Wry Martinis Read online

  2. Ten Private Cocktail Reception Tickets. Includes Photo Opportunity with H.R.H. Prince Begin; Cameras Graciously Provided by Disposable Cameras, Inc.

  3. A Warm Embrace of Your Person by H.R.H. Prince Begin, Including a Hearty Pretense That He Has Met You Before.

  4. Cocktails of Your Choice Made with Liquors with Recognizable Brand Names. Glasses Graciously Provided by Baccarat.

  5. Dinner: Beluga Caviar with Blinis; Fugu (Potentially Poisonous Japanese Blowfish, Prepared by Chefs Skilled at Removing the Toxins); Chocolate Leveraged Buyout. Catering Courtesy of Phabulous Phoods, Served by Trained Actors, Superbly Resentful at Finding Themselves in This Line of Work.

  6. Your Name Included in All Press Releases and Media Promotions.

  7. Keepsake Bag. Contents: New Cologne “Joxx” (Perfect for Chauffeur’s Christmas Present); Gold-Plated Cuticle Remover. Both Wrapped in an Abundance of Crinkly Colored Tissue (Perfect for Maid’s Christmas Present).

  ————

  $25,000—Patron

  1. Twelve-Foot-High Dried-Flower Arrangement on Table, Courtesy of Fleurs du Mel.

  2. Brief Acknowledgment of Your Existence by H.R.H. Prince Begin During Cocktail Hour. Champagne Graciously Provided by Château X-ellente, Napa; Glasses Courtesy of Pierre One.

  3. The Imperial Portion of Sevruga Caviar (Two Full Grams); Crackers Courtesy of Ritz.

  ————

  $10,000—Host

  1. Photo Opportunity with H.R.H. (Extreme-Wide-Angle Lens Graciously Provided by Maxiflex.)

  2. Two Glasses of Sonoma Sogood ’95. Glasses Provided by Party Rite Plastix.

  3. Capellini Alla Lumpfish. Plates Courtesy of Paperware.

  ————

  $5,000—Friend

  1. Table Near Speakers. Earplugs Courtesy of Bleeding Ear Corporation.

  2. A Selection of Locally Brewed Beer, Served en Bouteille.

  3. Fleeting Glimpse of H.R.H. Prince Begin.

  4. Le Diner sur l’Herbe: A Medley of Recently Mown Grasses from the Sheep Meadow; Dandelion Salad; Tarte de Boue (Mud Pie).

  ————

  $1,000—Acquaintance

  1. Le Mariage de Brun et de Violet (Peanut Butter and Grape Jelly).

  2. Eau de Tap à la Façon Paysanne. Served in Your Own Cupped Hands with One Full Cube of Ice (Hole Included).

  3. Full Coat-Check Privileges (Tipping Extra).

  ————

  $500—Do We Know You?

  1. Ropeside Tickets Outside Main Entrance to Grand Foyer, Ideal for Viewing the Arrival of the Less Economically Challenged Invitees.

  2. Loan of Umbrellas (in Event of Rain).

  3. Vol de Pigeons. (Magnificent Aerial Display of Pigeons as They Gambol Delightfully Above the Assembled.)

  4. Venin de Fugu á la Mort. Canapés Made from Removed Blowfish Toxins. Transportation Courtesy of Emergency Medical Services.

  —The New Yorker, 1996

  Moodest

  Proposals

  NEW DELHI, April 2 (Reuters)—A Hindu group in India offered today to shelter British cows threatened with slaughter because of mad cow disease.

  —The Times

  “Surely the solution to Cambodia’s mine problem is here before our very eyes in black and white.”

  —A Cambodian newspaper, quoted in The Times, on using British cows to detonate unexploded land mines

  BERLIN, N.H.—Republican Presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan today proposed that the United States import the 4.7 million British cows affected by mad-cow disease and deploy them across the U.S.—Mexican border to deter illegal immigrants.

  DALLAS—Ross Perot today attacked the idea of deploying cows along the U.S.—Mexican border, saying that hungry illegal immigrants would be likely to “take a bite out of ’em on the way over and then we’d end up with tens of thousands of crazy Mexicans running around. I ask you,” he told a crowd, “is that the America we want to leave for our grandchildren?”

