Janet Berliner

by Janet Berliner

A few months ago, I promised to write about the story behind the story of CRICHTON-ON-CRICHTON. Since then, after a decade of work and promises, I have received a message via the doctor’s agent: “Michael says he no longer has any interest in the book.” Before writing anything further about it, I have to find out my legal standing on the contracts and collaboration agreement which we both signed. Thus, once again, the topic will have to wait.

I have finally completed STONES. Since many people have asked that I continue to post chapters here—and because it’s a topic I feel needs to be aired—I give you

Chapter 15: Who Will Tell the Children.

When the Wall came down and I returned from Israel and Berlin, I tried to write about my experiences. I thought about my children and my grandchildren, and about how we, my generation, could pass on to them what was likely to be but a few lines in their history books. The words that kept running around in my head were Thomas Jefferson’s: “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

The opportunity to explore my feelings did not come along until years later, after my next trip to Israel and visits to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and to the Children’s Memorial.

The Children’s Memorial is a circular underground structure built by Abraham and Edita Spiegel of Beverly Hills in memory of Uziel, their son who perished in Auschwitz. It commemorates the one and a half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.

One and a half million…1,500,000…children.

The memorial hall itself stands in darkness. It is built in much the same way as a Disneyland ride. You walk into the darkness through a small anteroom in which three-dimensional photos of children are exhibited. A railing separates you from a circular floor. The walls and ceiling are a series of convoluted mirrors. Five burning memorial candles are multiplied into tens of millions of pinpricks of light, symbolizing the souls of children who perished. Softly the chant begins…a litany of their names forcing the weight of your body in a circle through the darkness and back out into the stark sunlight.

I knew that if I lived to be a thousand, I could not remove that experience from my consciousness. Would that I could take each person in the world by the hand and lead them into that hall of lights.

As luck would have it, shortly after my return our very own Richard Dansky invited me to write the introduction to a daring experiment, a controversial game supplement called Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah. Who would have thought that a game could teach history? The Anti-Defamation League threw their arms up in horror, until they saw for themselves what Richard and White Wolf, his publisher, had achieved.

What I wrote was the prologue to the game book; I called it, Mi Yagid Labanim: Who Will Tell the Children?

With your indulgence, here is an excerpt:

My daughter, a contemporary Jewish American teenager, when first forced to face her heritage, felt put upon. She had nothing to do with the past. She was not involved.

It’s not my problem.

All of that stuff happened ages ago.

Why rehash ancient history?

Forget it already.

Forget it? Forget prejudice, violence, ethnic strife, genocide?

I don’t think so.

So what do we do to ensure that our children and their children and their children remember? For if they do not remember, the attempt to make it happen again will be repeated.

Which group will be singled out the next time around? Redheads, perhaps, or blue-eyed blondes?

It’s not the N word or the J word, or what’s PC and what’s not that matters. It’s learning that we are setting each other apart without regard for human dignity and making it possible for genocide to reoccur when we say things like, “There’s a black man at the door” instead of “There’s a man at the door”, or “I bought the car at a great price. Boy, did I Jew him down.”

Again I ask, what do we do about it? What can we do?

The answer is that we must do what we can, each in our own way…in short stories, in essays, in poetry and novels, often using magic realism to define truths too painful and ugly to be faced in any other form.

Each time I complete a piece of work, I think…I hope…that I have done with it. That I have paid my dues.

But for some things the dues can never fully be paid.

In a sense, it is like the bodily functions that most of us perform daily. Each day, having performed them, we feel relief. We feel clean. And then the offal begins to gather once more and as surely as night follows day, the pressing need for elimination returns.

So it is with my creative bowels. When I think that I have written enough, I discover that I must write more. And while I do, I question if that is in fact the answer to educating our children’s children. The survivors are old. Their children are growing old. Their grandchildren say it is not their problem. Many of them do not know about their roots, still more do not care. What, I ask myself, will work to educate and inform the children of the new millennium? Will they read William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, will they watch Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, or do we have to feed them horrors in some form that makes it palatable for them?

If we give them a Holocaust website, will it serve as a tool of awareness, or will it turn evil into a game?

Before Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, I was repeatedly told that no one wanted to hear about the Holocaust. That wasn’t true, was it? His film was a box office smash, even in Germany.

Why does that not surprise me?

Because I was in Berlin in the seventies when the government insisted that all schoolchildren watch a documentary on Hitler; the children stomped and sang along and complained, asking why they too could not march and sing and have “…that kind of fun.” I was there in the eighties when groups of German children were taken to visit the sites of concentration camps and complained because they were not able to see the machinery in action. I was there in the nineties when a game was developed that invited the participants to devise better ways of ridding the world of Jews.

On the day Richard called to ask me to write this essay, I had written the last scene of the third book in a trilogy of Holocaust novels. I was going through my research materials, packing them away with a sense of relief, when the telephone rang. As I lifted the receiver, I held in one hand a precious sepia photograph of my grandmother with her older brother and three sisters, taken somewhere around 1929. The glass had cracked, so I was removing the photograph in order to put it into a new frame.

“Hello,” I said, idly turning over the photograph.

The script on the back was tiny, fine and faded. I used a magnifying glass to read it:

Siegfried Lichtenstein. Born 1880. An officer in the Kaiser’s Army. Mostly invalided after the war. Applied to go to Johannesburg, but stayed in Regensburg, Bavaria, when his wife was refused a visa. He thought that he was safe, what with half the bones missing in his face. He was one of the first to be deported.

Hedwig Lichtenstein. Born 1882. Married Heimann. Lived in Regensburg. Immigrated to Melbourne, Australia. Died 1968.

Erna Lichtenstein. Born 1886. Lived in Berlin. Deported to Theresienstadt in 1938 and died in the gas chamber.

Ella Lichtenstein. Born 1888. Married Joseph Kahn. In 1932 the family with two children immigrated to Amsterdam, Holland. In 1939, the husband was taken to a
workcamp, the children to an unknown destination (“For their safety”) and their 8-roomed home was filled with Nazis for whom Ella had to keep house. (I was there in 1960. The neighbors told me that Ella was taken to Auschwitz in 1942.)

My darling wife, Recha Lichtenstein. Born 1887. Married James Abraham. Arrived safely Cape Town, South Africa, 13th June, 1936.

Recha Lichtenstein Abraham.

My adored grandmother. The story-teller of the family, saved and brought to South Africa through the ingenuity of my mother—her youngest daughter…

I heard what Richard said on the phone that day through the keening voices of the collective unconscious of the dead—my own family, and the family of Man.

Earnestly, he explained what it was he was trying to do.

