The Naughty Schoolboy

By Priscilla Painton/New York

Just who is Andrew Wylie and why is he stirring up so much bile in the publishing industry? "He's probably the most dishonest agent in the business," claims Scott Meredith, who is Norman Mailer's agent. "Wylie is to the literary business what Roy Cohn was to the legal business," snipes superagent Morton Janklow. "A sociopath," says Daphne Merkin, associate publisher at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wylie, 41, is a peevish Manhattan literary agent whose most famous client is Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, that prompted the Ayatullah Khomeini to order his execution. The Wylie-Rushdie pairing is apt: if only one of them is an agent, both are provocateurs. At a time when many agents have turned mercenary, Wylie tops them all in aggressiveness and acerbity. Says he: "This little East Hampton approach to publishing, where publishers and agents share summer houses so that they can get together and shaft the writers, has gone by the board -- I'd like to think partially as a result of our efforts."

Publishing has long since lost the gentlemanly style it had in the days when Andrew's father, the late Craig Wylie, was a senior editor for Houghton Mifflin. The young Wylie's transgression is that he disobeys the few rules that are left. He rustles writers from other agents, which he admits, noting, "This is not Texas ranching; these are not cattle with a brand." He has been accused of representing authors before they know it. "That's a lie," he says. And when it comes to negotiating, he's slippery: "Sometimes I make it up as I go along."

However Wylie does it, his clients love the results. "The hell with publishers," says Robert K. Massie, president of the Authors Guild and a Wylie client. "Andrew isn't going to play along." While some agents swing bigger deals, Wylie has won relatively large advances for the literary writers he represents, including more than $250,000 for two books by the young novelist David Leavitt.

As the industry's top snob, Wylie makes it his duty to malign agents who represent books he considers vulgar. He has called Janklow the literary equivalent of a heroin dealer for handling novels by authors like Judith Krantz. "They have no lasting value and two years after they've been published are worth nothing," he says with a Grottlesex stammer.

A Harvard graduate with a major in French literature, Wylie drove a cab and communed with Andy Warhol before finding his calling as an agent. In 1980 he signed up author I.F. Stone after singing Homeric verse to him on the phone -- in Greek, of course. (Wylie later handled Stone's unlikely 1988 best seller, The Trial of Socrates.) Three years ago, Wylie persuaded British agents Gillon Aitken and Brian Stone to form a partnership. Wylie has brought Susan Sontag and other distinguished authors to the firm, yet many of the big names on his list are either one-shot autobiographers or recruits from his London partners.

Veteran agent Sterling Lord sees Wylie as the naughty schoolboy of his generation. "Each one ((of these agents)) pushed the ethics back a little further," he says. But even Wylie's critics acknowledge that he is an inevitable product of the awkward transition from cottage industry to multinational business. So they see little choice but to play along. Says Wylie: "Publishers find it very hard to return our phone calls, but they do."