I MENTIONED EARLIER that money has seldom played a decisive part in my career decisions, but there were exceptions, of course, and one particular period proved to be an exception.
At the beginning of the Eighties I was feeling bad about my prose. It wasn’t any one thing—it was more like everything .
The one bright spot, financially, was that I had just sold Cadillac Jack , for, I believe, a $25,000 advance, a sum I assumed would easily pay my income tax.
A few minutes with my tax accountant revealed, to my horror, that I had been far too optimistic, not about what I had earned but about what I owed. It was $50,000, not half that amount.
It was the beginning of March, forty-five days to Armageddon, when I made this discovery.
What to do? (Many a writer, of course, has had to ask him- or herself that very question. Think Dostoyevsky!)
What I did was write, in twenty-two days, The Desert Rose , a book that seemed to flow out of me as rapidly as I could type. The Desert Rose was supposed to have been a screenplay, but, to my intense relief, it came out a novel. I had hardly written a sentence I liked for eight years: to actually enjoy my own prose again was a big, big deal.
My literary agent for the first thirty years of my career was Dorothea Oppenheimer, a beautiful European who acquired me as a client in 1960 and remained my agent until her death from pancreatic cancer three decades later. Though she lived to read Lonesome Dove , she didn’t live to see it win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and to rise a fair ways on the New York Times bestseller list.
As Dorothea began to fail, my next agent, Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar, began to quietly take over some of Dorothea’s chores—indeed it was Irving’s being so nice to Dorothea at her painful end that persuaded me to make him my agent when she died.