I started to argue, to say that the Holocaust was not a game, but a voice inside my head stopped me. “We must teach them through the tools with which they are comfortable,” it said. “Insanity and entertainment have become interchangeable.”

We can look at program guides and choose to: Watch the Disney Channel; Watch Discovery; Watch a murder trial; Hear David Duke address his hooded comrades about an all-White Christian America; See Farrakahn, surrounded by his uniformed guards, use rhetoric and mannerisms almost identical to Hitler’s. Once upon a time, I thought, there were bards and storytellers who passed on the words of the elders and the history of their peoples. Then came the era when the pen was mightier than the sword.

But there are few bards now, and as we approach the millennium, the pen diminishes in power. Someone, somewhere, somehow, must tell the children.

While Richard waited patiently for my answer, I recalled a day I spent in Nice, in an old stone building overlooking the Mediterranean. As if it were happening again, I saw myself being handed a trust by my great uncle, a Holocaust survivor who had nary an organ fully intact. Our conversation switched back and forth between six languages, only five of which I fully understood—something he did out of old habit from his concentration camp days when such devices were some protection from eavesdroppers. He gave me a copy of La Deportation. The book was a compilation of black and white photographs, which had recently been released from the French government’s archives. They were stark and unembellished by text. Snapshots taken by German guards and “technicians” in the camps and sent to their families to show them what their sons and brothers and fathers were doing during their workday.

“Take this to America,” my great uncle said. “Make them publish it.”

I hand carried eight copies of that heavy book to the States. For a year, I devoted myself to trying to get it reprinted here.

Every copy of the book was stolen from the publishers to whom I sent it.

The book was never reprinted here, nor do I have a copy today. My great uncle is dead. But in my own mind’s eye those black and white photographs, taken with box cameras—the toys of that time—teach the full lesson of the inhumanities of which man is capable.

Remembering, I asked Richard to whom he wished me to address the essay.

“That’s up to you,” he said. “By whom do you wish most to be heard?”

“By the children,” I said, picturing the Children’s Memorial Garden at Yad Vashem. It was there, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, that I had the most profoundly moving experience of my life. “That is my greatest fear…that when my generation is gone, there will be no one left who will tell them the true history of mankind’s darkest moment.”

No one to remind them that “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

More in December

by Janet Berliner

I thought this story would be appropriate for the season. Next month I’ll be back with that promised scoop on my work with Michael Crichton. I hope you enjoy. –J.

———-

Knit one, purl one.

Castoff.

The sweater was finished.

Stretching, Bethany rubbed the small of her back and stared at the empty street outside her window, her ears tuned for the crunch of his footsteps in the snow that had been falling all night. “Comeback to me, Nicholas,” she whispered, swearing that if he had not returned by morning she would unravel the last row of the right sleeve and go on knitting him, this time weaving one of her Cajun grandmother’s curses into each tiny woolen loop. She would punish him for the broken dreams and the worthless promises. He had been strong once, in body and spirit. That was before he had decided to come to New York; dragging her here from the bayou; telling her that if she did not come she would lose him. Now the bottle had claimed his soul and she had lost him any way. She had nothing left to cling to, nothing except the knitting and the waiting and the knowledge that her curses would reach out and touch him, no matter where he had gone.

Knit one, purl one.

Bethany watched the sleeve grow, counting one extra inch, then a second and third, pushing the stitches across the needle like rosary beads sending prayers to the ears of God. Only Bethany’s god was a different one; it was guided by her need for vengeance.

When her knitting was done, Bethany went out into the Bowery. From dawn until dusk and through the night, pausing neither for food nor rest, she haunted the alleys, searching for Nicholas in the unshaven faces of every broken down bum she could find. She did not give up until that moment of greatest darkness, that instant shortly before the dawn when the night seemed to take a deep breath and briefly renew its losing battle against the encroachment of daylight.

Tired and hungry and cold, her eyes raw from the debris being whipped up by the wind and her jacket gaping open over Nick’s bulky sweater, it’s right sleeve so long that it had to be doubled up into her armpit, she started for home.

But picturing the dingy room she had shared first with Nicholas then with her loneliness and her knitting, Bethany stood still. That wasn’t home. She couldn’t go back there, not now, not without even the knitting to sustain her. There was nothing in that room she could not live without and she had enough money in her pocket to take a bus to her real home. She was going back to the bayou where she belonged. Now, before she had time to change her mind.

“I’m leaving, Nicholas.”

She had not meant to say the words aloud, to yell them and let the echo against the buildings and flow into the sour-smelling doorways. She had meant only to weave the last of her curses into each syllable of his name.

Angrily she removed her jacket and drew Nick’s sweater over her head. Holding it with the tips of her fingers as if it were a dead roach, she headed for the nearest garbage can. Almost without breaking her stride, she lifted the lid and dropped the sweater inside. She would leave it for one of the unwashed creatures hovering in the shadows, a vulture whose only raison d’etre was the anticipation of disemboweling the Bowery’s refuse. She and her gods had done their work; that she would never see what she had rocked, she was going home.

Half listening for the rattle of aluminum behind her, Bethany walked on. The scavenger moved quickly; she had hardly taken a dozen steps before she heard the sounds of his rummaging in the trash. She hesitated; stopped; shivered in the damp chill.

Turning around, she watched the man who listed into the glare of the streetlight, his gait singular, lopsided, pushed askew by the disproportionate length of his right arm. Balancing himself with difficulty, he pushed his arms through the sleeves of the sweater and pulled it over his head. When it was on he stroked it, as if he could not quite believe his new good fortune.

Suddenly, he felt her there. Knew it was she who had done this to him. He raised his head and she saw his eyes. They were filled with questions and pleading with terror.

Slowly, lurching, Nicholas moved toward her.

Smiling, she let him advance. Allowed him to hope. Watched the long fingers of his right hand brush the wine-spattered sidewalk. When he was close enough to touch her, he lifted his elongated right arm and held it out to her in a gesture of supplication.

“You really should have come back to me, Nicholas,” she said, admiring the perfect fit of the sleeve and the stitches on the cuff that encircled his distended wrist. “You really should have come home.”

by Janet Berliner

Which stands for “Most Frequently asked question.”

In 1993, while working on the infamously unpublished Crichton-on-Crichton, I wrote a chapter called FAQ–Frequently Asked Questions. At the time, I thought I’d made up the acronym, but I guess I was reinventing the wheel. Today, twelve years later, with the book as yet unseen and before Dr. C’s 64th birthday, I’m adding the M for ‘Most.’

In my case, that inevitably means questions about collaboration: 1) Why do you do it?
2) How do you do it?
3) What sparked the project?

I could easily write three blogs about each project answering those questions, but I’ll try instead to be succinct.

