy life as a TV producer/writer/director. Over the ensuing years, my output included more than 50 long-form documentaries, 75 shorter features, 30 live event programs and 600 editorials. Occasionally I still do that kind of work, but I never stopped writing.

And then about a decade ago the world changed. Digital disruption hit the publishing business, and perhaps it would no longer matter what an agent or a publisher would look at. For 30 years I had lost the manuscript of my book about what was done to Murder, but when it came back to me, I brought it up to date and in 2012 offered it for sale both as an e-book and in paperback on Amazon and other outlets. I also put up for sale an e-book version of Murder along with the 1200 copies of the original hard-cover edition that I’ve kept in basements and garages all this time.

Over the past five years, I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest drawn by these two books, written almost five decades ago. They’ve both generated lots of positive reviews, along with a few from trolls, who’ve said things like, “The first book was so awful I couldn’t finish it, so I didn’t even bother to start this second one.” Of course I always assume that reviews like that come from those folks who’ve always thought Murder in the Synagogue should never have seen the light of day.

Now I have not sold a lot of these books, and the crazy business of book selling today is a subject for another time. But perhaps my most rewarding moment in this whole process came in December of 2012 when, as a promotional event, for a period of five days, I made the e-book version of both books free to all comers. I was stunned when readers grabbed more than 10,000 copies. How did it feel knowing that Murder and Squelched were in the hands of so many readers who wanted them? As the commercial says, “Priceless!”

Finally, let me wrap this up with a couple of passages from the epilogue to Squelched. In it I explained how the original manuscript came back to me when I got back in touch with Leo McNamara, an old professor friend of mine to whom I had given the last copy 30 years earlier. I also covered the passing of Max Fisher in 2005 at the age of 96, and recounted how I’d lost touch with Avren Strager over the years. Quoting from the epilogue:

Then as I re-read the manuscript Leo had saved, the reality of this extraordinary woman came rushing back at me: her pluck and courage, her sharp intelligence, blunt opinion, business savvy and cultural naiveté, her firm conscience and commitment to principle, her devotion to her people and her religion, her prickly, sometimes difficult moods, the narrow insularity of her life and finally her remarkable decision to break the boundaries and come to me.

So how would I find her? Well, of course, I would start with that remarkable tool not even dreamed of back in those days when Avren and I were chatting often on the phone, but which I now used so often. I would google her.

At that point I described how shocked I was to learn that Avren Strager was no longer with us. Quoting again:

On one of the people-search sites I learned that Avren Strager had been born in 1941 and died in 1994 at the age of 52. My heart felt crushed. She had been taken at a time when most of us have just begun to see our children forging careers and marriages of their own and perhaps giving us the sweet pleasures of grandchildren.

I thought of Max Fisher still enjoying the comforts of his home and family at the age of 96. The fates had given him almost twice as many years as they had granted to Avren Strager.

The post RESPONDING TO A RABBI’S MURDER appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

There are signs lately that the old saw about old dogs and new tricks may be passé. Take that pathetic old rocker Ted Nugent, for example. Now so far past his way-over-valued prime that he reportedly needs a cane to haul himself on stage (sorry, I just made that up to be snarky), old dog Ted sounds like he’s actually learned a new trick.

Remember back in the day when predictably outrageous Ted would announce from the stage that “Obama should suck on my machine gun?” Well, now old dog Ted, a rabid Trump rooter, says he wants to tone down “hateful rhetoric.” After the shooting at a congressional baseball practice, newly sensitive old Ted said he’s decided to be “more selective with my rants and in my words.” A really heart-warming development.

And now Yours Truly may just be another old dog who’s learned a new trick. This past week I learned somewhere on our wonderful web (so of course, I know it to be true) that fully 7% of American adults think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Honest-to-god, someone did a survey.

Now this, to me, new fact has had important ramifications in what passes for my mental life. First, it re-enforces the truism I was forced to adopt about seven months ago that it is impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the American voter.

Remember the good ol’ days when every election cycle in this country always ended with some vapid commentator or other making a profound reference to the “wisdom of the American electorate?” Well, not so much anymore.

Last November I was convinced that the reason we got the presidential result that gobsmacked so many of us was that 54% of white women voted for the short-fingered pussy-grabber currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now I’m not so sure. Now I’m thinking it might well have been the chocolate-milk-from-brown-cow crowd who put him over the top.

Think about it. It took only about 70,000 votes to move Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and my own benighted Michigan into the electoral college win-column for Dumbfounding Donald.

Surely, with 130 million votes cast nationwide, even including the 3 to 5 million illegals who gave the nod to Cheating Hillary, that idiotic 7% could easily have swung things for the Constitutional Catastrophe we’re now stuck with.

So what else do these HIDs (Hopelessly Ignorant Deciders) think? What other interesting little facts might they credit? My guess is that because of the color of his hair (or whatever that swept up stuff is up there), they’re sure he shits gold bricks, and if they could just gain access to the presidential toilet, they’d be set for life.

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So I had my first cell phone nightmare last night. I’m not talking about some frustrating episode that actually happened involving the ubiquitous little device that has taken over our lives—the kind of experience where you just can’t get the damn thing to do what it’s supposed to. I’m sure many of you are only too familiar with what I’m talking about.

No, this was a real nightmare, the kind you have when you’re lucky enough to finally fall off to sleep. It felt like most of the night I was fussing and fuming with my little Blackberry, trying to make it work properly. But the more I tried, the more weird and dysfunctional it got, producing more and more bizarre pictures on the screen and disallowing any of those vital things I feel like I need to be doing every waking minute with my phone.

