Interview with Judith Regan

MJ: Judith Regan, thank you for joining us today.

JR: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

MJ: Well, tell us about what you do. We have all these books lined up here, and tell us what you do.

JR: What do I do? Well, I have a book publishing company, and I publish a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction titles, and in the last couple of years, I've been trying to develop some of those titles into television projects, one of which has come to fruition this year, based on a book "Every Knee Shall Bow" by Jess Walter. I did a four hour mini-series for CBS called "Ruby Ridge," which came out of that book. I have another author who's actually published in Japan called Douglas Copland, and we're developing a series based on his book "Microserfs." So the idea is that the book publishing company is basically a base of operations, and out of which come these other properties that can be developed in film and television.

MJ: To me it seems like it's a very male world, book publishing.

RJ: Really? Actually, it's not a very male world.

MJ: Really.

JR: Book publishing has traditionally been a pink collar ghetto, and for

many many years, the best and the brightest women who couldn't make it in

other industries worked in book publishing, because it didn't pay very

well. That's changed somewhat, and certainly it's very interesting to note

that many of the top, top level executives are male. But there are also a

handful of female executives at the very top. It is, I would say, not on

the whole, a male dominated industry.

MJ: Why is that?

JR: Because traditionally, you know, it was poor paying, and because of

that it attracted women when men wouldn't take those jobs. So the highest

level women who couldn't make it in other industries, who wouldn't be

accepted in other industries, who came up through the ranks, you know, are

now 50 and 60 years old. You know, 20, 30 years ago when they first started

it was easier to get a job in publishing as a woman than it was to get a

job on Wall Street. That's changed now for younger women.

MJ: How did you get your start in publishing?

JR: In publishing? I went to Simon and Schuster as an author, originally. I

was going to write a book called "The Innocence Lost," about two

all-American Hollywood families, and what had happened to them over three

generations. And I contracted to write that book. They offered me a job as

an editor. I had been a magazine editor, and had worked as a reporter, and

had done other related things, but never in the book publishing world. And

they decided that they wanted someone who could acquire celebrity and

personality non-fiction, and because that was the beat that I covered in

the reporting world, they thought that, you know, it was something that I

could do well. And what happened was, I... My son... my son, who was a

little boy at the time, got hit by a car, and I had been traveling a lot

doing the book, and I decided it was time to stay home and to be with him

on a daily basis, and not to be traveling any more, and that's how things

happen in life. So I took the job as an editor so I could stay home. That's

how I got my start in book publishing.

MJ: So you were working at Simon and Schuster. Now how did you end up as

the president of Regan books, and how did that happen?

JR: Well, I had been at Simon and Schuster for a number of years, and I'd

had a lot of success there, and Simon and Schuster was owned by Paramount,

and I had been developing a lot of projects that were sold to the movie

business, and I felt that because Simon and Schuster was owned by a movie

company that we should work in a synergistic way, and they should let me

develop some of my properties as a movie producer. I took that idea to them

when I had made them a lot of money, thinking that I had some leverage, and

they thought it was a great idea, and that I should wait. And so I waited,

and I waited, and I waited, patiently, and then I decided I wouldn't wait

any more. And about two weeks before Christmas I had made a list of things

to do, and one of them was to call to call or write to Rupert Murdoch, who

was a man that I had a great deal of respect for, and had decided I would

go and work for. And right about the time I had made this list, I was

actually out in Los Angeles on business, as I was checking out of the

hotel, I got a phone call from Peter Chernen, who runs Twentieth Century

Fox, and he said, "I'd like to meet you, and Rupert would like to meet you.

We'd like to talk to you about becoming a movie producer." And of course I

didn't let them know it was on my list of things to do. And so I made an

appointment to see them, and I came out here the day after the big

earthquake, and had my meeting with them, and decided that this was what I

was going to do next, and I sat down and had a long conversation with

Rupert Murdoch, in which we talked about using the book business as a basis

of everything else, and growing a lot of product out of that into

television and film. And he was very receptive to the idea, and unlike the

slow moving, uninspired people at Paramount Communications, he was very

enthusiastic, and supported my ideas, and said, "Great. Do it." You know,

he's a very bold man, and it's a great corporation, because it doesn't run

like a corporation. It's run by people who are both business people and

creative visionaries, which is a great combination, and so it's a perfect

environment for me to work in...