1) Why? There’s a different answer attached to each collaboration, yet each one has a single thing in common–the belief that the whole will be better than its parts.

2) How? No two projects have had the same M.O.

3) Spark? Each one is a tale unto itself.

Hrrmph, you say. That’s a fat lot of help.

All right, I answer. Let me try a different route, one that tackles some of my actual collaborations.

As every marriage in unique, so is every collaboration. I’ll do this somewhat chronologically (a bit complex, as I had six books come out in 1995 and 1996).

The Execution Exchange:

An Oregon mountain man came to me with a wonderful concept for a thriller. He’d written the book. I tried to teach him how to make it saleable. When I gave up, he said “You rewrite it” and I did. It sold extremely well, considering the publisher put out the uncorrected proof that had been typeset by an alcoholic.

Madagascar Manifesto:

You’re going to get the shortened version. George wrote a wonderful story about Africans on the moon. It was up for a Nebula. He had read RITE OF THE DRAGON, my African novel, and liked it. A lot, he said. I was writing a novel based on my mother’s escape from Berlin in 1935 and her return there on the day before the Wall went up. George sent me a paragraph about cannibal dogs and asked if it sparked anything.

It sparked a correspondence, then a novella, which we sold. The novella sparked a novel (Child of the Light) for which I cannibalized the book I had been writing. Then came Child of the Journey, followed by Children of the Dusk. The novella that started it all would appear in longer form at the end of the fourth book, should there be one. There’s also a fifth book and one George wants to write about Madagascar.

Maybe George should write the Madagascar book, I should write the Deborah book, and readers will get a twofer.

We started Child more than twenty years ago. George was then, as he is now, a teacher. He had written many short stories and a YA-For-Hire. He was an expert researcher, something he loved to do, while I was much more involved with writing from experience, from family and other verbal histories and from observation. He is a high-speed typist. He wrote draughts faster than you could drink them. I was slow and, for the most part, a stylist. He is Catholic; I am Jewish. Our philosophies are oftentimes poles apart. My family came from Berlin. Few of them survived.

There was no such thing as e-mail when we began. We used the telephone a lot and got together during Summers to plot and fight things out.

It’s for good reason that we were known as the fire and ice team. I’m a gypsy, he’s an Eskimo, at least at heart. We went back and forth with the storyline, called each other about epiphanies, and worked together daily for at least a month of the summer. I write a lot more tightly than George who tends to fall in love with his research and would like it all to show. I’m a merciless cutter and I specialize in structure.

One thing that helped keep us (relatively) sane was that we designated certain areas where each of us had absolute power. George, for example, had the final word about the dogs, the Hempel story arc and the military. I speak fluent German. I travelled back and forth to Berlin. Read Mein Kampf in its original.

Are we still friends? Absolutely.

Crichton-on-Crichton:

It hadn’t been done. I sensed that he was growing weary of having to repeatedly answer the same questions.
I was told no interviewer could make it past twenty minutes; I needed a week of interviews. I can’t resist that kind of challenge. After he said yes, I had visions of sugarplums dressed in dollar bills.

David Copperfield anthologies:

When I came back to Las Vegas after finishing work with Michael Crichton, I thought it would be fun to put together an anthology about magic, and this being the land of illusion, I got in touch with the biggest illusionist of all. David loved the idea and we set to work, putting together two fabulous anthologies of original fiction. David and I went back and forth on every story, especially his two contributions. Plus, it was great to be able to take friends and idols to see David perform. My favorite times were in smaller meetings, however, when his boyish side would come out and he’d play tricks on me.

Immortal Unicorn:

I’ll keep this one short. I’d known Peter Beagle for twenty years. When I was putting together the Copperfield anthologies, I invited him to contribute a story. As usual, he needed money–more than the story for the Copperfield book would pay–but refused to write about unicorns. So I came up with the concept of collecting stories about immortality–not about unicorns–but each one had to use a unicorn as a catalyst or a symbol. I took care of everything except the final story selection. When I liked one enough to want to buy it, I sent it to Peter first for his input. Also, he contributed an original story, as did I, and we both wrote introductions to each one. They are beautiful books with no problems attached.

The Unicorn Sonata:

Marty Greenberg was working with me on the various anthologies. He said to me one day that Turner Books had published DINOTOPIA and, “Why don’t we get Peter to do a similar book about unicorns?” I instantly called Turner. When the first idea did not appeal to them, I turned to my own unfinished Libretto (I dream of writing a Broadway Show) and sold it, with unicorns added, to Turner Books, with the provision that Mr. Unicorn himself would write it. I would whop him into writing fast, talk to him about the book along the way, play trouble-shooter and editor. I did. It’s a beautiful book, designed for readers from 8 to 80. Thus, I created it, he wrote it. I could not have written it the way he did. The experience was extremely positive until just before publication. Then things changed, but that’s another (much longer) story.

Snapshots: (coedited with Joyce Carol Oates)

I am an ardent fan of Joyce’s work.
I needed to feel good about myself.
I rejected the first story she sent me for the Copperfield anthologies on the grounds that it didn’t fit the theme, and added that if I ever did a Mothers and Daughters anthology, her story would be the cornerstone. Later, I asked if she would consider such an anthology and away we went. We treated each other with enormous respect and made every decision as a team. The book is wonderful. It has sold in several languages, is used in more than one college course, and is my pride and joy.

Secrets:

I met Melanie Tem in ’77. I was agenting and fell in love with her voice. She and I recently completed Secrets, which we wrote purely because we thought we could write a good book and have a pleasant experience. We wrote alternate chapters, found a singular voice, and had a delightfully positive experience. The book is, for lack of a better word, mainstream. I like to say it’s our Annie book: Annie Dillard meets Anne Tyler.

Artifact:

I wrote in a previous blog a
bout this adventure-thriller starring Kevin J. Anderson, Matt Costello, F. Paul Wilson, and yours truly. We wrote it for two reasons. The first was to have fun, the second was to prove that what New York declared impossible was not impossible in the right hands.

I hope you enjoyed that. Feel free to ask me about some of the other collaborations, like my work with Jack Kirby’s unpublished novel.

by Janet Berliner

Being multilingual has enriched my life. I had many languages left to learn when my hearing took flight, which saddens me greatly. While I could still learn a new one, I couldn’t do it my way. The easy way.

Language, to me, is music. You hear a new piece of music, with strange and wondrous chords and lyrics, and that’s what it is. A strange, new piece of music. If you listen to it many times and, without angst, let it wash over you, magic happens. You begin to anticipate the chords, to sing the lyrics, to move to the melody.

Language is no different. If you remove your angst and let it approach you, you will suddenly find yourself beginning to understand the meaning of what’s being said. Will you know every word? Doubtless not. But you’ll understand.