Like, making an overdue call to friends or family (that will often go to voice mail because they can see it’s me calling), or reading an urgent text telling me a package I received yesterday has just been delivered, or taking a call from some solicitous guy named Bruce in India who thinks I need help with erectile dysfunction, or opening an email with a news flash on some incomparably stupid thing Trump has just done that I’m now hearing about for at least the fifth time, or…well, of course I partially jest. Not all my cell phone transactions are misleading or a waste of time, but you get the idea.

If my nightmare sounds like a Kafka story for our times, that’s pretty much what it felt like. (For those of you who just said, “Wait, what’s a Kafka?” or “Why would a Middle-Eastern food favorite have anything to do with this?”—just go google on your mobile.)

As I said, the dismal dream seemed to go on for much of the night, and when I’d wake occasionally and then try to get back to sleep, I’d immediately find all those disturbing images from my out-of-control smart-ass phone again flooding my mind as soon as I’d close my eyes.

Actually, it felt as if that nightmare almost had a mind of its own and wanted to consume mine. Yes, a strange notion but even awake, it seemed I was still in its thrall. And now that I think about it, that’s kind of how I feel about the disruption our cell phones are inflicting on most of our waking lives.

Disruption. Now there’s a seminal concept, one we need to understand and apply to practically every aspect of our contemporary world. Like Amazon disrupting the book business, or iTunes with the music industry, or Trump doing it to the American political landscape. But our so-called smart phones may be disrupting more things in our everyday lives than any other social or technical phenomenon.

Yes, you’ve always been able to take a photo of your genitalia and send it to someone who might (or quite possibly might not) want a look, but now you can do it practically instantaneously with just a single tap or two.

Remember road maps? The kind that were often a pain to fold back up correctly? Now road maps are like ancient relics because your phone will calmly talk you through directions to just about any location on the globe and show you a photo of that spot both from above and at ground level.

Want someone to spend the night with you, or maybe share the rest of your life? Just tap away. How about knowing how many minutes you’ll slice off your life span if you indulge in that delicious looking glazed concoction you’re eying at the local donut shop? I’m sure there’s an app for that…or there will be tomorrow.

Our phones can kill us (just keep using yours behind the wheel), or find a cure for what ails; they’ll teach us something amazing, or make us remarkably stupid; connect us, distract us, or keep us living in a bubble; help us find love or trouble or both, learn the facts or remain ignorant, tell us what to cook tonight, or how to overthrow a dictator tomorrow; they can make us well-informed citizens, or prey to fake news, show us the play of the day, or someone’s head chopped off, the cutest kittens at play, the latest live Facebook murder, or a horrific natural disaster; and they’ll offer the most elaborate bird calls, the ugly screams of a mob, or our favorite song.

Come to think of it, given the incredible penetration of these powerful little pocket things into practically every corner of our psyches, I’m surprised at how long it took for my phone to finally invade my dream life.

And while I haven’t researched this, I’ll bet you a box of those artery-clogging donuts that there’s an app out there that will turn your mobile into a soothing white-noise or soft music provider that will help you get right back to sleep if a nightmare wakes you up.

The post MY FIRST CELL PHONE NIGHTMARE appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

We seem to have a lot of them these days. Just read the papers or watch the news. No, I’m not talking about all those tireless journalists working their fingers to the bone, breaking bombshell, after expose, after blockbuster about the crazed, pathetic or frightening antics of our sitting president.

There are so many of them at work right now, and the competition among them is so fierce, that if Woodward and Bernstein were still at it today (instead of just being the avuncular personages they play on TV) they’d most likely be lost in the shuffle. No, frankly, in my book, all these super-busy reporters are just doing their jobs. And since this is a time when those jobs bring enormous excitement, reward, recognition and even adulation, one might argue that performing their work is actually easier than it is in more pedestrian times.

I’m also not talking about all those never-at-lost-for-words commentators with the supposed cojones to call the Orange Guy in the White House a know-nothing fool, an idiot and a child. (Oh, and by the way, please, please stop calling the Leader of the Free World a child. That’s way too deeply demeaning to the concept of childhood. At the very least, be sure to add something more specific, like “selfish” or “spoiled-rotten.”) No, for my money, heroic behavior is not to be found behind the opinion desk or on expert panels either.

So who are my real heroes in the multitude of jaw-dropping news stories raining down on us daily? I’d argue for all those quiet, unassuming ones, those devious milk-toast types, those lurkers in the shadows at the military and intelligence agencies, high-powered law firms and financial outfits and, most important of all, the brave ones operating with stealth in the paranoid confines of the White House itself. Yes, of course I’m talking about the Leakers.

It’s all those courageous ones so vilified and threatened by the blind and craven defenders of the Orangutan in the Oval who are finally giving us a real shot at learning what’s truly going on. For all their trouble they live in fear and uncertainty and face the very real possibility of prison time and the outlaw’s disgrace.

So why willingly risk a loss of career and personal freedom? Certainly not for money or fame. If all goes well for them, no one is likely to ever know their name or the dimensions of their exploits.

Then why do they do it? That’s the easy one. Because the future of the Republic is at stake, and the only thing that can save it is what they give us: the Truth.

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We had friends in from out of town a few weekends back, and because their Dallas Cowboys and our Detroit Lions both had games that started at 1 pm on Sunday, the local sports bar was in order. And so well ahead of game-time the four of us were ensconced in a large booth partaking of typical pub fare and surrounded by big-screen TVs.

For a while we were practically the only ones in the bar, but our waitress assured us the place would be jumping by 1:30 or so. And sure enough about that time, with the games well underway, most of the tables and stools were occupied, and the scene was getting a little raucous, with one helpful fellow screaming “He’s goin’ deep!” every time our quarterback decided to launch a pass more than 20 yards downfield—just in case, I suppose, the rest of us hadn’t noticed.