MJ: This is News Corporation?

JR: News Corporation, yeah. It's a perfect environment for me because if

you're very self starting, as I am, and you're very entrepreneurial, as I

am, it's the kind of company that nurtures that, welcomes that, and

embraces that. And I sort of studied that before I went to that company,

and knew that it would be a good fit for me.

MJ: I'm looking at your books here. You have a diet book, "The Zone."

JR: "The Zone."

MJ: You have a book by Douglas Copland, who's sort of a Generation X

spokesman. You have a book by a black congressman. You have such a variety

of books. What's the common thread here? Is there one?

JR: Well, the common thread is, basically, that I think that I can find an

audience for each of these books, and sometimes I think it's a large

audience, sometimes I think it's a small audience, but all together, when I

decide to publish a book, or I decide to go after a book, it's because I

think that it's either worth publishing, it has a literary merit, or

there's a story there that needs to be heard. You know, in the case of

"Every Knee Shall Bow," by Jess Walter, that was the story about the Randy

Weaver family, which at the time of my acquiring that property, there

wasn't a lot of interest in that story any more. It was a couple of years

old, there had been a couple of books, nobody really cared, and he sent me

the pages. Every publisher in New York had turned it down, and they were so

brilliantly written, and he was such a great writer and such a great

reporter that I thought that it had to be published because it was

something that was very important. And... Although a lot of my decisions on

what I publish and how I publish and what I pay for things is based on the

marketplace, in this case, I thought that the book just had merit and had

to be published. And so I bought the book. And right after that, Oklahoma

City happened, and there was renewed interest in both Waco and the Randy

Weaver Ruby Ridge case. And then there were congressional hearings, and the

federal government settled for 3.1 million dollars, and, you know, it was a

case that was reopened basically, and reexamined, and I was in the right

place at the right time, with, in fact, the right book, because he's a

really marvelous writer, and has just been named a finalist in a very

prestigious literary award, the Pen West Award. So every book is different,

you know. The Shabby Chic book, I walked into the Shabby Chic store, and

fell in love with it, and said, "You know, I don't have time to live here.

Maybe I have time to do a style book with you." And so I signed her up for

a book, and the book is a best seller, just published it in the past couple

of weeks, and it's doing incredibly well. It's in the top ten at Doubleday,

and we've sold copies all over the world. We've sold quite a few copies in

Japan, and so every, you know, every book is different. That was one that I

just fell in love with the place, and I thought about, you know, I think

other people will love this, and we gave people practical information as

well as, you know, the design elements. And so, you know, every book is

different. Some of the fiction I think will connect. I think that there's

an important message. When I first acquired Doug Copland, which was many,

many books ago, it was right after he had written Generation X, and before

the book was published, before he became sort of a pop culture visionary

around the world. And I just thought he had a very fresh voice and a very

interesting point of view and was totally unique and thought that other

people would feel the same way. And so I've published many of his books. We

just came out with a new one called "Polaroids From the Dead," which was

also published in Japan. But he has, you know, a unique voice that's

connected world wide. He's a best selling author all over the world. Huge

in England, huge in Germany, in Italy, in some of the Scandinavian

countries. He's actually bigger in some of those countries than he is here.

MJ: How many manuscripts do you see? Are they just sent to you?

JR: Thousands.

MJ: Really.

JR: Every year. Yeah. Thousands. It's difficult.

MJ: What sets apart the ones you publish apart from the ones that you

don't?

JR: Well, you know, it's a combination of things. It's very difficult to

really weigh everything carefully, because a lot of this business is

instinct, and you can study it, and you can, you know, do your homework,

but you still have to have some gut instinct about what's going to work

later. Because in the book publishing business, unlike television, which is

immediate, you sign up a book, it doesn't come out for a year or two, and

you have to project into the future very often, in terms of what people are

going to be interested in, what they're going to respond to, what they're

going to care about, what they're going to be moved by, what they want to

know about, how they want it presented to them, how you're going to market

it, how you're going to dazzle them, how you're going to get their

attention. So there's a lot of different things that go into, you know,

making a decision about what to publish, and how to publish it, and every

book is different.

MJ: Do you... Do the authors always write the books themselves, or do you

have co-authors sometimes?

