How I Got That $1 Million Story

By John Greenwald

When he joined the Wall Street Journal in 1983, reporter Bryan Burrough could barely tell a buyout from a bailout. But Burrough, 29, co-author of the best seller Barbarians at the Gate, has become a formidable chronicler of Roaring Eighties-style shenanigans and greed. In a deal befitting a literary superstar, publisher HarperCollins last month agreed to pay Burrough $1 million for a book on American Express and the smear campaign it waged in the 1980s against international banker Edmond Safra. "I was absolutely stunned," Burrough said of the cash advance. "To me, the money is not a real thing. It's kind of like it's happening to someone else."

Burrough is the biggest beneficiary yet of readers' hunger for tales about the pratfalls of the corporate elite. For many other top financial journalists, six-figure book advances have become the rule. Publishers pay handsomely for such potential blockbusters as author Ken Auletta's probe of the television industry, which brought him at least $500,000 and is due on shelves next summer. Connie Bruck, a New Yorker writer, reportedly signed a $400,000 contract for a profile of Time Warner chairman Steven Ross. Other high-priced works in progress include Wall Street exposes by Anthony Bianco of Business Week and James Stewart of the Journal.

HarperCollins gave Burrough his million partly to reward him for Barbarians at the Gate. Burrough and fellow Journal reporter John Helyar shared a $150,000 advance for that vivid saga of the $25 billion RJR-Nabisco takeover war. They wrote the 528-page book in just seven months. An instant hit, Barbarians has sold more than 300,000 copies so far and has been a fixture on best-seller lists for 38 weeks.

As the book climbed the charts, Burrough pondered what to write about next. "I moped around for quite a while," he recalls, "thinking I wouldn't find anything that interested me as Barbarians had." But before long, he was probing the story behind American Express's extraordinary campaign against Safra, which ended last year when the company apologized to the banker and paid $8 million in damages to him and his favorite charities. "I told my agent and publisher that I was working on something that could be the next book," says Burrough. When the Journal published his 10,000-word account on Sept. 24, HarperCollins enthusiastically agreed. "The story came out on a Monday," Burrough said, "and the deal was signed Tuesday night." Compared with the hurly-burly schedule of Barbarians, the one to two years he plans to spend on the new book is leisurely.

A devoted reader of true crime stories and a demon for detail, Burrough weaves suspense into his tales of high finance and intrigue. "I try to write somewhat the way a good murder mystery is written," he explains. "My stories sometimes read as if ((LBO king)) Henry Kravis were approaching with an ax instead of a buyout offer." Burrough may have hit the peak of fascination with 1980s whodunits. As the 1990s wear on, his agent Andrew Wylie says with literary disdain, readers are likely to become more interested in advice books on "how to stave off disaster."

With reporting by John E. Gallagher and Jane Van Tassel/New York