The booth behind us remained empty until about 2 when a party of four well-dressed, middle-aged black women slid into place. Their waiter explained that for every touchdown the Lions scored while the ladies were there, 7% would be taken off their bill. They didn’t seem impressed, and it soon became clear that they had zero interest in any of the games on screen in the bar.

Now I need to tell you that I am an inveterate eavesdropper and a dedicated observer of unsuspecting folks in public places. I really can’t help myself. But on this particular occasion, with two games to follow simultaneously and while sharing comments on both with my Cowboy-rooting buddy, I was mightily distracted and only caught a snippet from the ladies here and there, enough only to surmise that they had just come from church and were at the bar strictly to socialize. It was something they did, I guessed, every Sabbath.

Why this bar? Who knows? Maybe it’s the closest one to their church. Maybe they’re partial to the burgers or the wings. Or maybe they prefer an atmosphere where they can be pretty darn sure that no one in the place will pay the slightest bit of attention to them or what they wish to talk about.

Except that on this particular Sunday, and unbeknownst to them, they had just happened sit next to an incorrigible spy. And so as I sat there following the intricacies of two NFL games, kibitzing on brilliant or dim-witted strategies, play-calling or execution, I was also half-processing the reports and analysis (gossip is another word that comes to mind) emanating from the booth next door.

Their subject was of course not the trivialities of football, but the profundities of the human condition, or their own little slice of it, which seemed to most often involve insecure ministers, wandering wives, hopeless husbands and treacherous best friends. As I mentioned, I was getting none of this in anything close to coherence. It was all mixed in with amazing one-hand grabs and ignominious dropped passes, depressing quarterback sacks and remarkable tight-roped sideline scampers.

Until, that is, there arrived, as clear as a bell, a line delivered by one of the women behind us, a line so simple and perfect in its way that it held three or four times the impact of the guy on the other side of the bar screaming, “He’s goin’ deep!”

As fate in this noisy place conspired to offer a two-second window of relative quiet, the woman said with a calm firmness, “At least he was dead.”

Wait a second, I thought, did she just say, “At least he was dead”?

Yes, exactly: At least he was dead.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered to my gal-friend sitting next to me. “She just said, ‘At least he was dead.’”

“Yes, I heard it,” said my friend. And then I realized that I wasn’t the only one eavesdropping.

So I said, “What could possibly have come before to which that was an appropriate comment?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said my friend.

And later, after the Cowboys had won and the Lions lost (because of three missed field goals, although their two touchdowns had meant 14% off our bill), once we were back in the car and driving home, both my gal-friend and my buddy’s wife did indeed fill us in on what had been coming from the church ladies in the next booth.

By the way, it was not that our gals had missed out on the finer points of either of the games we’d all been watching, in order to better apprehend the colorful chat next door. It was only clear evidence once again that women are much superior multi-taskers.

As it turns out, the moment I was curious about had come soon after the ladies had picked apart the rather pompous male minister of their church, who turned out to be so completely intimidated by a new female associate minister that the old reverend had quickly managed to find a way to send her packing.

And then it was onto a series of lurid tales about married female friends and acquaintances who had been fooling around on their sad-sack husbands, and sometimes with one of their hubby’s good and trusted friends, the friend being, of course, “just a dog,” who was only too happy to take advantage of a deplorable situation in which the wife was acting “like a whore.”

Finally, it was in the context of this rich conversational string that one of my favorite overheard lines of all time had arrived. One of the good church ladies had been recounting the story of a friend who had just recently been widowed and then, no sooner had she put the poor man in the ground than she had immediately taken up with her newly deceased husband’s best friend.

Which from another of our good ladies in the booth behind had elicited the undeniably sage observation:

“At least he was dead.”

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The past week or so has been passing strange. Every day I’ve driven 15 minutes to the house I lived in for about two decades with the woman I divorced about seven years ago. When I moved out back then, I left behind almost all of my most cherished possessions, my books, stacked in boxes in a basement back room.

Now having decided to return to her New England roots, my ex had sold the house, in one of Detroit’s nicest suburbs, a place I could no longer afford. So the books finally had to be moved, and on each trip I filled my car, a smallish station wagon type, with those boxes and brought them back here to my small apartment to stash them in a garage where I had spent days throwing things out and shifting stuff around to make room.

Through all of this unusual (for me) physical exertion, as I hauled box after heavy box up the basement stairs to shove them in my car, I was teased and bashed by memories filled with hopes, regrets, dreams and disappointments. I must have moved about 60 boxes, but obviously this was not just physical labor.

In that basement I had practically all my books, from the beginning of my college days, first at Notre Dame and then at the University of Michigan, along with close to 1200 hardcover copies of Murder in the Synagogue, the book that unfortunately holds the most emotional resonance for me. (If you’re wondering why I reference Murder that way, you can check out its strange, four-decade-old story in this old post.)

But, in any case, each time I grabbed a box marked “Prentice-Hall,” my publisher back then, I wondered why the hell I was doing this. It seemed almost like blind instinct was driving me. I knew only that I could not possibly leave those books behind to be thrown in a dump.

This was the third time over the past 40 years that I’ve moved them, from basement to basement to garage, and now (unlike those previous moves when I still clung to fanciful hopes) I was quite certain I would never be able to do anything with them that would be right and appropriate for books.

Online I’ve sold only a handful of those hard covers, with their garish purple dust jacket featuring a bullet-split menorah on the front and a photo of my hopelessly naïve 30-year-old self on the back. And there’s no place I can think of to even give them away now. Talk about the baggage of my life. They will most likely still be stacked in the garage when I croak, and so I will have left my family a befuddling, regrettable burden.