Which leads inexorably to the next step. You walk into a café, sit down, and find yourself greeting the waitperson in their language, ordering in their language.

It’s a trip, for them and for you, a neat way to segue into my brother, who is a tour guide in Israel. Well, right now he’s a medic on the front lines, but when he’s not that, he’s a tour guide. His training for that took five years at the University. He speaks nine languages. My mother spoke seven, fluently. I’m the dummy; I only speak five, and not all of them fluently. I wouldn’t try to write in any one of them except English. That’s tough enough for me. When I speak Dutch, for example, I speak like a kindergartner. But I can communicate. In Portugal, I had to point and wave. Did it work? Yes. Pretty much. But it’s not the same.

All of which leads to–well to a lot of things–but the first one is the issue of bilingualism here, in America.

Now here’s the thing. If everyone spoke English the way she should be spake, I’d be all for it. Heck, let’s have bi and tri and quadrilingualism (making those up as I go). Unfortunately, we all know ’tis not so. Not judging by the manuscripts I read on a daily basis for several agents. I
remember one particular author, nice lady, who sent me a manuscript in the early eighties, when I was agenting. The Romance genre had
recently started to blossom, and that’s what hers was. Straight line Romance, no diversions, no sub plots. Her use of language, however, made me cringe. The example I’ve never forgotten is: “She (her heroine) had to go back to square root one.”

I was pleasant to her, but sent her to someone I knew who handled only
Romances.

That “Someone” used the square-root one manuscript, as is, to obtain an eight-book contract. The nice lady has been selling her books within the genre since that time, and not simply one per year.

So what do I know?

Probably not much, but that doesn’t stop me having a strong opinion.

Maybe I’m being too rough, too blunt, too “mean,” but I don’t think so. If you’re trying to write and want to be published in English, the fact that you made a sale despite inferior use of language, doesn’t make it okay, and the fact that English is your second or third or fourth language is irrelevant.

But here’s the real problem. The BIG problem. Many of the readers at publishing houses, the ones who tell their bosses not to bother with our work, don’t have a frigging clue. Yes, some of them are Vassar grads, but others are coffee boys, unschooled and recently promoted. Not only that, don’t count too heavily on the likes of Vassar.

I recently took on a one-on-one editing/teaching job. The book we’re working on is a Civil War novel, the writer someone I taught more than twenty years ago. He’s an extremely bright and well-educated man. As someone educated in the “Colonies,” my focus upon the Americas was minimal (as was any American’s when it came to Africa). I knew next-to-nothing about the Civil War; Americans know as little about the Boer War.

My point?

I choose to learn as much as I can about as much as I can. Most other people (no, not you) don’t necessarily make that choice. I’m Jewish but chose to learn about many religions; I try to read translated books along with the originals (Mein Kampf was a case in point when writing MADAGASCAR MANIFESTO.)

Most people just plain don’t do that, nor do they care about speaking or writing correctly. They’re not taught to do it and they’ve never learned
to care.

Once upon a time, in the long ago and very far away, I was learning English at an all girls’ school called Micklefield. We wore pastel pink dresses. Any style would do, as long as it was pink. Navy blazers and panama hats topped things off. As part of our syllabus, we did a damn fine production of Macbeth. I was all of 8. I understudied Lady Macbeth but was cast as one of the witches. Fine type casting, if you ask me.

Thirty or so years later, my daughter was reading Romeo and Juliet in an advanced lit class at Jr. High in Cupertino, California–the very heart of Silicon Valley. She was required to write a paper and did so, without any help from me. It was definitely a solid A paper, but was given a C-. She
Was mighty upset. Not me. I was livid. I suggested she ask her teacher to explain why he had given her a C. She wouldn’t ask him, so for the first and only time in her schooldays, I marched myself into the classroom.

You’ll love his answer: “She answered the question from the play not from the movie. I showed them all the movie. She should have answered it from that.”

Resisting the urge to strike him dead, I asked: “Mr. Pimplehead. Have you actually read the play?”

“I don’t need to,” he said. “I’ve seen the movie.”

Yes, Friends, he was fired, but most of his clones are not. They’re right there, in the classrooms, teaching generation after generation how not to speak or write or understand the English language.

I have four grandchildren. One of them is reading, another is beginning to sound out words. I write little stories for them, but those won’t be their primary influence, nor will the fact that my daughters speak and write English well (one is a technical editor) and read a great deal. That’s all wonderful, but their greatest influences are bound to be their peers, their teachers, books and televisions.

Unless something changes dramatically in this society, I can only say, G-d help them all.

by Janet Berliner

You want to talk unreasonable? It’s unreasonable to expect me to follow Stan’s debut. Why is my life so h-a-r-d?

As some of you already know, I recently spent two months sans computer. The bad part was that not writing turns me into a roaring witch; the good part was that, since I am confined to quarters, I had a lot of time on my hands. No smoking, no alcohol, a restricted diet. Couldn’t even clean out closets. TV was dull and I could only read a book a day and research just so much without the tools to take and make notes. Myasthenia restricts the amount I can hand write and breathing problems restrict tape recording. And so, as my father-in-law used to say, “Sometimes I sat and thought and sometimes I just sat.”

One of the things I thought about was the roots and progression of storytelling and the tool imperative that rules our lives. There are still cultures, particularly in parts of my beloved Africa, where the storytelling tradition remains the bailiwick of musicians, singers, and tellers of tales around the night fires.

A simple, wonderful, envious avocation.

When my mother was well into her eighties, she talked about the myriad changes she had seen in her lifetime: horse-drawn buggies to Porsches; unicycles to the Concord; roller skates to space shuttles. She mentioned radio, records, and CDs, quills and computers, the telegram man and the telephone. What she found to be most amazing, most magical, most wondrous, was the fax machine. She didn’t like phones much. In her view, they were things that should be used for making and breaking appointments, not for conversation. She lived in Europe and wrote letters–in many languages–until the gift of a fax machine changed her life.

As far as she was concerned, anyone without a fax was just plain ignorant.

Being frugal out of necessity, she refused a new machine and opted for a secondhand one. She wrote faxes with relish and watched them come through to her, applauding like a kid watching a train set. She had a quick mind and read a lot, yet this was always fascinating to her, ever new and useful. Quickly she found herself unable to do without it. When it was out for repair, she went to her travel agent and used his, happily paying for the transmission with cookies here and treats for his dog there, not to mention the many trips she took from Berlin to the U.S.A.

So there she was, happy with the manual typewriter she’d owned forever, the old fax machine, a record player, an ancient tape deck for Nat King Cole and an older radio for Radio America. And you know what? I couldn’t fault her. Ray Bradbury refused to fly for most of his life; a bicycle was his preferred mode of transportation. Harlan uses a typewriter, as does Joyce Carol Oates. I have writer friends who fill yellow pads while propped up in bed for the morning. A chacun au son gout, I say. To each his own.

