Stuart Leuthner by Clive Cussler
After his customary morning walk, Clive sat down at his typewriter and attempted to concentrate on the work at hand, but his mind kept wandering - a group of strangers 2,000 miles away were involved in a guessing game that would have a major impact on the rest of his life. At ten o’clock, the phone rang. Lampack informed Clive that Bantam had prevailed with a winning bid of $840,000. Clive recalls little of the rest of their conversation, but he remembers calling Barbara. When she answered, he simply said, “Quit your job” and hung up. While Barbara walked into her boss’s office and gave two weeks’ notice, Clive tried to come to grips with what had just transpired.
Once the dust settled, Bantam’s management was informed that Raise the Titanic! was not only the third in a series of Dirk Pitt adventures, Clive owned the rights to the other two books. Concerned the novels might not be up to the quality of Raise the Titanic!, the publisher paid Clive $40,000 for each book to keep them off the market until their merit could be ascertained. A curious editor located copies of The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg and read them non-stop over a weekend. During Bantam’s Monday morning editorial meeting, he suggested the publisher would be crazy not to publish both books. His advice proved to be prophetic: The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg became bestsellers in their second incarnations.
Having invested a significant amount of money on an unknown author, a meeting was scheduled at Bantam’s Manhattan offices to make sure he had ten fingers and toes. Clive and Barbara saw an opportunity for a mini-vacation, and Clive invited his parents, who had never been to New York, to join them. In addition to meeting his new publisher and editor, Clive and Peter Lampack would finally meet face-to-face. The two men had been working together for more than eight years but had always conducted their business by mail or phone. Clive had never told Lampack about the “Charles Winthrop” subterfuge because he was afraid the agent might drop him. With the success of Raise the Titanic!, he decided it would be safe to come clean.
Arriving in New York in July, Clive and Barbara met Peter and his wife, Diane, at the Sign of the Dove, a posh east side restaurant. Just before the waiter served dessert, Clive leaned over to Barbara and murmured, “The time has finally come.” Beginning with Charles Winthrop’s stationery, Clive recounted the entire scheme. After he finished, Lampack burst out in laughter. Regaining his composure, the agent exclaimed, “I always thought Charlie Winthrop was some guy I met when I was drunk at a cocktail party.”
Clive arrived at Bantam’s office with an entourage - Lampack, accountant Vinnie Tepedino, and Eric Cussler. Clive had included his father not only because he thought Eric would find the negotiations interesting, he had an ulterior motive. “My father,” Clive says, “always considered me to be something of a loser. That’s probably not the best word, more like a ‘mover.’ In his mind, anybody who couldn’t hold a job for at least five years was a ‘mover.’ I tried to explain, if you work in advertising you’re lucky if you can keep a job for three years. The agency loses an account, you get sacked. Somebody doesn’t like you, you get sacked. Another outfit buys the agency, you get sacked. It’s just the way the business works. I don’t think my father ever got it.”
For the first half hour, Clive, Lampack, Tepedino, and Bantam’s management discussed contracts, royalties, and book tours. During a lull in the proceedings, Eric, who had been following the proceedings with a great deal of interest, leaned toward Lampack. “May I ask what kind of money we’re talking about here?” After looking at Clive, who smiled and nodded, the agent began to rattle off the numbers: $840,000 for the paperback rights, $40,000 each for the rights to Clive’s first two books, and $100,000 from the Book-of-the-Month Club. “Eric,” Lampack said, “Give or take, we are talking somewhere around a million dollars.”
Clive glanced at his father. He had not seen that look on his face since Eric discovered a big, black Jewett touring car parked in the driveway. “I think my Dad,” Clive says, “thought it was going to be, at the most, $50,000. He couldn’t comprehend the numbers, especially since they were being paid to his ‘mover’ son.”
Clive and Barbara were scheduled to return to Denver the next day, but Clive urged Eric and Amy to remain in New York - see the town, take in a show, eat at the best restaurants - he would take care of everything. His parents accepted his invitation and several weeks later, Tepedino received an itemized bill. Eric had carefully noted each and every expense incurred during their holiday, including several packs of chewing gum.
Amused, Tepedino showed Clive the bill. After a quick glance, Clive shrugged, “I guess Dad thinks I can afford it.”
Under the headline, “Titanic Book Worth a Million,” The Denver Post profiled Clive’s sudden fame and fortune in July 1976. “Want to know how to make a million bucks?” the article asked. “Clive Cussler can tell you . . . ‘Raise the Titanic!’ has already cleared nearly a million dollars and it hasn’t even appeared on the bookstands yet.” The article included a photograph of Clive holding the detailed scale model of the Titanic he built for reference.
In a letter to George Yeager, Clive included a copy of the article:
As you guessed by the article, I’m now a world famous, renowned, successful, wealthy, revered, lionized, simonized novelist. None of this has gone to my head however. Henceforth, please address all correspondence to Your Authorship, Clive Cussler. No sense in spoiling my image. Can you believe it? All of a sudden, just because my new book lucked out and hit the big time, people all over town are referring to me as Denver’s leading author. The two-faced bastards are acting as if I’m a homegrown asshole. Hypocritically, they overlook the fact that I’m from California and pretend I popped from a cow’s ass at Monfort Meat Packing . . . I can thank good old Mefford, Warren & Weir for my new status. If they had never fired me, I probably would have never written Raise the Titanic! and make a bundle.
