It's hard to say at age 23 that you've met the most unscrupulous person you'll ever know, but not when that person is Judith Regan.
From 1996-1997 I worked for the publishing dynamo herself. I have innumerable stories about the crass, abusive and paranoid ravings I witnessed firsthand in her office; the pictures of her wearing male drag and a pasted-on beard walking up a West side avenue in New York; and the seductive manner she used when manipulating her male staff, but mostly I've kept them to myself, for fear of being sued. Then I read today that Judith is going to publish O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It" — a 'hypothetical' tell-all of how he would have killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had he done it — and I feel I need to share a couple of facts.
Lots of horrible things befall you when you work for Judith. One of my friends developed mysterious tumors on his back that only went away when he moved to France. For me, I was three weeks into my first real job when she fired my boss, who had been there all of five weeks herself. I had come to work at 8:30 that day and by 10:00 I was supervising the fortysomething vice-president who had hired me for the thirty minutes she was given to pack up her desk and vacate the premises. Walking outside with a woman I hardly knew whose career was suddenly in shambles was my first survival test, and I passed. Despite my fear of guilt by association, I gave the stunned woman a hug and a "good luck" before she wandered away carrying her pathetic cardboard box in her hands.
The good news for my employment, however, was that Judith favors the young and exploitable. In my second week I had written some cover copy for one of her forthcoming literary novels. Judith despises literary fiction, but I had made this particular book sound more important than Huck Finn, and she liked that, so I kept my job.
As the youngest (and least important) of the seven or so employees at The Regan Company, I was able to stay under her radar for much of the year I was there. She gives her employees a tremendous amount of power, and backed by her terrifying personality, I was able to get whatever I wanted from the other employees of HarperCollins without question. When you work for "J.R." as she's sometimes called, you have the courage to face senior staff throughout the building. Well, maybe courage isn't the word. What makes you stand firm outside the Regan office is the very real belief that you'll die if you don't bring back what she wants. (I was never physically threatened, of course, but sleep deprivation and verbal abuse can be pretty convincing tools.)
In addition to my editorial duties, I was asked to do some special research projects for J.R. One included finding out everything I could about the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, because she wanted a print of it for her office wall. If you've never heard the story, it's about a woman who seduces a man then decapitates him in his sleep. Judith got a great kick out of that one.
Judith's revenge fantasies know no bounds of taste. When she lost the spot replacing Arsenio Hall to Magic Johnson, she was incensed at Fox executive Rick Jacobsen
At the time she was embroiled in a bitter custody battle with her ex-husband and father of her young daughter. How do I know the battle was bitter? I took dictation and wrote faxes to her ex that contained more vitriol than most people utter in their entire lives. We all knew his real name, as did anyone who read the NY Post's Page Six on a daily basis, but she preferred to call him by the pet name "The Sperm Donor," for which we always choked out a laugh for her benefit. I never heard her call him Holofernes, though
In 1997, Judith topped herself once more by refusing to catalog her books in the semi-annual HarperCollins catalog. See, while ReganBooks is indeed a HarperCollins imprint, The Regan Company, Judith's media conglomorate comprising her film deal at 20th Century Fox, her former show "That Regan Woman" on the Fox News Channel, and her publishing arm ReganBooks, is a News Corporation company. That's who paid us, so she answered to nobody except Rupert Murdoch himself.
The glossy catalog featured Judith in a hot pink gown on the cover and inside it contained at least two controversial books. The first was "Our Mothers' Spirits" by Bob Blauner. It was filled with moving memoirs written about deceased mothers by their grieving children. No problem there, until Judith used the image of Princess Diana's flag-draped coffin with the card "For Mummy" written by sons Harry and Willam on the top. There was no mention of Diana inside the book. Then there was a million-dollar book by Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson. Judith signed that book up herself, but Denise ultimately pulled out. Here's a transcript of a 2004 conversation she had with Larry King about the scrapped deal:
DENISE BROWN: And I did have a book deal. Yes, I had a million-dollar book deal, and that million-dollar book deal was with Judith Regan, and she didn't like the story that she got. She wanted to have the tabloid. She wanted to have the cocaine, the drugs, the dancing, all that stuff. And I said, well, wait a minute. I said, Judith, I said, this is not my sister. This is not my sister's life.
LARRY KING: She wanted...
BROWN: She hated that life...
KING: ...bad things about your sister?
BROWN: Oh, she wanted the tabloid. "The National Enquirer" had done a story, and that's what she wanted. And I said, you know what? Nobody can pay me enough money to write a story like that about my sister.
But there was one more despicable deal that never happened that year. Now that she's publishing O.J., I feel people should know about the other book that would have been in that catalog.
In 1997 Bill Cosby's son, Ennis, was on the way to visit a friend when he got a flat tire. While he was changing the tire on the side of the L.A. freeway, a man approached him, asked him for money, then murdered him with a gunshot to the head.
Many of the scenarios the character Theo Huxtable played out on "The Cosby Show" were taken from his life. All the love people had for Bill Cosby, and for Theo, became part of a nationwide sorrow. But Judith had another take on it. She bellowed for me to come to her office, then, without any evidence of respect or scruples, she barked at me to find the friend that Ennis Cosby was headed to visit so she could buy the rights to her story. As an afterthought, she told me to track down Bill Cosby, too.
I walked away stunned and silent. I had no intention of following through, and decided that if she brought it up again, I'd tell her exactly what kind of scum she was and walk out the door. But she never did.
Until today, I never thought Judith could sink lower than she did that day. I've always been thankful that book never made it into print, and I hope by telling this story, "If I Did It" won't sell. But I know better. She made millions off Christopher Darden's book, she tried to make even more off one about Denise and Nicole Brown, and now she'll rake it in with O.J.'s.
Still, I can hope.