(Article from The New Yorker 7/11/13)
Mavis Gallant’s Double-Dealing Literary Agent
Jacques Chambrun was a New York-based literary agent in the nineteen-forties and fifties with a penchant for pinstripe suits and stealing his clients’ money. One of his clients was Mavis Gallant. The diary entries excerpted in this week’s issue of the magazine show Gallant starving and desperate in Spain, selling her clock for breakfast. Her agent hadn’t mentioned that two of her stories—“The Picnic” and “One Morning in June”—would be appearing in The New Yorker.
Gallant wasn’t his only victim. Chambrun embezzled thirty thousand dollars from W. Somerset Maugham by secretly negotiating the world rights to his books. When Ben Hecht ghost-wrote Marilyn Monroe’s memoir, Chambrun sold a scandalous passage to a London tabloid for a thousand pounds with neither Monroe nor Hecht’s permission; Monroe was so unnerved by the article that she rescinded her support for the book and Hecht had to return his five-thousand-dollar advance to Doubleday. (“My Story” was eventually published, twenty years later, but Hecht was not credited until the book’s third printing.)
Chambrun quietly arranged for the books of Grace Metalious (author of “Peyton Place”) to be published in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy and used the money from these deals to cover his debts to Jack Schaefer, another client. Chambrun had used the money from Schaefer’s foreign rights to pay back Maugham, and so on and so on, in a kind of literary pyramid scheme. Chambrun was transparent about his methods, at least to those who inquired. If authors threatened legal action, as many reportedly did, Chambrun offered a stump speech: “If you put me in jail, I can’t earn any money, and I can’t pay you back. If you don’t sue me, I’ll pay you back.” The pitch worked. All of his authors abandoned him, but not as quickly as one might imagine. Money trumped revenge, and some writers, like Hecht, were still grateful to Chambrun for their careers.
According to the New York Public Library’s records, Chambrun’s client list included many established authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells, with relatively deep coffers to skim from. But Chambrun stole just as readily from his younger clients, like Gallant. He sold manuscripts and stories behinds his clients’ back and produced contracts allotting him a twenty to thirty per cent commission. (Agents typically take fifteen per cent.) “This man knew I had not two cents to put together,” Gallant said of Chambrun in an interview earlier this year with Radio-Canada. She left Chambrun after her editor at The New Yorker urged her to do so. “I woke up,” Gallant said.
Chambrun was grandiose and very French—a combination that made writers feel like a big deal long before they got to be one. Grace Metalious was seduced by his name alone. “I just picked your name cold out of a book,” she wrote in her first letter of inquiry, according to “Inside Peyton Place,” a biography of Metalious by Emily Toth. Chambrun wore a boutonniere, travelled in a chauffeured car, and maintained an office at 745 Fifth Avenue—across the street from the Plaza Hotel. He could be elegant or oily, depending on whom you asked. Knox Burger, an editor and agent, once described Chambrun as a “feral character” and said he would be perfect “if you were casting an unctuous Levantine villain in a 1950 film noir.” He dyed his hair a deep black and threw Hugh Hefner-style parties in his basement pool. Chambrun claimed relation to the French counts de Chambrun, but rumor had it he was raised in the Bronx. (There’s a record of a Jacques Chambrun born in New York in 1906, but no one is certain that this was even his real name.)
In 1956, when he had no clients left, Chambrun started 16, a celebrity magazine for teen-age girls with cover stories like “Barbara Hearn: Elvis’ Girl Friend Tells Why She Makes Up as She Does.” He and a partner wrote most of the magazine’s stories under the pseudonym Georgia Winters. In 1958, Chambrun yielded control of the magazine to Gloria Stavers and slipped away. He died in 1976, according to Toth. Gallant heard that he was killed in a car crash, along with his two dogs. Gallant’s checks were recovered, but all the possessions she sold to survive those dry months in Spain—her grandmother’s ring, her typewriter—were not. “I never forgave him for that,” she said.
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