And then there were all my personal books, some of them in boxes so water damaged from basement floods that I had to go through them book by book and decide which ones were suitable to keep and which should be consigned to the trash. Often not an easy choice with so many of them holding such great importance to me.

A slim book of poetry by my favorite professor at Notre Dame, a brilliant, no doubt tortured man who had left his wife and children because he finally knew he was gay. My treasured copy of Crime and Punishment with all my scribbles and notes from my Russian Lit class at U. of M. A volume of short stories by six of the giants that I’d pull out as a parlor trick, point to their pictures on the cover and ask my two-year-old son, “Who’s that?” And the little kid would pipe, “Dostoyevsky!” Well, you get the idea.

And again they’ll all probably remain in boxes in the garage because I have only a few small bookcases in this crowded little apartment, and I’m very unlikely to live again in a place with enough shelves for my books.

Of course, all of this was also a potent reminder of how much our world has changed over the past decade or so, especially the volatile world of books, a place where today I can hold a thousand titles on a handheld device that lets me access each book with the touch of a finger.

But the bottom line is I did it. I moved everything, certainly everything in decent enough shape to move, and I didn’t have a heart attack, and I didn’t ruin my back. Actually, if I didn’t think the whole thing was close to absurd, I’d almost feel proud of myself.

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Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s domestic crime thriller, became a publishing sensation in 2012, began its journey to the silver screen with Flynn writing the screenplay in 2013 and is scheduled for its cinematic debut in October, 2014. Recently there’s been a spate of publicity for the movie with the news that it will end in a way substantially different from the ending of the novel.

The word came in the 2014 Preview edition of Entertainment Weekly, where Flynn once worked, and which features a cover photo that seems to be a major spoiler. The photo was staged and snapped by the film’s director, David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), who reportedly pushed for the revised ending. The cover picture shows British actress Rosamund Pike as Amy, complete with toe tag and a frozen look of wide-eyed surprise on an autopsy table. Also on the table and snuggled around the corpse is Ben Affleck as Nick, with no toe tag and perhaps still in love with his dead wife. Or perhaps not. Maybe he’s dead too.

Now in case you haven’t noticed, Hollywood taking liberties with a popular book is not news. It happens way more often than not, but Gone Girl was a widely devoured novel that engendered a great deal of controversy and discussion. Readers came away from it with powerful likes and dislikes that led to passionate debate, often focused on the story’s end. And those inclined to look at the bigger picture wondered what kind of nerve had been struck here.

So for a lauded director to want a changed ending and the writer of the both the novel and the screenplay sounding like she was only too happy to come up with a different conclusion, yeah, well, that was news.

Gone Girl is a nicely terrifying relationship drama, featuring Nick and Amy Dunne, a smart and attractive 30-something couple with, shall we say, complex issues. Amy and Nick are two people navigating love and hate, consumed by secret desperation and scheming revenge, and locked in a marriage rife with suspicion and deceit.

Their story is told with alternating points of view, and sooner than later we learn that the two narrators are wildly unreliable. The writing holds a clear-eyed, hip and knowing tone while it effectively describes and explores timely topics such as the media and its obsessions, the impact of a crashing economy on personal lives, and maybe most of all, the cracks and fissures of identity produced by hyper self-consciousness in a society that seems both pressure cooker and fishbowl.

But the narrative is littered throughout with moments that, given the nature, history and propensities of its protagonists, either could not or should not have happened. In short, it is chock full of the implausible and the impossible to believe. Some examples:

–Early in their back story there’s a strange time lapse between Nick and Amy’s instant attraction in their first meeting at a party and their chance encounter on a Manhattan street eight months later. Nick says he was going to call, but the slip of paper with Amy’s phone number got ruined in the wash. Patently ridiculous: each of them could easily have found the other through the party’s host. But Amy is fine with this story even though the Amy we come to know would have cut Nick a new one for being such an inattentive dolt.

–Both Nick and Amy are laid-off magazine writers in NYC, and his decision to move them back to his hometown, North Carthage, Missouri, and to buy a bar with what’s left of Amy’s inheritance seems more than a bit unlikely.

–When Amy goes missing after two years in North Carthage, there are signs of a struggle in the living room, and the front door of the house is left wide open. Whether Nick is the culprit (he is soon a suspect) or someone else is, this detail seems far-fetched, since it means the disappearance will be almost immediately discovered.

–Later we get the news that Amy had gone to an abandoned mall trying to buy a gun from one of the homeless folks squatting there. She feared someone, she told him, but he can’t get her a gun. As it turns out Amy wanted to leave a trail that will incriminate Nick, so why not just go to Walmart and buy a gun. Do it on the record—it’ll be easier to trace, which was the whole point. Please keep in mind: this Amy gal is supposed to be absolutely brilliant.

–Soon Nick and Amy are struggling to make ends meet, but she secretly runs up credit card charges of $212,000 in his name. Apparently he never picked up the mail?

–After a week or two on the run, Amy is hiding out at some rundown Ozark cabin resort and still has about nine grand in cash. She nonetheless decides she needs the 50 bucks oddball Jeff offers to help him steal somebody’s catfish. She stupidly lets Jeff and another obvious grifter see her money belt stuffed with her entire stash, and so, surprise, the next day she’s dead broke.

–Amy’s Plan A had been to send Nick to the chair and then kill herself, since, I guess, she’d be fully satisfied with her life.

–Plan B involves looking up her old high school flame Desi, a multi-millionaire living just an hour away with his mother in one of his mansions. For decades from afar Desi has been crazy in love with Amy, so first he rescues her, then he imprisons her in another of his mansions, then he makes love to her, after which she slits his throat and escapes in his vintage Jaguar. Whoo boy!