My story tool history goes something like this:

Oma, my grandmother, was the family storyteller, known far and wide (well almost) as a raconteur par excellence. If only I had written it all down….

But I didn’t.

I started the act of writing on any paper I could find, using an eraserless pencil, which had to be sharpened with a knife. I didn’t draw pictures much because we couldn’t afford Crayolas, so I scribbled. At school we had to use an ink pen, so the care I’d had to take being without an eraser came in handy. My grandfather gave me his Waterman Fountain Pen, which I treasure to this day. Must be an antique by now, I reckon. There were no such things as slide rules or calculators. Instead, we had log books and rulers. Also compasses. I used mine to bore a hole in my desk so that I could put a straw through it and drink whatever I could find. Water mostly, but it tasted so good that way. The pencil had another use, too. I sat for many hours over the course of years with the point digging into my cheek, hoping to create a dimple. Harrumph. That was when I started to put in my order for a new self, should I return to this world after death. I demanded tall, thin, rich, blonde, stupid–and dimpled.

At sixteen, after High School where I had learnt to type, I was forced into servitude at a travel agency. Once a week or so, I was permitted to use my mother’s typewriter, the very portable mentioned above. Buying yellow pads and notebooks became my secret sin until, a couple of years later, indentured by my first mentor–editor-in-chief of a weekly newspaper–I gained daily access to an electric typewriter, saw how UPI worked…ye olde teletype…and learned how to set type with calipers.

I was rising in the world. Hallelujah.

As an intern, I earned almost nothing, so it took two years before the next step: a portable typewriter of my own, with a hard case no less. I was in heaven and instantly wrote my first book, a children’s “classic” called “Tales of Timothy.” Wish I could find it, if nothing else to give to my grandchildren. Alas, it somehow disappeared during my last move. Could be that it’s buried in a box in the attic, but there’s no way my wheelchair’s going to make it up there for the search.

Skip to 1975 and a job translating a German engineering textbook into English. My personal goal: An IBM Selectric, secondhand, of course. As I recall, it was bright red. The first owner had sprayed it to match her décor. I refuse to knock that baby. I typed RITE OF THE DRAGON on it, many times over. By the time I got to the final draft, I had myasthenia, which was not being controlled. The messages from my brain weren’t getting to my fingers, so I typed the entire final manuscript with one finger, guiding it with my other hand.

That, Friends, is devotion.

Couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t do much of anything, but I knew I had to find a way to write so…I put myself in hock ($8,500.00 in 1980!!!) and bought the best–BEST…word processor of the day, an ABDick. What a beautiful mother that was! Is, really, because I wouldn’t part with it for anything. It saved my life. The touch on the keyboard was as light as whipped cream, the screen was huge, the brain as big as small car.

Next, after medication stabilized me, I graduated to an IBM PC. I detested it. I didn’t want to program, I wanted to write. The printer printed in mirror images, no one could fix it, and I went back to my trusty AB Dick. Trouble was, the 8″ floppies didn’t work for anyone else and finding anyone to fix a problem was like searching for a diamond on the pavement in Times Square.

Fahgetaboutit.

With a great deal of whining going on, I bought my first Apple, plus all of the accoutrements, which my resident expert insists I have to keep upgrading. I am now the proud owner of computers, printers, tape recorders, faxes, scanners, Martians.

Okay. No Martians. Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

See, here’s the truth of it all: My darling grandmother did it to me. She turned me into a storyteller. A raconteur. When that’s who you are and you’re old and wondering if the vacant look in people’s eyes is boredom and you can’t stop, you have to throw in a Martian or two for good measure.

Thanks for listening.

by Janet Berliner

Good thing I wrote my essay ahead of time because I’ve been basically sans computer for over two weeks. Given my particular limitations, that leaves me with little alternative but to read, think, watch television, think, look out of the window at the flowers, think…. I had just finished the rough of my next book when the computer quit. One of the things I think about is the possibility that the universe is telling me that the book sucks. Hey. I’m obsessive. Paranoid. A writer, for G-d’s sake.

In any case, my essay is the flip side of something I wrote about before: Interviews and how to keep them lively. The last time, I insisted that it’s imperative to do your homework. The exception to that rule is the opportunistic interview, like coming upon Sammy Davis, Jr. in a coffee shop in Waikiki and spending the weekend with him and his crew, or meeting Tom Jones, his son and his managers, in a diner–small d intended. At times like that, you take a flying leap and do what you can with the joys and pains of the moment. The worst thing you can do is to do nothing, to let the moment pass, because it surely won’t come again.

So here, for your delight–or not–is my recounting of one such opportunistic meeting:

Barcelona, Spain, is synonymous with castanets, Paella, and sunshine; for me it is the city where I took my younger daughter, Stefanie, en route to meeting my mother in Nice. In Paris, I was overwhelmed by the avant-garde architecture of De Gaulle Airport’s Terminal One, a ten-floor circular structure that looked like a child of the Guggenheim. Our flight to Nice had been canceled, giving us a bonus day in Paris. On the flight, we had met a movie producer who wanted to make a star of Stefanie. He gave us his card, invited us to the Cannes Film Festival, and sent us on a tour of the city in his private limousine. In Nice, I met an Ethiopian prince who put jewels around her neck and proposed marriage–to me. He followed me around Nice until I took refuge in the protection of the Pimp of Nice. En route home, we went upstairs on the plane and were befriended by the Fifth Dimension. I fell in love with Nice and with my uncle who lived there, a Holocaust survivor married to a Spanish lady who could not speak English. We conversed in multi-languages. He had a wonderful mind but could not stay with one language for more than a sentence. He learned that in the camp where it helped avoid the danger of eavesdroppers.

Stefanie remembers the fish soup, eating pizzas at dawn sitting outside at street cafés, women sunbathing without tops, De Gaulle Airport.

What she remembers most is the night in Barcelona when we I met the petite, white-haired lady who was Walt Disney’s first official bird singer. Her name was Marion Darlington Maley.

“When I was a child we lived near a large flock of crows,” she told me, when I asked what led to her unusual profession. “For a long time I laughed like a crow. I guess that was when I became a ‘Bird Lady.”

That was in 1980. The following year, she told a panel on “To Tell the Truth” (Show No. 3421 for unbelievers) what she told me in Spain: “Next time you visit the ‘Enchanted Tiki Room’ at Disneyland or Disneyworld, think of me.” Her appearance was over in a few minutes; not so the continuing delight of the millions of children and adults who hear Marion’s realistic bird singing.

