December 15, 2006
OUT ON HER ASS, BUT PROBABLY LANDING ON HER FEET
Judith Regan, eponymous head of the ReganBooks imprint at HarperCollins, got the boot from her parent company today in an economically worded two-sentence news release. Ostensibly, the catalyst was the totally botched release of one of the single-most distasteful publishing efforts ever: O.J. Simpson's maybe-maybe not-tell-all on how he butchered his wife and another man before getting away with it.
In truth, however, I bet this was Judith Regan's long legacy of sweeping trash down the halls of an industry that takes pride in its hifalutin nature and legacy, and doing so very profitably.
It is also unclear whether Ms. Regan has been terminated wholly from any employment with the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s giant media company, which owns HarperCollins. Over the years, Ms. Regan has gained a growing amount of sway within the corporation because of her ability to generate profits from books and other ventures.
In recent years, she has helped to produce television series and specials like “Growing Up Gotti,” a series about the children of the crime family don John Gotti, which was broadcast on the A&E cable channel. Ms. Regan served as an executive producer of that program and others, including a television special with Jenna Jameson, the adult film actress whose best-selling memoir, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” was published by ReganBooks.
Typical of Ms. Regan’s ability both to enrich and infuriate those who did business with her, Ms. Jameson later sued Ms. Regan over rights to a proposed reality television series featuring the actress.
Porn stars and murderers: it's not exactly timeless literary endeavors over at ReganBooks. I recently read she hoped to recover from the O.J. book debacle with a "liberally detailed" biography of Mickey Mantle.
Ms. Regan has continued to court controversy even after the O. J. Simpson incident. Publishers Weekly, a trade journal, reported this week that a planned book about Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankee baseball player, was drawing stunned reactions within the publishing world over its questionable content.
The book, titled “7: The Mickey Mantle Novel,” is by Peter Golenbock, a longtime sports author, who referred to the book as an “inventive memoir,” according to Publishers Weekly. An article about the book said that people who had read preliminary copies described it as containing long passages describing sexual activity and other inflammatory episodes told in Mr. Mantle’s voice, but which were not authenticated.
Judith Regan doesn't restrict her trashiness to the books she publishes. Remember back to the immolation of Bernard Kerik as the erstwhile Bush nominee for head of Homeland Security a few years ago. Kerik went down in flames after it was revealed that he was using city funds to maintain a Ground Zero pied a terre in Battery Park more to "entertain" Judith Regan than keep an eye on security and reconstruction.
Fortunately for Regan, she's got her finger on America's cultural and literary pulse, i.e., people love shitty trash with little lasting value. That apparently rubbed some of her former colleagues the wrong way, but she'll no doubt continue to laugh all the way to the bank.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at December 15, 2006 11:22 PM
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