Raise the Titanic! was published in hardcover by Viking in October 1976. To promote the book, Clive set out on his first book tour, appearing in cities throughout the United States. On December 5, 1976, the book appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. It would reach number two and remain on the list for twenty-six weeks. Author Catherine Coulter compiled a group of writer’s reflections, including Clive’s, on the moment they were notified their book had first appeared on the Times list. “The book was Raise the Titanic!,” Clive recounted. “The clouds parted, the sun burst through, there came the sounds of harp music, trumpets, and a drum roll.”
The sounds of celestial music quickly faded when Clive read a review in Harper’s. “If good books were rewarded with flowers and bad books with skunks,” Evan S. Connell groused, “on a scale of one to five, Raise the Titanic! would deserve four skunks . . . Buffeted by icy North Atlantic clichés, drenched with reeking balderdash, will we succeed in raising the Titanic? Never fear. The only question is whether Hollywood will buy it.”
Unnerved by the review’s vitriolic tone, Clive called Lampack and asked why the reviewer had been so hateful. Lampack told Clive to ignore the critics, explaining, “When your books start getting good literary reviews, we’re in big trouble.”
“It didn’t take me long to realize Peter knew what he was talking about,” Clive says. “Critics tend to apply literary criteria to genre writing in general, suspense adventure included. I started with suspense adventure, and I’m still at it. Literary writing just isn’t me. Too often writers of Great Books gloss over the structure and story line, going instead into great depth on character development and descriptions of leaves on a tree, a stain on a character’s tie, or the shape of a cloud. I have never had the desire to write mainstream fiction. I’ve found my niche, and I’m pretty good at it.”
Asked if he considers himself to be commercial, Clive’s answer is emphatic. “Yes, I’d be the last to deny it. If being commercial means writing for your audience, writing what appeals to them rather than the critics, then yes, I’m commercial.”
When his first royalty check arrived, Clive splurged on a
In the fall of 1977, Clive completed Vixen 03, the fifth Dirk Pitt adventure. The novel’s prologue takes place in 1954. A C-97 Stratofreighter (code name “Vixen 03”) takes off from Buckley Field in Colorado. Carrying a top-secret cargo from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the airplane disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later, Dirk Pitt is vacationing in the Rocky Mountains. When he discovers the remains of the ill-fated Stratofreighter at the bottom of Table Lake, Pitt finds himself up to his neck in a plot that involves a biological doomsday organism, African mercenaries, and a crazed ex-Royal navy officer who attempts to use the World War II battleship Iowa as a terrorist weapon against Washington, D.C.
The six-figure advance for Vixen 03 convinced Clive his new-found success was not a fluke and the Cusslers moved up in the world - literally. Located a half hour drive west of Denver, Lookout Mountain is home to a mixed bag of attractions, including Buffalo Bill Cody’s grave, Boettcher Mansion and nature preserve (the summer home of one of Colorado’s early entrepreneurs), and the Mother Cabrini Shrine, dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
Charmed by the same natural beauty they fell in love with eight years earlier in Estes Park, Clive and Barbara purchased a home on Poco Calle Road. With only one other neighbor on the secluded street, the contemporary house included four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a pool. The grounds sloped towards the east and provided a sweeping view of Denver. “The panorama at night,” Clive recalls, “was spectacular. A tapestry of twinkling lights stretching across the entire horizon.”
Dayna Cussler was with her parents when they first inspected the Lookout Mountain house. “It had two levels and a bridge with railings connecting the main entrance to the rest of the house,” Dayna says. “There was a large room under the bridge where my father built his office. I thought the bridge was the coolest part of the house, but my parents were more impressed by the views and the built-in bookshelves that went from the bottom level up to the main level. We moved in during the summer of 1979.”
Dirk describes the move to Lookout Mountain as culture shock. “My family was somewhat in awe of Clive’s sudden success. It was exciting to move into such a luxurious home, almost like we had won the lottery. The most memorable thing was the joy the house brought to my mother. She was a modest woman and would have been happy to stay in Arvada, but she also appreciated the beauty of the house and its surroundings. Her happiness is what I recall most about living on Lookout Mountain.”
The east wall of Clive’s office was fitted with large windows and sliding glass doors, but he had his desk custom-built to face west, toward the bookshelves. Dirk believes there was a good reason for the desk’s orientation. “Clive’s a smart guy,” Dirk says, laughing. “I’m sure he would have written fewer books if he spent his day’s gazing at the scenery.”
Teri, married, with two children, was now living in the Arvada house on 72nd Place. “We would spend our summers on Lookout Mountain,” Teri says. “My kids practically lived in the pool. Dad would always manage to take a break from his writing and do cannonballs with them or see how far they could swim underwater, the same kind of things he did with us when we were kids. Dad has always been the best grandpa.”