Marion was born in Monrovia, California, a town founded by her family. When I met her, she was living in Southern California, where she befriended parrots, startled cats, and fooled the world into believing in exotic jungles, wicked witches and romantic liaisons in the thick of the forest. “I was Cheetah in a Tarzan movie,” she told me, “as well as the birds, but doing bird singing is my true vocation. Sometimes my bird voice is only a signal call for Indians, but I was also the nightingale in Errol Flynn’s ‘Don Juan.’”

I asked her about the stars with whom she’d worked.

“Audrey Hepburn in ‘Green Mansions,’” she reminisced. I had seen the dress AH wore in that movie. I think it was a size minus three. “Also Sophia Loren, Anthony Quinn, Maureen O’Hara, Eleanor Parker, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb. Oh and of course, Crosby, Hope, and Lamour.”

Her favorites?

The ‘True Life Adventure Series’ and everything she did for Walt Disney–’Snow White,’ ‘Bambi,’ ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Sleeping Beauty.” She also did a ‘Mickey Mouse’ radio show in the 1930s and ‘Flowers and Trees,’ Disney’s first color cartoon which won him his first academy award.

“Have you done any bird singing lately or are you retired?” I asked.

“I’ll never retire,” she answered quickly. “I’m still on call at the studios.” She had recently done the robin in G.E.s ‘Carousel of Progress’ at Disneyworld. “I’m always ready to do benefits and demonstrations,” she said.

I thought of Ima Sumac’s success and asked about recordings.

“‘Home Songs’ with Ethel Merman. ‘Tweedle, Tweedle, Tweet’ with Pinkie Lee,” she said.

“What about on your own?”

“I can’t sing on key,” she told me, laughing, “that’s why I took up bird singing in the first place. They wouldn’t let me into the choir at school.”

Seems reasonable to me, since I can’t sing in tune. I’ve been told by someone who purports to have gone to school with Barbra that she was once thrown out of the choir at school. I think it was because she wouldn’t sing like everyone else.

by Janet Berliner

Used to be, once-upon-a-time, that interviews were exciting to give, take, and read.

“Hey, look, Ma. I’m important. They’re interviewing me for the Bazooka Times.” “Hey, look, Pa, they’re doing a piece about when you taught me to fish and you got mad at me and tried to drown me.” “Hey, look, Dumbo. If you’d hooked up with me instead of that gorgeous Übermodel, you could sit on the (rented) leather sofa with me and share the spotlight.”

I remember the first interview I did for the raw fear it evoked in me. I was eighteen, an intern for a weekly newspaper–the pride and joy of my mentor who was the Editor-in-Chief and did everything short of beating me with a Mighty Sjambok to keep me in line. This was in South Africa, where there were no personal tape recorders yet, no television at all because of its potential to corrupt the masses into believing that all people were created equal. There were no computers or word processors, even in America. Hell, there weren’t even ball-point pens. We used what were quaintly known as fountain pens with blue-black ink, the stains on our fingers badges of survival. My pen was a Waterman, given to me by my grandfather. I still have it, use it, treasure it.

I was an intern who rarely did more than make coffee and set type (by hand, with calipers), so being sent out to do an interview was a major coup which required multiple hours of instruction. When I was deemed ready, I made an appointment, got permission to take photographs, guaranteed that the person I was interviewiewing–a radio personality by the name of Morkel Van Tonder–would be given veto rights before publication. The interview was to be done as a Q & A and to include what is currently called FAQs, i.e., frequently asked questions.

There wasn’t a thing previously in print about Morkel that I didn’t read as prep for the interview, not just once, but over and over again. Among other things, he ran an audience participation quiz show where someone was chosen to pick a ticket from a large bowl for a small prize. I took my mother to see that and was invited to pull out the ticket.

I selected hers. Yes, it was honest, and not the only time I’ve done that. No, I have no explanation.

That was 1960. Fast forward thirty plus years to 1993. I was living in America and had been at both ends of a lot of interviews. We had television, tape recorders, computers–personal and otherwise. There were radio interviews, but not yet online interviews like the fabulous ones our own DNW has been doing in his journal. For television and print, make up artists airbrushed pretty people to look prettier; on television, prompters and cue cards destroyed spontaneity. Hey, even I was being interviewed on live television and conducting interviews with the rich and famous.

For the most part, I no longer did Q & A. Profiles were more my style. They were fun to write and to read and they enabled me to take advantage of opportunistic happenings like meeting and talking to Evel Kneivel in the middle of a Las Vegas casino, meeting Steve Lawrence (a delight) and Eydie Gormé (less of one) in the Green Room after a performance honoring lounge lizard extraordinaire, Buddy Grecco. Meeting them turned into stories, stories turned into profiles.

Yet, and here’s is the real reason I’m writing about this, there were two rules I’d never broken and have not broken in the years since then:

1) I still always offer the subject the opportunity to check my facts and insist that I be afforded the same courtesy when I’m interviewed.

2) With a prearranged interview, I always do my homework. A case in point: For a weeklong interview with Michael Crichton, I read six million of his words, including twelve versions of Jurassic Park and his Master’s Thesis in anthropology. I even watched the movie in several languages. Did he tell me to do these things? No. Was I glad I did them? Yes, particularly since he grilled me about everything.

So do your homework, check your facts, try to find a new angle (like my piece on Judith Krantz about “typewriter turn-on,” or my long interview with Ray Bradbury over what he claimed to be his first ever Chinese dinner), and be grateful as hell to any interviewer who obeys those rules when you’re in the hot seat. I’ve had more than one reviewer use jacket copy as the basis of a review of my work. That’s bad enough. But when they take hours of my time, then write a profile based on never having read a word I’ve written, it’s downright insulting.

– Janet Berliner

I’ve finished a new book, SESSIONS, which will shortly be on its way to New York. It’s a collaboration with my friend and colleague Melanie Tem. I met her at my very first convention. She introduced me to Ed Bryant and I read a manuscript she had just finished and took her on as a client. (G-d help me, I ran my own agency in those days.) I thought her book was brilliant. I met her again in Denver, and then we didn’t see each other in person again until she won her first Stoker. I happened to be there and cried a lot.

That back-story is important because time has damaged both of us. She is legally blind and I, as I’ve mentioned before, am pretty much confined to quarters. So chances are, we won’t be doing too much in the way of signings. We’ve both done a lot of them and won’t feel deprived, but are we taking away from the chances of success for the book and what is our alternative?

Book plates.

They’re easy to sign and inexpensive to mail to bookstores. There’s something else in the wind, too. Margaret Atwood has invented a device that will allow us to sign at our own computers, and see our signatures being transferred onto the page in a bookstore. But that, I’m told, is down the road.

