Hey, once upon a very distant time, long, long ago, I ran into John Updike at a clam shack in Ipswich, Massachusetts. I was just out of grad school, and I was a fan. Actually, I was a John Updike addict and had just read Rabbit Redux.
Updike was eating by himself. Small, neat bites, like his sentences. I sat down at a nearby picnic table and watched Updike eat the whole meal. Steamers and a glass of iced tea.
I didn’t want to bother him. I just sat there watching. That seemed like enough fun for one afternoon in Ipswich. Man, I loved those Rabbit books of his.
Ipswich wasn’t my last time being a celebrity stalker either.
When I was the CEO at J. Walter Thompson North America, three or four times a year we would invite our most important clients to a dinner featuring a guest speaker.
One night we had James Carville and Mary Matalin. That very unlikely husband-and-wife team was funny and engaging and effectively covered both sides of the political aisle. Our agency clients were mostly Republicans, so they loved Mary Matalin, who had been a campaign director for George H. W. Bush. But they had to admit that former Democratic Party consultant Carville was pretty sharp and maybe even funnier than Mary. Maybe, maybe not. Mary doesn’t think so.
The following year we invited Tom Wolfe. Actually, I was the one who invited him, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody speak more eloquently than Wolfe. He talked for close to an hour as if he had written out the whole speech, every sentence, polished it, rewritten it, then delivered the talk without a single muff. The words, the sentences, flowed like the best of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic.
At the end of the evening, I sidled up to Wolfe. “I could give you a ride home. It’s right on my way.”
That white lie is how I got to be his chauffeur that night. We arrived in front of his apartment, somewhere on the East Side. We sat in my car and talked for a good half hour. Wolfe was a kind man. Most of the good writers are that way. I try to do the same when I’m approached by people who enjoy my books. My wife, Sue, says that sometimes I’m too kind. But Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe and Wilfrid Sheed were really good role models.
On one of my many book tours, I remember talking with my PR guardian Erinn McGrath about how I was with the public. Erinn said, “Jim, I’ve been on a lot of tours with a lot of different authors. You aren’t just kind to people who like your books or even the ones who don’t. You are genuinely interested, warm, patient, and surprisingly open with them.” Then Erinn added, “Don’t let it go to your head, hotshot.”