  FAIRFAX, VA.—The National Rifle Association today announced that it has offered to send its entire 3.3-million membership over to England to assist with its massive cow-culling effort. N.R.A. executive Wayne LaPierre said that if Britain did not have such stringent gun-control laws “they’d have been able to nip this problem at the start.” He called on Congress to immediately repeal the ban on some types of assault rifles, including the .50-caliber Elsie Eliminator, so that the membership can “do the job right.”

  BOGOTA—Luis Alfonso Maquilon Amaya, a head trafficker for the Cali cocaine cartel, is reportedly trying to buy up all 4.7 million mad British cows on the black market. According to sources here, the plan is to stuff the cows full of cocaine and ship them to the United States. “Normally we have problems with customs when the bags break inside and the animals make a big scene,” a source said. “But a vaca loca isn’t bothered too much by even a couple of kilos in its bloodstream.”

  CANBERRA—The Australian government has said it will take delivery of all British mad cows. Trade Minister Tim Fischer said that the plan is to “float the cows off beaches so the sharks will eat them instead of tourists and the odd Prime Minister.”

  LOS ANGELES—Entertainer Michael Jackson and Saudi Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal announced today that they will create a theme-park home for all British cows afflicted with mad cow disease. Stroking a cow’s forelock as he spoke at the press conference in a barely audible whisper, the singer would not provide details of the amusement park or venture to explain why people would pay to be with millions of mad cows other than to say it would be “really, really wonderful.”

  WASHINGTON—Mayor Marion Barry today offered to use Britain’s mad cows to fill District of Columbia potholes. The one problem, he said, is that there are only 4.7 million cows, and the District has 7.8 million potholes.

  JORDAN, MONT.—The FBI plans to stampede more than four million mad British cows in an effort to force the Montana Freemen to end their standoff, it has been learned. FBI director Louis Freeh declined to comment on reports that British C-130 Hercules cargo planes have been observed dropping large numbers of cows by parachute near the standoff area.

  BEIJING—China announced today that it plans to conduct “amphibious mad-cow exercises” in the Taiwan Strait. Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned China’s leadership that the U.S. viewed the development “seriously.”

  NEW YORK—The Council of Fashion Designers of America said today that it would use British mad cows in runway shows. “Fashion recognizes its responsibility to help,” said C.F.D.A. director Fern Mallis. “The cows are very contemporary, they look great in leather, and their eyes have the look.”

  HOLLYWOOD—A group of actors and actresses has called on Prime Minister John Major to “stop the slaughter” of British mad cows and “do something positive instead, like vaccinate them or whatever.”

  “We feel the government hasn’t done enough,” said Liam Neeson. Neeson said he has felt sympathetic toward British cows ever since the filming of the movie Rob Roy, in which he escaped from soldiers by hiding inside the carcass of a large, decomposing Hereford. The group, Creativity United to Denounce the Slaughter (CUDS), plans to distribute lapel udders with ribbons.

  OAK BROOK, ILL.—The McDonald’s Corporation announced today its plans to introduce a new line of sandwiches next month called Mad Macs.

  —The New Yorker, 1996

  Homaǵe to Tom Clancy

  The Eǵo

  Has Landed

  The office of the O. F. Bowen insurance agency is about a forty-five-minute drive from Washington, in Owings, Maryland, opposite a corn-field and just up the road from the Dash-In food store. The decor is Hartford Drab: gray steel desks, beat-up filing cabinets, wooden chairs, and veneer paneling. Near the door is a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Books and folders with such titles as Reliance Auto, CAMP Risk Management Series, and The World’s Missile Systems line a bookshelf. Another photo shows President Reagan, in black tie, introducing the owner of the O. F.
Bowen agency to President Raul Alfonsín of Argentina.

  The phone rings; it’s the William Morris agency in New York.

  “Yeah,” says the man behind the steel desk, lighting a cigarette. He is in his early forties and wears very thick, tinted glasses. “Number eight hardcover and three soft. We’re on both sides.” He listens, inhales, um-hums. “We may have one more week, then it’ll die. But it’s been one hell of a ride.”