Look, there’s other ridiculous stuff, but you get the idea. The point here is that the problem with Gone Girl, the book, is not the ending. Yes, absurdly, these two get back together, with no charges leveled finally at either one. And yes, the baddest badass is not the man but the woman, so super-smart and devious that she can defeat, subdue and control a man who knows her every rotten proclivity, because she has confessed it all when they’re together in the shower, where no tape recorder can nail her.

But now Nick can’t just walk away: Amy has his baby boy in her belly. (She duped him into thinking the fertility clinic they had gone to years ago had destroyed his frozen sperm, then returned there recently to get herself pregnant.) And soon she’ll deliver the unfortunate little tike into a world in which his mother is a monster.

In the book’s final pages we learn that she has carried the baby to term, with submissive Nick there smearing on the cocoa butter and rubbing her feet. And on the marrow she will both give birth and see her new book published, the one that tells her own self-serving version of the whole sordid saga.

So she has triumphed. She has won this epic gender war. Or has she? In their final exchange Amy wonders aloud why Nick is being so good to her. She wants him to say he loves her and she deserves it. Instead he says he just feels sorry for her: “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

At the very end Amy tells us she can’t stop thinking about that line from Nick. And so we know without question the war is still on.

Actually, the book’s ending, to me, was properly motivated and well-calculated, especially in terms of setting up what seemed like an inevitable sequel. No, the novel’s flaws and weaknesses are all related to the fact that it is implausible fantasy masquerading as cynical realism.

So what about the movie’s new ending?

The ultimate in marital dysfunction, rage and despair is, of course, a story that ends with the husband and wife killing each other. The one I best recall is The War of the Roses, the very popular 1989 film starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and directed by Danny DeVito, from the 1981 novel by Warren Adler. If you haven’t heard of it, never saw it, or have an inkling to watch it again, I’d recommend it.

In the climactic scene, the warring Mr. and Mrs. Rose don’t exactly kill each other, but they’re trying to and end up dead at each other’s hand with the aid of a convenient chandelier. Will something similar happen at the end of Gone Girl the movie? My guess is that it will, although the final scene or scenes will certainly be very different.

But the wonderful thing about murder on stage, screen or page is that the various ways to make it happen are basically endless. Flynn is on record as believing that Nick is too “soft” to murder his wife. If so, that leaves it to Amy to initiate. Why would she do so? Remember, in spite of everything, she still wants Nick to love and cherish her. Instead, after leading her on, he tells her finally that he harbors only pity: “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

Really, if she thinks about that line long enough, it could well be enough to make Amy snap. And if she acts, Nick will react. And then we’ll have our ending, carefully designed to be both shocking and somehow emotionally satisfying as we walk out of the multiplex.

At least we’ll be certain there will never be a sequel.

The post DON’T READ THIS! UNLESS YOU WANT TO SPECULATE ON GONE GIRL’S NEW CINEMATIC ENDING appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

The other day I went Googling to see if I might have missed a published review of one of my books. I typed in one book and another came up, well down the list and from two years ago. That was before I began publishing, and before any of my books were available, with one exception. There were still old copies of Murder in the Synagogue for sale on Amazon and at several used book sites.

So I checked out the listing, a site called “R. Shlomo’s reading list,” which turned out to be a blog by a Chicago rabbi, and found his review of Murder posted on November 2, 2011. As I learned later from an exchange of emails with Rabbi Shlomo Rosen, that was some 40 years after he had read my original article on the murder of Rabbi Morris Adler reprinted from Commentary in The Norton Reader. He had found the book on the internet, recalled the tragic story, bought Murder and reviewed it. Yes, life can be a little weird.

So here is the rabbi’s review:

Murder in the Synagogue is a multilevel, fascinating study of the 1966 notorious murder of prominent suburban Detroit rabbi Morris Adler. The book profiles Richard Wishnetsky, a promising graduate student who gradually descends into a psychosis that culminates in Rabbi Adler’s murder and Wishnetsky’s suicide during a Saturday morning Bar Mitzvah service.

Richard Wishnetsky drew inspiration from his Hasidic grandfather claiming a certain authenticity that the suburban synagogue community and its rabbi lacked. We are told of his idealism of wanting to make a difference. He wants to make his mark, to make a statement. Unfortunately, his life spins out of control when it appears that his graduate study plans will not come to the fruition that he expects. We find that he fails at love; he is frustrated with rejection. Speculations of homosexuality persist about his social interactions. He is unattractive. His tragic confusion results in such an horrific scene: reading a final statement against the community and turning to shoot the rabbi and than himself before a crowd of 800 congregants and Bar Mitzvah celebrants.

What struck me about the book was the criticism of Suburban Jewish life; its materialism and lack of religiosity. However, how can one take seriously the criticism of the deranged? Had Wishnetsky experienced success and not failure would he have even noticed the flaws in his own community? Would his mind have crumbled so severely with the taste of triumph? He may have identified with his religious grandfather, however, he, himself, never became religious. The phoniness that he charged and applied to the community could have been charged and applied to himself.

Although a heart wrenching read, the book is thought provoking, written in a strong narrative prose.

In the comments section on the rabbi’s blog I left a message thanking him for the review and mentioning that he might be interested in my book Squelched, an account of what happened to Murder and its strange publishing history. After our email exchange, within a few days he was reading Squelched and a day later he posted this review:

This slim volume is really a continuation of and an explanation of the fate of the excellent study Murder in the Synagogue also by T. V. LoCicero. Anyone who has read Murder in the Synagogue would have expected a wide audience and best seller status because of its topic, caliber of writing and reporting. Surprisingly, the book was stalled and then halted after the author received promising reviews and expectations from the publisher. He subsequently heard from a congregant of that fateful synagogue that a prominent member of the synagogue community proudly announced to a group of friends the he “squelched” the book. Mr. LoCicero details the mishaps and misstatements of his publisher fudging its way through an unsatisfying explanation of the book’s failure.