JR: Well, in... You know, the novelists, for the most part, aside from, you

know, the celebrity novelists, write their own books. The non-fiction

authors, very often they have to work with someone because they're not

professional writers. That doesn't mean that the material isn't theirs, it

just means that they aren't professional writers, and they have to work

with someone who can craft it for them. You know, Christopher Darden worked

with Jess Walter, Barry Sears, who did the health book "The Zone" worked

with Bill Lawren, who's a science writer, and you know, people have this

misconception that the writers of those books actually invent and create

the material, but that's really not the case. They're basically

craftspeople who listen and interview the subjects, and then go back and

type it for them, and write it for them, and craft it for them. But they

don't come up with the material.

MJ: What does your job consist of ...what's a typical day?

JR: My day starts with trying to get my daughter to brush her teeth.

Arguing about what she's going to wear to school. That's like a typical day

for me. I spend a lot of the day keeping up on what's going on in the

world. You know, I read every newspaper, I watch television, I'm very on

top of what's going on around me. Then I spend a lot of time reading

manuscripts, reading proposals, taking phone calls from agents who are

pitching things, authors who are pitching things. I have creative meetings

about marketing, cover design, sales. I have endless meetings with the

sales department. And basically collaborating with the people in my

company, working with them, working with the authors individually. Every

day's a little bit different. You know, sometime's I'll move in with an

author for two weeks to get the project done. You know, sometimes I'll work

at home. It's a very interesting job, because it's different all the time.

And depending on who I'm working with, you know, everybody's different,

everybody works in a different way, and I'm basically a mother, you know,

and the authors are my children, and I have to take care of them, and make

sure that they do their homework, and make sure that everything's taken

care of. I'm sort of mother, psychiatrist, editor, seductor. You know, you

have to do... you have to wear many many hats when you're a publisher.

MJ: And how many employees do you have?

JR: I have five full time, and then there are lots and lots of freelancers,

and then are hundreds of people that I use within Harper-Collins. The

Harper-Collins sales force, the art department, the publicity department,

you know, it's a huge support group of people who work on the books. The

sub-rights department...

MJ: You're in New York right now, but you're in L.A. this week obviously.

You're thinking of moving out here, is that correct?

JR: I would like to move out here, but I have a child in New York, and we

have a joint custody situation, so I don't think I'm going to be moving

until she's older. But I love it here, and I think it's a great place to

live. I love the weather. I'd love to have a garden. I'd love to grow

flowers.

MJ: We're here in West Hollywood today, but you live in New York, yet you

say you're thinking about coming out to California? Tell us about that.

JR: Well, I'd love to move out here, because it's beautiful, and I could

have a garden, and there are many opportunities work-wise too, because I'm

going to be opening an office on the Twentieth Century Fox lot to further

develop the television and film projects, so I'm actually going to be

spending a lot of time here in the future, but not moving yet.

MJ: Well, tell us a little bit about Judith Regan the person. Your family,

and where you grew up, and all that good stuff.

JR: My family. My grandparents on my mother's side were from Sicily, and my

grandmother came to this country as an indentured slave, illiterate, never

went to school, couldn't read, couldn't write. I taught her how to write

her name when I was about five years old. And my mother was the youngest of

nine children, and I lived with my grandparents and my parents and my

brothers and sisters in a sort of a large extended family situation, which

is very unusual for my generation, here. And I had a very happy childhood.

My father is of Irish descent, and was welcomed into this big Italian

family.

MJ: That's quite a mix.

JR: Quite a mix, yeah. A lot of eating, and kissing, and hugging, and

lots... a very tightly knit family. I come from a very, very tightly knit

family. And my mother was very ambitious. Education was very important to

her. And education was very important to my family. So all the children

were very well educated, and all went to Ivy League schools. I went to

Vassar, I have a degree in English, and after I graduated, I did a number

of different things. I studied voice, I was a singer for a while. I studied

with a voice teacher at Juliard, wanted to be an opera singer, and then

started working at the National Enquirer, of all things, and went from

there to start up a magazine called "Woman's World," started another

magazine called "Real Life," then I worked as a television producer, and

then I went to Simon and Schuster.

MJ: And the rest is book publishing history.

JR: Book publishing history. And I have two children. I have a teenager who

is six feet tall, named Patrick, who's very cute and smart, and is a great

joy, and then I have a daughter who's five. Her name's Laura.