Are either of those alternatives the same for the reader? Of course not. Then again, most of us are not my buddy Kevin Anderson, who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the best-attended single-author signing in recorded history. This was at a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI, PEDRITO! The previous records were set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern.

Anyway, thinking about the fact that there will probably be no bookstore signings for SESSIONS got me thinking about my own signing adventures, each of which fortunately taught me something.

1. There are the signings where no one shows up and you find out, to your dismay that no one advertised. From that you learn to double and triple check well ahead of time and the day before that someone, somewhere has told a few people that you’re going to be sitting there. It also teaches you not to rely on friends and relatives who rarely show up. The most important reason for doing a signing is to get to know bookstore managers and staff. Take cookies; be generous with coffee and soda, even if you think they should be buying, and smile a lot. Drop names and tell stories. It’s fun and they won’t forget you.

2. I did a signing once for a small chain (anyone remember Bookmania?) which was very kind to me. They gave me a window, which is a big deal, and they put money into advertising. So what’s the problem, you might well ask? The problem was Mother Nature who decided to send a major electrical storm. It was winter, late in the day. “We’ll close the store and you can go home,” the owner said. I had what turned out to be a much better idea.

Someone went out to buy lots of candles, cokes, and cake. We created a friendly haven from the storm, one that could be seen from the outside through the plate glass windows.

What a signing that was! We sold everything they had with my name in it and then some. Good party.

3. There are the signings where you have nothing to sign because your books did not arrive. Again, double and triple check.

4. When my first paperback came out, I went down to the loading zone with coffee and doughnuts and had a dawn breakfast party with the drivers and schleppers. They put the book on the bestseller rack and it sold and was refilled until sell-through.

5. When I signed at the (then) ABA in Chicago, four hundred people showed up. I wrote a personal message in each book. Sure was fun and got me over two hours instead of the standard twenty-minutes-and-you’re-out-of-here.

6. When I signed at the (then) ABA in Los Angeles, in tandem with Sean Derek–daughter of John, stepdaughter of Ursula, Linda, and Bo. She’s a dead ringer for Jaclyn Smith and I was pretty cute myself in those days. We had an absolute ball.

7. Remember the Rodney King riots in L.A.? I had a Barnes & Noble signing that day in San Francisco, which held sympathy riots. I was told I didn’t have to show up but I went anyway–and signed while rocks flew through the windows and sirens screamed up and down the street.

8. My favourite signing? I went to Reno for a weekend to play poker. My dealer friends surprised me with a signing in the poker room. They cleared a table, stacked up books, and there I sat, signing while the cards rose in the air.

9. Scariest signing: My first, wedged between Stephen King and Byron Preiss.

10. My least favourite signing: Seeing a co authorship for the first time and finding out that my name had been left off the cover.

11. My angriest signing: In midtown Manhattan at the Fashion Café, owned in part by David (Copperfield’s) then beloved Claudia Schiffer. She placed herself into the signing line next to David, signed the books, and left no room for me in line or on the page. Revenge: Telling everyone loudly that it was okay because I was going to sign across her face on every magazine cover I could find.

12. The only signing David (Copperfield) agreed to do in Vegas. The bookstore set up a podium with a table and two chairs and a mess of books in the centre of one of our largest malls. We had done one at the Beverley Center Mall with some of the other contributors to our anthology, including Ray Bradbury who so rarely does things like that. Here (in Vegas) people actually drove overnight to be there, while others slept on the pavement overnight to be sure to be in line early. Obviously I knew they weren’t there to see me. Sigh.

This was David’s first book signing. He was in the middle of taping his TV Special and arrived late, the first no-no, then whispered in my ear, “Berliner, I’ve got twenty minutes.” I did my usual thing, asking people their names and writing a little message in each book. He got more and more irritated. “Hurry up,” he said. “C’mon. You don’t have to write another book. Just your name. See.” He signed with an unintelligible flourish and smiled, so charming, endearing, until he stood up and left me with the furious folk who had waited outside, sleeping on cement.

Ah fame. How wonderful it must be, I thought, as I kept on signing and explaining and excusing.

Was it worth it in terms of royalties earned on the books actually sold at signings? Nah.

Was it worth it for the publicity and recognition, the ego-boo and the experiences? Abso-blooming-lutely.

by Janet Berliner

As writers, shouldn’t we want everyone to read?

A whole lot of years ago, I got into a bunch of trouble giving schoolbooks to the son of a woman of color in South Africa. Not satisfied, I gave schoolbooks to a girl of thirteen who was working as a nanny for people I knew instead of going to school.

When my oldest daughter was almost five and I was pregnant with my second, I helped set up and run an Outreach center over a bar in New York. In case you don’t know about them, they’re places with books and tables where kids can go after school. They get books and juice and Band-Aids. Older kids read to younger ones.

It’s all good. The kids are off the streets and nobody loses.

There are so many places to donate books. For example, I’ve donated thousands of them to military bases, here and out of the country. Discovering that the homeless plead for books, I started giving cartons of them to shelters. You could even give your own; no law against that. Or is there a law against giving of ourselves.

Here, in Las Vegas, I became involved with the “Gala Benefit for the Children of Heroes,” which is about children and heroes and was founded by one of our very own at Unplugged. (He’d be mad if I mentioned his name, but I can say thank you, Eleven.) He was (I’m about to steal from his bio) “…the mind and the soul behind the children’s gala organized by The Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing college scholarships and post secondary education to ALL the children surviving Special Operations personnel who are killed in a training accident or operational mission.”

But wait. There’s more.

Fourteen years ago I became part of the Childreach Program. I adopted two beautiful little girls. One lives in Malawi, the other in Zimbabwe. They write to me and send me photographs and bring me much joy. What have I and others like me brought them with our small monthly contributions–the equivalent of a half-a-dozen fancy coffees for each child?
A village well, medicines, and a one-room schoolhouse.

Hadija and Brenda may not wear shoes, but they can read, and both of them want to be teachers.
And there’s more-more.

When I was Pres of HWA, I initiated an outreach program. I accepted slave wages to teach hundreds of beginners in the Writers’ Digest Writing Course.

Why, you might ask, is she telling us this? Does she want us to tell her she’s wonderful?

DEFINITELY NOT.

Don’t send gifts; don’t send flowers.

Do, please, read on.

I tore something out of a magazine at a doctor’s office. (Yes, I asked first.) It was a letter to the editor from someone in Illinois. The heading read, Novel Ideas. Here’s an excerpt: “I loved the Navigator item on hotels with book collections ["Book Me a Room"] and have another to suggest: Country Inns and Suites has a lending library in each of its North American hotels. If you haven’t finished your book by checkout, you can return it at another member of the chain, which then makes a five-dollar donation to a literacy organization. Last year Country Inns raised $15,000 through its “Book it and Return” Program.