The book’s picture of people of influence and power rings true; it reminds me of my life as a community rabbi when my job was threatened for speaking the truth. “Rabbi, if you continue to explain your view, there are people in this town who can ruin you! I would watch out if I were you!!” Or alternatively, it reminds me of the help I received: “Rabbi, there seems to be some misplaced anger directed toward you- we’ll just send a letter …” and the anger dissipated and disappeared miraculously! In the first case as a fiery young rabbi I responded with “How dare you threaten a rabbi! I will serve the entire community and not just a few of the elite!” And in the second case, I marveled at the power this man’s pen!

Every community has its ‘melech’, king. The role of the king is to fight and defend and unfortunately for Mr. LoCicero the king misunderstood his very well thought out book that analyzed a dangerous crank as a threat to the community and supposedly snuffed out the “threat” as a king is expected to do.

If the book is true, and there is little evidence to deny this fine written memoir, I believe here the king and his council were wrong! The rabbi’s widow even praised the book. The synagogue could have grown in many ways as a result of a best seller depending on the leadership of the synagogue.

Since Mr. LoCicero has brought Murder in the Synagogue back into print, I believe it to be a very worthwhile read and recommend his writing.

Of course, I am deeply grateful to Rabbi Rosen for his kind and perceptive reviews. And once again I’m amazed at what is possible in this brave new world of publishing.

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Let me stop here for a moment to praise Victoria Louise Best. If the name is familiar, perhaps it’s because you know her blog, “Tales from the Reading Room,” one of the U.K.’s top literary/book review sites. It’s the place where she calls herself “Ms. Litlove.”

Or maybe you’ve read one of her extraordinary biographical sketches of writers in crisis. You can find the latest (on the remarkable American novelist and story writer, Shirley Jackson) in the current issue of the on-line literary mag, Open Letters.

Or you might know the academic volumes she authored while lecturing for a decade in French literature at Cambridge.

Or possibly you recall my mentioning Victoria here on occasion, as I embarked on one of my pet peeves, Unsympathetic Characters, after one of her brilliant essays on the subject, or my grateful reference to her wonderfully generous take on my novel, The Obsession.

Today the occasion is a recent post she called “A Whiff of Testosterone,” in which she reviewed, kindly indeed, my first two books in The detroit im dyin Trilogy: The Car Bomb and Admission of Guilt. Here’s part of what she had to say:

“If you like Elmore Leonard, you’ll love these books. Fast-paced action with lots of short chapters and sharp, punchy dialogue, and the writing is crisp and contemporary. Tom LoCicero is wonderful at setting up several threads of plot that plait into one another and end up inter-related, and there’s a real pleasure in the moment when they finally combine and the landscape of the book is laid out before the reader. The authenticity of the context is evident, particularly in Admission of Guilt, which has a lot of pithy things to say about the way Detroit was allowed to slip into free fall, the authorities unable and mostly unwilling to intervene in a shocking situation. But ultimately, these are stories about our overwhelming desire to see bullies and users get their comeuppance; there’s little more satisfying than that. The third book in the detroit im dyin trilogy isn’t out yet, but I’ll be waiting for it to appear.”

So as you might expect, my gratitude to Ms. Litlove is matched only by my admiration for her own literary accomplishments. The breath of her knowledge, the depth of her insights and the consistent quality of her taste all prompt me to grab your figurative collar and urge you to check out this woman’s marvelous writing in any and all of the places I’ve mentioned, or wherever you can find it.

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Okay, far be it from me to argue with a classic old saying that apparently goes all the way back to Matthew (5:14-16) in the New Testament:

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

The problem is we live in the Era of Snow-Blindness, a time when all of us are enveloped by the digital blizzard, with screens of all sizes shimmering in every corner and the Net buzzing insistently in our pockets. So even if we remove that bushel and allow our light to shine brightly, who’s going to see it?

To shift the metaphor with another old saw, how about Tooting My Own Horn? I mean, who else is going to toot it? Well, actually a number of kind folks have blown flattering notes my way lately. But this is also the Age of Noise-Induced-Deafness, when our ears are afflicted with a cacophony of voices all screaming to be heard.

Look, all this is a self-conscious preamble to my offering, as a public service, of course, a sampling from recent reviews. Actually, I was encouraged in this by an experience I had last month. Across five days in December with a free-book promotion through Amazon’s Kindle Select, I gave away almost 12,000 e-copies of my four books.

What stunned me was that more than 10,000 of those downloads were of two books that are more than 40-years-old.

Now if you know the tale of those books (it’s right on the Home page of this site)—Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched, the story of its suppression—you’ll understand why I felt that every bit of time and effort it took to e-publish them was suddenly worthwhile. Yes, I haven’t made a penny on those books and probably never will. But knowing they’re in the hands of so many readers who wanted them? As the commercial says, “Priceless!”

Fewer people downloaded the novels, The Obsession and The Disappearance, but I could tell myself the confounding route to discovery was now just a bit less daunting. Everybody in the book business is looking for ways to enhance this thing called “Discoverability.” As far as I can tell, nobody has a good answer yet. So in any way you can, let the light shine and the horn toot. I’ll start with the novels:

My deep gratitude to all these readers who took the time to grace my books with their kind and generous thoughts.

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So here’s just one way of looking at last night (November 6).