  Indeed it has. A year ago no one had ever heard of Thomas L. Clancy, Jr. Then along came The Hunt For Red October, his book about the Soviet Union’s hottest new submarine and its captain, who decides to take the sub and defect to the United States. All hell breaks loose, and it falls to a bookish CIA analyst named Jack Ryan to tell the President whether Red October is the Trojan horse of World War III or the vehicle for a legitimate high-stakes dash to freedom.

  In a business in which the average free-lance writer makes less than five thousand dollars a year, Clancy accomplished the equivalent of hitting a grand-slam home run in his first at bat.

  Red October sold about 330,000 hardcover copies during twenty-nine weeks on The New York Times’s best-seller list and moved onto the paperback best-seller list, where it had risen to the number-three slot by December. He sold the book to Hollywood for “pretty serious money” if the cameras actually roll. And he has a six-figure advance for his next book, which will appear simultaneously in thirteen countries. “We missed Greece, but that’s no great loss,” Clancy says.

  It should also be noted that Clancy has become Writer of Sea Thrillers to the President of the United States. The job is without portfolio, but it does have its advantages.

  There’s a fat note of irony to all this, since Clancy, who started selling insurance fourteen years ago because it was the first “decent” job offer he got, had always wanted to be a writer. But as a level-headed, Jesuit-educated Baltimore boy, the son of a mailman, he knew the truth—that “writers die poor.” So he went to work selling policies and raising a family.

  Eventually he and his wife were able to buy the business and make a “decent living.” They insured country things: barns, oats, the odd restaurant, tobacco (while it hung out to cure), and horses. They stayed away from life insurance, says Cheryl Terry, their assistant, “because it’s too morbid.” It was a nice, quiet, no-fireworks kind of life.

  In many ways it still is, apparently, since much of what Clancy has to say is about how success has not changed him. Clancy is, in fact, so self-deprecating about his sea thriller and so generous in talking about the talents of others that he often uses the pronoun “we” rather than “I.” While he has the aw-shucks down pretty good, we—I, that is—suspect he is getting more of a kick out of all this than he is letting on.

  The saga of Red October actually began on a winter morning in 1976, when Clancy was reading his Washington Post and saw a story about the Storozhevoy incident. The Storozhevoy was a Soviet frigate whose crew mutinied and tried to take the ship and defect to Sweden. They got within about thirty miles of Swedish waters before the Soviets stopped them. The mutineers were shot. Clancy clipped the story and filed it away, thinking there might be a book in it.

  Seven years later he found himself listening to sea stories being told by one of his clients, a former sub driver (as they call themselves). “All of a sudden a light bulb went off and I said, ‘Hey, submariners are pretty much the same as fighter pilots. They just do it a little slower.’ ” The Wet Stuff!

  He started writing, and by late October 1983 had two chapters to show Marty Callahan, an editor at the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis. Clancy had worked for Callahan once before, writing an article on the MX missile for Proceedings, the NIP’s magazine. Other than that, NIP publishes mostly naval textbooks and had never published a novel. But Callahan liked the two chapters and told Clancy to keep going. So he went home and started over at page one.

  He wrote in his spare time, sticking a piece of paper into his IBM Selectric whenever he got a chance. He had no outline and didn’t even know how it was going to end. “I let my characters do all the work. Sounds crazy, but it works.”

  Clancy thought it was more “fun” to write that way, anyway. “It’s a discovery process for the writer as well as the reader,” he says, “and I think that’s really the enjoyable part of writing—that everything you write is actually new, and you don’t know what’s going to happen until it does.”

  He banged out the pulse-quickening last two chapters—almost one hundred manuscript pages—in two days. Then, on February 28, just four months after his initial meeting with Callahan, he showed up at the NIP’s offices with a 720-page manuscript.

  Clancy says he waited three weeks “to find out if it was worth fooling with, or something to be used for starting a fire.” (We ourselves think he is pulling our leg here.) Finally an NIP editor called and said, in so many words, don’t use it to start a fire. He doesn’t remember exactly what she did say.

  “It was kind of a euphoric day for me.… It was nice, but I didn’t go out and get drunk that night. I had three kids at the time. That tends to keep you down to earth.”

  The NIP’s editors then asked some naval officers for an opinion of the manuscript and, according to Clancy, one of them “really freaked.” He wrote a letter to the Press saying the story was so full of classified stuff that there was no way the firm could publish it.