There are a lot of hotel chains, not just here but around the world. How do we approach them and try to get them to do the same thing? Gem, in Grenada, West Indies, does the same thing. Why not the Hiltons, Holiday Inns–name them?

Perhaps we can think of a way that this can be done. We could work through the organizations with whom we’re affiliated. Or we could each do what we can do ourselves.

Maybe that’s too specific, in which case may I ask you to believe with me that there’s a way we, as writers, can make a difference in the fight for literacy. Please do what you can.

Thank you.

by Janet Berliner

We writers justifiably complain that we’re underpaid, undervalued, underappreciated–and we certainly are. National Geographic pays well. Reader’s Digest pays well. Porn pays with regularity. Playboy? Sure. But for the most part, if you ain’t a Biggie, you ain’t nothin’ at all. So, like lyricists turn to writing jingles, we supplement our incomes with writing-related jobs like editing, ghost writing, and working for ad agencies.

There’s a cute commercial for a certain credit card (sorry about the alliteration). After the commercial quotes the value of three different items, it shows the viewer a fourth–generally something that fits right in with happiness being a warm puppy. Then comes the tagline, which is inevitably something like: “Flying kites with your grandchild? Priceless.”

Those things, the ones that don’t carry a dollar sign, are the priceless perks that we so often fail to take into account when we total the plus side of the balance sheet.

In the mid-eighties, the owner of a boutique in Monterey offered to give me a pair of 1920s black satin shoes in exchange for a signed book; in 1989, in Tel Aviv, I swapped a book for a pair of earrings; a year later, on a Sunday, I locked myself out of my car in a mall in Oregon. The locksmith saw one of my books in the trunk and recognised my photo. He asked me to sign it in exchange for work done. Last week, the library of my High School in South Africa asked for a signed copy of a book for their library; yesterday, a man who came to measure a window in my house treated me with more than ordinary respect. I couldn’t figure out why until he said that he was a reader and had read everything of mine he could find.

Twenty years ago, a woman in Los Angeles sent me a copy of RITE OF THE DRAGON to sign because, she said, I had clearly modelled Negwenya, the dragon, on her.

Most significantly of all, more than one concentration camp survivor has thanked me for my Holocaust novel.

Priceless Perks.

But wait. There’s more. Like the people you would never in your wildest dreams have believed you’d meet, let alone with whom you’d work and socialize.

Here’s one example: In the early 90s, I wrote a proposal for an anthology and sent it to David Copperfield. I’m talking about the illusionist; I’m old, but not old enough for it to have been the other one. It was a really good proposal, but I put it on a mental back burner and began working on a new book.

Early one morning, I was awakened by a telephone call.

“Hello. This is David.”

“David? David Who?”

“David Copperfield. Get your tail over here. I’m ready to talk to you.”

My first meeting with David was interesting…in the Chinese sense of the word. He owns a massive converted warehouse on the outskirts of Las Vegas. At the time, it was fronted by a bra shop. In order to get into the inner sanctum, my assistant and I had to use a buzzer disguised as the right nipple of a torso displaying a teddy.

His bodyguard, a big ex-New Orleans cop, who really liked me and quickly became one of my favorite members of David’s large retinue, showed us inside. He was a member of the inner circle, in fact I remember seeing David borrow three hundred dollars from him to go to the movies, this although I had seen thousands in his wallet. Seems he and Claudia wanted to go to the movies “like normal people”. In their case, that meant buying every seat in the movie house, so maybe he did need the extra three hundred.

Back to the warehouse.

The downstairs is mostly offices and a huge conference room. The walls are plastered with photos of him at all ages and stages. Somewhere, there is a second hidden entrance to his Museum of Magic. Upstairs, there’s a tanning booth, a bedroom, an exercise room, a dressing room (his closet, then, contained dozens of black sweatshirts and black pairs of slacks, all identical), and a viewing room with plush leather sofas and chairs.

David was upstairs, leaning over what looked like an architectural design, a preliminary drawing for a new illusion he told us later.

He turned the drawings face down, stood upright, and gestured to the sofa with his oh-so elegant hands. All I could think of was that he looked like a young kid, tall, tanned, and very thin. He excused himself for a moment, then returned with what looked like a thick manuscript.

“Before we get started, read this and tell me what you think. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Five minutes! I saw my assistant and David’s look at each other and roll their eyes.

What David had handed me was a TV proposal that must have cost the offering company ten thousand dollars to put together. They wanted David, and wanted him badly. Fortunately, I had taught myself to speed read in college and, more fortunately still, I had time to spare before David returned because my analysis came to me well before I was halfway through.

The proposal was great, the TV show was interesting, but there was one thing glaringly missing. None of it seemed to me to have anything to do with the heart and core of David Copperfield.

Which is exactly what I said when he returned to the room and sat down beside me.

He took the proposal, tossed it onto a glass table, and said, “I agree completely. Now lets talk about what we’re going to do together.”

There followed discussions about the writers he wanted in the anthologies–I had provided him with an initial wish list in my proposal–negotiations between his people and mine, discussions with publishers, contacting some of the best known writers in this country, most of whom I had met personally, and warnings from his staff that I would never be able to keep him focused. Only two things mattered to him, they said: his work and Claudia Schiffer.

On the way out that first day, we were shown the part of the warehouse that was used for storage, with labeled containers stacked to the ceiling. David told me that, among other things, those containers held the very first magic trick he had learned, when he was eight and living in New Jersey. His mother told me later about the frequent long trips to replenish his supplies and buy new tricks. His father, always there when she was, smiled proudly and told me that he was the head of David’s fan club. That part of the warehouse was also used for building and storing his large-scale illusions. I started to run my finger along a blade of his fan illusion and he stopped me. “Want to lose fingers?” he asked. His assistant took two Polaroid photos of me being levitated by David and asked me to sign them. I said sure, “As long as David signs them, too.” David pointed at other such photos on the wall. “I didn’t sign any of those,” he said. “Tough for them,” I said. “That’s my deal.” He started to laugh. “I can see you’re not going to be easy, Berliner,” he said, signing the photos.

There’s a lot more to the David story, which will probably show up in its entirety as a chapter of RIVER OF STONES or as an Amazon Short. Here, I’ll add only this. Two years ago, after selling one of the anthologies to China, we redid the photograph and sent it to the Chinese publisher. They put it inside the book and had life-sized cutouts made and distributed around Beijing and other places where there were books.

Now I know that doesn’t pay the bills, but it sure is fun to contemplate.

It’s one of those Priceless Perks.