It was a stunning defeat for:

• Mendacious Mitt
• The One Percent and those self-serving billionaires who tried to buy an election
• Intolerance
• Those who would yank health care from our newly covered millions
• Ayn Rand
• Lies and deception as essential campaign tools
• Secrecy and hidden agendas
• Those who would deny women the right to control their own bodies
• The rabid right and all those who cater to it
• The opposition to any reasonable control of the market dipsy-do that crashed our economy
• Shape-shifting
• Angry, self-seeking white people
• Turd Blossom
• Candidates with Swiss bank accounts
• Political calculation over minding the People’s business
• Race baiting
• Those untold millions still living in the 1950s
• Donald J(erk) Trump
• Homophobia
• Blindness to the changing face of the American electorate

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That things have changed is a pretty common observation from those interested in books and publishing these days, but my story about the Great Transformation might shed a different kind of light.

I started working on my first ebook in 1970. Yes, people still lived in caves back then, and ereaders were only a gleam in the eye of some techie savant. But for me it was supposed to be a big year, with the publication of Murder in the Synagogue, my true crime account of the killing of Rabbi Morris Adler in a suburban Detroit temple on Lincoln’s birthday, 1966. They called it an assassination, not all that uncommon in those turbulent years.

Murder explored the behavior and psyche of a brilliant 23-year-old graduate student—Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Michigan, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow bound for the Divinity School at the University of Chicago—an idealistic intellectual seeker who accused his audience of 700 congregants of being hypocrites and materialists and then turned a gun on the rabbi and himself.

Among many things, it was a window on those riotous 1960s, and one of the hot literary topics back then was the rise of the “non-fiction novel.” According to my agent, Prentice-Hall, my publisher, saw the book as a kind of Jewish In Cold Blood. So in the same year that Mario Puzo got $5000 for what became The Godfather, my advance was $8500.

Published, Murder drew good reviews in often odd, out-of-the-way places like Pomona, CA, and Allentown, PA, and praise from psychiatric experts, religious figures and academics to whom I sent copies. But the eastern literary establishment acted as if it had never heard of the book, and sales were slow.

Then from Detroit’s Jewish community, a remarkable young woman came forward to tell me that Murder had been undermined by a wealthy and powerful man she had grown up calling “uncle.” She had heard this influential presidential adviser and top Republican fund-raiser—a fellow named Max Fisher—tell a group of friends that he had “squelched” my book. I checked her story and eventually learned that Prentice-Hall had indeed bowed to pressure from Fisher and suppressed my book. They printed 4000 copies from standing type, which was then pied, or dismantled—the method used for a “limited edition”—and sabotaged its marketing and distribution.

So like any foolishly high-minded young writer, I brought my accusations to Prentice-Hall, got weasel-like responses, then demanded (and secured) the rights to my book. After which I wrote another book, about what had happened to Murder.

To me, of course, it was a compelling story of corporate deceit and criminality, but facing a sure-fire, deep-pockets lawsuit from Fisher, a guy who hung out with the likes of Henry Ford II and Richard Nixon, not one of the agents and publishers I approached would even look at my new book.

My once-budding literary career soon withered. And in order to move on, I gave away my last manuscript copy of that useless expose and then embarked on a busy life as a TV producer/writer/director. Over the ensuing years, my output included more than 50 long-form documentaries, 75 shorter features, 30 live event programs and 600 editorials. Occasionally I still do that kind of work, but I never stopped writing.

And then the world changed. Digital disruption hit the publishing business, and it may no longer matter what an agent or a publisher will look at. For 30 years I had lost the manuscript of my book about what was done to Murder, but when it came back to me, I brought it up to date and am now offering it as Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue. Also for sale are an e-book version of Murder and 1200 copies of the original hard-cover edition that I’ve kept in a basement all these years.

So why bother with Squelched? The book was written more than 40 years ago about the publishing problems of another book written a few years earlier. What could such a story have to tell us about the disruption, confusion and uncertainty in the business today?

One of the things people say after reading Squelched is that so many of the details are reminders of things past. For example, the size of the advance Prentice-Hall gave me for writing Murder: $8500 back in 1966 when Puzo got five grand for what turned out to be one of the best-selling novels of all time.

Today the numbers seem almost quaint. The same for the hard-cover price of Murder, jumped by Prentice-Hall from the more or less typical $6.95, to what seemed like a much-inflated $9.95 as part of what I later learned was the publisher’s effort to stifle the book’s appeal and sales.

Lately I’ve wondered what those figures would seem like if translated to the value of today’s dollar. $8500 in 1966? That would be something over $60,000 today. Not bad for an untried young writer in the current market (unless she were a Kardashian).

And $9.95 in 1970 for a hard-cover non-fiction book? In 2012 that would be about $58. Today, of course, you might expect to pay between 27 and 30 bucks for such a book, but then we’re in the midst of the digital revolution. One wonders what a typical hard-cover price might be today if ereaders and ebooks had never happened.

Really, both sets of numbers point up a not-uncommon problem with such comparisons. In today’s rapidly changing book-publishing world, many a successful mid-list author with a few good-sellers under her/his belt might be happy with a 5-figure advance.

So with change and disruption shaking the industry, does my story of suppression in the publishing business back in 1970 seem only more ancient and irrelevant? Can this story tell us anything useful about book publishing or an author’s experience today? And why publish it now through my own company?

Because I can. To set the record straight. Maybe to prove that old New Testament line from John, 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” By the way, those words from Jesus are inscribed on a main lobby wall at that bastion of lies, cover-ups and covert ops, CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

After striking out with a hoard of agents and publishers, I finally decided that no traditional publisher would seriously consider touching either of my non-fiction books. And since it’s important to me to finally make the story told in Squelched available to the public (after 40 years!), I figured I have neither the time nor the inclination to wait around to see if I might be mistaken about all this. I also felt that once I went public with the suppression story, my novels, The Obsession and The Disappearance, would probably have little or no chance as well in the legacy world.