MJ: What do your kids think about this?

JR: Well, I publish an author by the name of Howard Stern, who's a big

radio personality; very controversial, very outrageous, and he has an

audience of adolescent males that's quite large, and so I've become...

because he talks about me a lot on the radio show, I've become a hero to my

son's friends, so they come and they visit, and they think, "Oh, it's

Howard Stern's editor, Judith." And they get a big kick out of that. So,

you know, Patrick, it's very interesting. He's not interested in writing,

he's not interested in what I do, really, other than the fact that I can

finance, you know, some of the things that he wants to do, as he reminds

me.

MJ: And that you're on Howard Stern's show.

JR: And, right, that I've been on the Howard Stern show. My daughter is

more interested, actually, even though she's five years old, because she's

very interested in books. She loves to look at books, loves for me to read

stories to her, is just on the verge of reading herself, and she's much

more interested. And comes to my office a lot. She actually has her own

little office within my office, because I work very long hours, and it's

very hard to balance work and raising children, so I have her come to my

office. She's decided of late to start drawing on the walls. She's doing

murals in my office.

MJ: You raised Howard Stern, and for our viewers, Howard Stern is sort of a

"shock jock," a radio disc jockey, who wrote two books now? And then you

have Rush Limbaugh, who's a very traditionalist figure, conservative.

JR: Very conservative, very traditional.

MJ: These are two sides of Judith Regan? What's going on here?

JR: Well, you know, people.... You know it's interesting, because I publish

a lot of different people. I publish a lot of different people with

different political points of view. For some reason, I have published a lot

of conservative authors. I'm publishing a book this fall by judge Robert

Bork, called "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," and I published a book this past

year by Commentary Magazine, which is a conservative magazine, and so

people very often equate what I publish with me, which is a big mistake,

because I am an equal opportunity publisher. I'm running a business, and I

publish people with a lot of different points of view, and not one

necessarily reflects the publisher's point of view, my point of view. And

people often mistake the author for the publisher.

MJ: Do you get any angry letters from people because of the Howard Stern

book?

JR: Thousands.

MJ: Mothers who are upset with you, or you know...

JR: You know, it's very interesting, there's an organization in California

that conducted a campaign against me, because they claimed that because I

published Howard Stern I must agree with him, and therefore I must be

stopped, and so on and so forth, which I thought was quite insane, because,

you know, first of all they misinterpreted what Howard Stern said in his

book, and what he did in his book, and then the associated me with it,

which I thought was a leap of strange... some strange connection that they

had made. But that does happen a lot. I had a lot of hate mail because of

Howard Stern; death threats, and so on. Very strange stuff.

MJ: Talk about balancing career and work. How do you balance it? What

advice to you have for women who want to work, or don't want to work?

JR: I think it's really difficult, I think it's very, very difficult. I

think that the best advice that I could give someone is to try to have a

stable and happy marriage, to try to have a stable extended family

situation. I think if you have that, if you have grandparents, if you have

aunts and uncles and cousins, and sisters and brothers, and a husband, it

makes it a lot easier. I mean, I think if you have the support system of

other people there, you don't really have to be there all the time. I

think it's very difficult for children to be raised in a situation with

nannies, and strangers, and day care centers, and so on. I think it's

unfair to them. Unfortunately it's the reality that a lot of American women

face, and a lot of women around the world. But ideally, I think that it's

very difficult to have it all at the same time. It's very difficult to

excel in your career and to be a fabulous mother, and to do other things.

And so what I've come to understand about myself is that you just do the

best that

you can given the cards that you're dealt, and you think, "Well, over a

lifetime, maybe I'll have it all. Maybe I'll be able to accomplish it all."

MJ: Not at one time.

JR: But not all of it at the same time. My life, something always gives,

you know. I don't get enough sleep. I don't get enough exercise. I might

not eat the healthiest meal because I don't have time to get it together.

Or I'm constantly pulling time, you know, out of projects or pulling time

out of my time with my kids for my projects. Or not taking vacations, you

know. What I tend to do, is instead of taking a two or three week vacation

at the end of the year, I grab time in the middle of the week. Maybe it's

an extra hour, an extra two hours, an extra afternoon, to be with my

daughter, who still needs a lot of my attention. You know, I don't believe

in "quality time." I think that's one of those crazy things that somebody

invented and didn't know anything about it, because they probably didn't

have children. So you just have to make the best of your situation, and

have some measure of peace about it.