His client’s transformation from a struggling unknown to a bestselling author convinced Peter Lampack, thirty-two and married, with one child, to make a career move. “Clive’s success,” he says, “made it feasible for me to leave William Morris and open my own agency. I had been thinking about it for a while - too many staff meetings and too much politicking by people who were threatened if you came in early and left late.”
Lampack’s father-in-law owned a clothing company located in mid-town Manhattan. In 1977, the agent moved into two empty offices - small, with no windows - but the price was right. “The low overhead,” Lampack says, “allowed me time to get the wind behind my sails.” Clive remembers having to navigate his way through a maze of clothing racks to get to his agent’s office.
Two years later, Lampack moved his agency to a four-room office in the French Building, located at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. In 2011, the agency relocated to the 53rd floor of New York’s celebrated Empire State Building.
Tom Guinzburg sold Viking Press to Penguin, a subsidiary of the London-based conglomerate, Pearson Longman, Ltd, in 1975. Irving Goodman, who headed Holt, Rinehart & Winston’s trade books division, was installed as Viking’s publisher, with Joe Friedman heading up sales. The management duo - Clive refers to them as “the hotshots” - moved the company from Madison Avenue to a renovated cast-iron building on West 23rd Street and instituted a drastic cost-cutting program. Guinzburg, who was promised he would remain as a consultant, was unceremoniously fired six months later while he was home sick in bed.
Vixen 03, with a 50,000 first printing, was released on October 1, 1978. “Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a lottery winner compared to Goodman and Friedman,” Clive says. “There was very little advertising for Vixen 03, and I was sent out on what can only be described as the book tour from hell.”
In Chicago, Clive was scheduled to be interviewed on Bob Cromie’s popular Book Beat television program. A good-natured fellow noted for his genuine love of books and authors, Cromie’s show was broadcast on public television, from 1964 to 1980. After Raise the Titanic! was published, Clive had made his first appearance on Book Beat. “Bob did a great interview,” Clive says. “I was really looking forward to talking with him about Vixen 03.”
Clive and the Viking rep had only been in the studio for a few minutes when Cromie took Clive aside. “I’m very sorry to have to do this,” he confessed, “but I can’t have you on the show.” Several months earlier, Cromie had contacted Viking and requested one of their authors for an interview. Not only did the publisher tell him no, they refused to give him an explanation. Cromie assured Clive it was nothing personal. He would love to have him on the show, but if Viking was going to treat him like that, he felt obligated to reciprocate. On their way out of the studio, Clive told the rep, “I get the feeling Viking doesn’t want me anymore.”
Clive’s itinerary invariably scheduled him to fly at night, a strategy he believes was devised so he would eat for free on the airplane rather than billing Viking for meals in restaurants. Arriving in Cleveland well after midnight, Clive told the cab driver the name of his hotel. Peering at him in the rearview mirror, the cabby asked, “Mister, are you sure that’s where you’re going?” Arriving at the hotel, the night clerk gave him the same reception. “Are you sure you’ve got the right place?” His room, Clive recalls, “was an absolute horror. The television set had been ripped off the wall, and I used a coat hanger to wire the door shut.
New York was the last stop on the tour. Clive checked into the Gotham Hotel. “This was before millions were spent on renovations and the Gotham was transformed into the trendy Peninsula New York,” Clive says. “The furniture was beat up, paint was peeling off the walls, and the plumbing in the bathroom was rusty and leaked.”
Peter Lampack stopped by to see Clive. As his agent looked around the room, Clive could see he was horrified by his client’s grim accommodations. After relating the tribulations of the book tour, Clive ushered Lampack into the bathroom where he was holding cockroach races in the bathtub. Clive chuckles, “I had to give the contestants a crumb of bread at each turn and thought Peter was going to lose his breakfast.”
A few days after Clive flew back to Denver, Lampack was summoned to Viking’s offices. Irving Goodman demanded to know why Clive had behaved so badly on the book tour. His client’s transgr
Lampack related Goodman’s accusations to Clive, who immediately set him straight. After signing books for several hours at a Chicago bookstore, Clive was exhausted. A clerk asked him to sign her book. Slumped in a chair and out of ideas, he asked her for a suggestion. She cheerfully replied, “Write something wicked.” Glad to oblige, Clive signed, “Stick it in your ear! Clive Cussler.”
In San Francisco, Clive addressed a group of book dealers. He began his presentation by relating a conversation he had at a similar event in New York. “I was sitting next to a book dealer, Saul Greenberg, and asked him, ‘Saul, should I talk about my book or something else?’ Saul told me, ‘Clive, I’ve read the book. For god’s sake, talk about something else.’” A young man, characterized by Clive as “shaggy,” stood up and started screaming, “You’re anti-Semitic, you’re an anti-Semite!” Clive and the audience were initially stunned, but the booksellers, including several who happened to be Jewish, ended up giving the heckler the bum’s rush. As for the charge of bad mouthing his publisher, the Viking rep in Chicago had dutifully reported Clive’s remark about “Viking not wanting me anymore.”
The wretched book tour and Goodman’s unfounded accusations convinced Clive and Lampack it was time to find a new publisher. There was, however, a major obstacle - Viking had the option for Clive’s next book.