Is Squelched a defining story of legacy publishing? Well, no. But, in a larger sense books have always been subject to the whims of the companies that publish them. Of course publishers have always made decisions that in large measure determine whether a book, no matter its intrinsic worth, will find its audience. That’s one of the things they do: they make choices about how a book will be presented to the public. Decisions about cover and text design, pricing, promotion, print run, marketing and advertising, whether to push hard for reviews in the places that matter or for certain kinds of in-store display.

They say it’s all about professional judgment. But often it may be just a gut feeling that the time is right for this story, character, theme or set of ideas. Or that its time has passed. Or that its apparent timeliness was only illusory in the first place. The publisher may decide that, while the author performed competently, the book somehow lacks that spark or special glow that can help it catch fire with a sufficient corps of readers.

And having once committed to a book and its author, a publisher may, for many different reasons, withdraw its support. For one, the editor, whose enthusiastic backing for a book promised it a chance, moves on to a new job at another house. After that, forget it. The book has lost its champion.

There have always been a multitude of ways a book might not succeed, might not reach or connect with its audience. But whether it’s bad luck, bad karma, bad timing or, as in the case of Murder in the Synagogue, bad acting that included collusion with an influential third party opposed to the book’s interests, there is almost always one common factor.

The author is in the dark. He or she may have picked up hints, from an editor who was unusually candid or just let something slip, or from the tell-tale pattern of screw-ups, failures and neglect. But the bottom line is the author doesn’t really know for sure what the hell happened to his book, whether it was some lame failure of his own—an inability to be brilliant, perceptive, insightful or eloquent enough. Or whether it was lousy luck. Or whether someone just didn’t like him or his baby enough.

So how common is what Prentice-Hall did to Murder? As I recount in Squelched, soon after the publication of Murder, I heard directly from two prominent literary agents on the subject. The very successful Julian Bach gestured at his office window overlooking 48^th Street and told me, “Look, this 20-square-block area of Manhattan is the publishing establishment in this country, and they’ve all had their experiences like this.”

And the famed Scott Meredith advised me that this kind of thing happened with enough regularity that no one of importance would even care if another instance were publicly revealed and documented.

And then there is my fellow victim of criminal shenanigans at Prentice-Hall. Gerard Colby is the author of another ill-fated book, entitled Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. Four years after it purposely “botched” Murder, Prentice-Hall did the same thing to the Du Pont book. That story was first told on January 21, 1975, in the New York Times.

It was told again more recently by the author Colby in “The Price of Liberty,” one of several essays about suppression in the media collected in a book called Into the Buzzsaw, issued by Prometheus Books. Colby’s research found that the occurrence of this kind of soft squashing was sufficiently common that insiders had a term for it: “privishing.”  Instead of “publishing.”

By the way, I’m often asked why Prentice-Hall did not simply shut down the project and not publish the book at all. My response: doing that would have risked my taking it to another publisher where Fisher might not have had as much leverage. Better a quiet, seemingly natural demise.

My own guess about the real frequency today of this industry practice? Perhaps not all that often. I mean, isn’t this the Age of the Expose, when the great game-changing web allows nothing to remain hidden for long? A time when even the most secretive of institutions, like the Pentagon and the Vatican, are subject to massive leaks?

But then again, how can we really know? How often will someone come forward as brave and morally driven as the young woman who told me about what she heard from Max Fisher? How rare is it that an editor and a corporate attorney will jeopardize their jobs and careers by going public with their inside knowledge, as happened with the Du Pont book? I don’t have answers.

Now, of course, I’m biased, but there are other reasons why you might want to take a look at these books from four decades ago.  For example, both can be read as coming-of-age stories, a rich, time-tested theme.

Murder is many things, including an account of something we remain afflicted with today, the use of terrible violence as perverse public statement. But Murder is also the haunting story of a gifted, high-minded, ambitious and privileged young man in a time of social upheaval and rapid change. It’s a carefully told tale that finally arrives at a tragic conclusion in which this young fellow not only forfeits his own life but takes with him a prominent, much-loved member of his community in an act of violent despair so shocking that it stains and changes many lives.

How about the uses of history? The 1960s remain an important and fascinating period in the American 20^th century. And you know what they say about those who ignore history. Murder offers an extraordinary view of the ‘60s in part because Richard Wishnetsky, the young man at its center, was so hyper-conscious of himself as a child of his time, as emblematic of both the promise and the failure of American society. He purposely cast himself in that role in order, he thought, to teach that society it was headed for doom.

Squelched in its way is also a coming-of-age tale. In it a naïve young writer is blindsided when his book suffers a fate he has no idea was even possible. Then he gropes, blunders and finally learns a few things.

If some of the questions raised here resonate, you might give Squelched a try. It’s a meticulous account of a young writer’s sudden plunge into the wiles of publishing and his unexpected, at times unpleasant lessons in how the world works. Its epilogue explains how the original manuscript, the last copy of which I gave away back in the early ‘70s, finally came back to me after more than three decades. And it brings the story up to date by recounting the passing of Max Fisher in 2005 at the age of 96.

Along the way you may note that while the details are decades old, the lessons they contain about corporate manipulation and the power and influence of wealth and political connection remain deeply important in our world today.

*  *  *

Rabbi Jack Riemer, known as “President Clinton’s rabbi” and one of the country’s most trusted reviewers of Jewish books, called Murder in the Synagogue “a fascinating double-portrait of the Rabbi and his killer that holds the reader spellbound from beginning to end.” About Squelched he has said, “It was so absorbing that I could do nothing else until I finished it.”

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