MJ: You've had some controversial remarks about men that I was reading...

JR: Me? About men?

MJ: But the men you publish really love you. I mean, they talk about you

all the time.

JR: I love men.

MJ: So, tell us about men.

JR: Men. You want to know about men? Well, first of all, I'm the mother of

a man, ok, because my son at 15 years old, is really a man at this point, a

very big man, and I love men. I have a great father, I have terrific

brothers. I didn't marry a nice guy. That wasn't a very pleasant

experience. I've had some bad experiences with men, but that doesn't mean

that all men behave in that fashion. That means that those individual men

misbehaved. And I think that as a culture, I think that the American

culture... I think that the men in the American culture could do a lot more

with themselves to contribute to the civilization. I think that there are a

lot of men who have abandoned their children, there are a lot of men who

abandoned their wives, who've been very cavalier about doing that. I think

it's had a devastating effect on the culture. I think if we look at crime,

if we look at illegitimacy, there's a great connection between the two, and

I think that a lot of it has to do with the sexual liberation of the

sixties, that basically, as my mother used to say, "Why buy the cow if you

can get the milk for free?" you know, gave men license to be the predators

that their true natures, you know, really conspire to make them want to be.

I think that it's actually a woman's responsibility to civilize a man, and

I think that women are much more by nature, I think they're much more

civilized, they're nurturers, they bear children, and they're much

responsible when it comes to children, because hormonally, they're much

more connected to their children. I think that we could do... I think that

the men in this country could do a lot more for their families and their

children.

MJ: Ok.

JR: And I make no bones about it.

MJ: That's not too controversial.

JR: But I love men.

MJ: When will you write a book, and what will you call it?

JR: Well, you know, I've been working on a book called "The Art of War for

Women," for a long time and the subtitle is "Living a Moral Life in an

Amoral Age." Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to finish it,

because I'm so busy taking care of everybody else, and there's a novel that

I've been working on which is a love story, a very romantic love story.

MJ: What is the first book about? What would it be about?

JR: It would be about living a moral life in an amoral age. What do you do

when you find yourself living in a society where all the forces are coming

together to conspire to make you behave in a certain way, and yet you want

to be a good person, you want to lead a clean and decent life. What do you

do? What are the decisions that you make? How hard is it to live a really

good and clean and straight life in a society that's sort of crumbling and

a little corrupt? What are the choices that you make? And what is the fight

about? Because I really believe that you have to fight for what's right,

you have to fight for what's just, and you have to fight for what's good.

And that's really what the book is about.

MJ: Is there an assumption there that women don't have, or don't use that

instinct to fight, and need to?

JR: Well, I think that women are not as good at fighting as men are. I

think that their natural inclination is to acquiesce more than men. I think

that they're not as aggressive by nature, although there are those who

would argue that I am. But I think that by nat

ure, you know, hormonally, chemically, or whatever, our natures are such

that we're just not as combative, aggressive, we don't have all that

testosterone. And so we have to learn how to do it. I think, you know, a

certain amount of it is socialization, men learn it in sports, and they

learn it, you know, with other men, and so on. But because by nature we're

not that way, there are certain things we're going to have to do to keep

the civilization civilized. We have to learn how to fight. I think it's

really important.

MJ: What are your goals and plans for the future?

JR: My goals and plans.

MJ: Personal, or professional.

JR: Well, professionally, I want to continue to do the books, and I want to

continue to develop the television and film projects in a greater way. I

want to open an office here in Los Angeles, and develop more television and

film projects, hopefully get a few hit television series on the air. That

would be a dream. At some point when I make enough money, I'd like to

become more philanthropic, get involved a little in politics, and change my

life a little bit. And I'd like to spend more time with my children and

have a happier and more wholesome family life. And perhaps have a loving

relationship with a man.

MJ: Do you think there will be a woman president someday, and are you

interested in the job?

JR: Yes I do think there will be a woman president, and would I be

interested in the job? You know, if anyone asked, and the time was right,

absolutely, why not?

MJ: Thank you for joining us today.

JR: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

MJ: Judith, thank you for joining us today.

JR: Thank you. It's a pleasure