This Media Life

The Gigawits

Leaving the Lampoon in 1978, he launches a series of ad hoc parodies -- Not the New York Times, in the middle of the 1978 newspaper strike; Off the Wall Street Journal thereafter -- inventing a mini-genre. He returns to London and helps create the political satire Spitting Image (perhaps the most successful satire of all time, running for eleven years in the U.K. and now, in its current iteration, getting moguls jailed in Russia). He departs a year later ("It turned into a nightmare, which is all I ever got from television"). He stars in the film This Is Spinal Tap, possibly the last word that need be said about rock and roll (whenever you are with Hendra, a stranger at the bar will say, Hey, don't I know you from somewhere?). He returns to the U.S. Tries and fails to start a new humor magazine. Writes a book called Going Too Far about the history of comedy. Finds himself in the room on Amsterdam Avenue, where I visit him in the late eighties. Briefly, he becomes the editor of Spy, where he discovers, in addition to financial disarray, a bunch of "24-year-olds who were suicidal that they were no longer working for Kurt Andersen."

He gets married again. Has three new children (he has two grown children from a prior marriage). Stays home (writes a screenplay and an occasional story about wine or dogs for this magazine). His wife, Carla Hendra, rises to the top of the heap at Ogilvy. Now he has a large apartment and a summer house. With the children in school, his wife encourages him to go back to doing whatever it is he does.

John Evans spends the sixties hanging around the flesh spots of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. In the early seventies, he delivers a boat from Venezuela to the 79th Street boat basin and decides to stay in New York. He gets a job at an ad agency, then starts selling classifieds for The Village Voice. In short order, he's running the Voice's classified pages and turning them into the most profitable per-line-rate pages in the business. He creates the back page of the Voice, the single most commercially successful page of print in the country: "Classified advertising celebrates small things. I saw you on the F train. You were reading Tolstoy, I was wearing blue. It is a vibrant place where people can reach out to one another -- usually for prurient reasons." Murdoch buys the Voice in 1977 and elevates Evans to publisher. Between 1977 and 1984, when the Voice is sold, its profits increase from $230,000 to $10 million. After the sale of the Voice, Murdoch gives him a big chunk of News Corp. to run, including its seventeen magazines (TV Guide, Elle, Premiere, and New York on the consumer side; Hotel & Travel Index and Travel Weekly on the trade side) and its incipient electronic business.

Evans becomes, through the late eighties and early nineties, possibly the most successful publisher of electronic information ever -- creating a travel-database-publishing operation that sells for nearly $1 billion and that, arguably, saves News Corp. in its near-bankrupt days in the early nineties.

Evans, elusive, often incommunicado -- he moves his office to Secaucus -- joins the first generation of electronic-media pioneers. It is possible to make the case that Murdoch's acquisition of the Internet provider Delphi in 1993 is the spark that sets the Internet afire.

But Evans fades out. Leaves Murdoch (one result is that News Corp.'s electronic business falls into disarray). Takes a powder. Evans becomes the father of a new baby, too.

I can't get a decent answer from either of them as to why they sat out the nineties. As real entrepreneurs, maybe they had a hard time, I theorize, in an era of false entrepreneurs -- that is, young people, without experience, fronting for financial interests. Perhaps the Internet itself, which is, after all, just a pipes business with various sideshows attached to it, wasn't terribly motivating for them.

I hesitate to say they are back. Certainly it is not clear that anyone wants them back. But this week, Hendra goes on "Imus" to begin promoting the firm's first book, and to proclaim himself the impresario, the Liveright-Cerf-Weidenfeld, of a new publishing era.

Again, I don't know if I am memorializing two fundamentally small-time characters who have chronic difficulties with authority or if I actually believe they can have an impact on the book industry.

On the other hand, I don't know anyone around books who doesn't believe that something big could happen now. But at the moment, the people doing the big things are technology guys or retailers. On our side, the side where there are people who actually read and write books, mostly people are trying to stay out of the way of the big bang. It's likely that if you've been in the book business for any time, all entrepreneurial and certainly revolutionary urges long ago died in you.

But just assume that book publishing as we know it, with the need to manufacture and store great numbers of physical books and to call on thousands of unaffiliated bookstores, no longer justifies itself (it is not, as they say in business school, rational). Now, if you can publish without manufacturing and storing and making sales calls, why not do it yourself? Start clean. This is going to happen. Someone is just going to do it. So? Who?

Hendra and Evans. It could be them. It could.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com