  Clancy chuckles as he pulls out a copy of the letter, which says that Red October “is no Run Silent, Run Deep” (the classic submarine novel and film of World War II). “He’s right there,” says Clancy. “Ned [Edward L.] Beach is a much better writer than I am.”

  Clancy even disclaims the title of writer; he calls himself a storyteller. “I may never make the transition. I’m gonna try. I wrote a fairly decent thriller, okay? It’s not King Lear. And it kind of embarrasses me sometimes when people make so much of it.” (We don’t remember anyone calling it King Lear, but it is a fine sentiment.)

  Nonetheless, the navy was genuinely alarmed by the depth of Clancy’s knowledge of its top, top secrets. All of a sudden Clancy found himself being swarmed over by the Naval Investigative Service and a commander at the Pentagon who wanted to know how he had found out so much about the world of nuclear subs—and from whom.

  Clancy obliged the commander by telling him where he’d gotten it all, without mentioning the names of any of the active-duty naval officers who had talked to him. Not that they’d given him classified material, but Clancy didn’t trust the brass to believe that they hadn’t. Finally Clancy said, “Look, if you’ll tell me what sensitive stuff you want removed, I’ll remove it.”

  This put the commander in a bit of a pickle. “Well, I can’t tell you,” he answered. “Then I would be confirming some stuff that I can’t confirm.”

  “The thing that really bent ’em out of shape is I knew what ‘Crazy Ivan’ meant,” Clancy says, referring to the navy’s term for a maneuver used by Russian subs to detect if they’re being followed. “I picked that up from one of my clients. They were really torched that I knew what that meant.”

  When Clancy finally met John Lehman, the secretary of the navy, Lehman told him that his first reaction on reading the book had been to say, “Who the hell cleared this?”

  Red October was published in October 1984 and sold twenty thousand copies in the first six weeks. “For a first novel, that’s not bad at all,” Clancy says in a classic bit of understatement; most first novels sell about one-tenth that number, total. By the end of the year it looked as if the book was going to top out at fifty thousand. “Which,” Clancy deadpans, “for a first novel is all right.”

  That might have been the end of it, but for a chance series of events.

  Jeremiah O’Leary, a Washington Times reporter who had served as the National Security Council’s spokesman under Reagan, gave a copy of the book to Nancy Reynolds, a friend of the Reagans and a partner in the Washington lobbying firm Wexler Reynolds Harrison and Schule. Reynolds was on h
er way to Buenos Aires, and O’Leary wanted her to pass the book on to the U.S. ambassador there, who is a mutual friend of theirs. Reynolds read it on the plane and was so taken with it that she ordered a case of Red Octobers for Christmas presents. One of them ended up under the president’s tree.

  Not long afterward, Time printed a story on Reagan in which he mentioned that he’d read the book. He pronounced it “the perfect yarn.”

  The folks at the Naval Institute Press may have been new at publishing novels, but they weren’t dumb. They ran the presidential imprimatur in huge type in a New York Times ad. “That quote,” says Clancy, “put us on the national [best-seller] list. And we’ve been there ever since.”

  Red October peaked at number two on the hardcover list. “It would have been number one if it hadn’t been for Stephen King, the dirty guy,” says Clancy, attempting a scowl. “If he’d waited one more week before bringing out Skeleton Crew, I would have been number one. Well, who ever said the world was fair?”

  The book was helped by the fact that it was a curiosity in the publishing world. That it came out of left field, from a company that publishes naval textbooks, “made people sit up and notice it,” says Daisy Maryles, the executive editor of the industry’s bible, Publishers Weekly. “It was unusual, and that made it easier to promote; there was an automatic angle. Obviously, it helped that behind all this there was a good book. But there was a serendipity to it all.”

  And so it was that in March 1985, the insurance agent from Owings found himself being invited to the White House—three times in two weeks.

  “The first [time] was meeting the president in the Oval Office,” Clancy says. “That was the day Chernenko was buried.” (So that’s why he declined to attend.) “Henry Kissinger was there. We had lunch in the Roosevelt Room with some relatively important folks: Secretary Lehman, Senator [Mark] Hatfield, General Brent Scowcroft, Nancy Reynolds, of course. The president told me he liked the book and asked me what the next one was about, and I told him. He asked me, ‘Who wins?’ And I said, ‘The good guys.’