Mr Toppit (27 page)

Then she bought an expensive and bulky leather shoulder-bag large enough to contain the extensive contents of her older, smaller handbag and several copies of each book. Despite her bad hip, which had never fully recovered from her fall at Arthur’s funeral, and the walking-stick on which she leaned heavily, she carried the bag with her wherever she went “just in case.”

Much of Lila’s life was led on the off-chance, not vicariously exactly, more with an opportunistic attention to detail—the toothbrush and nightdress always in her bag, the biscuits she baked in case someone were to drop in. Now if she heard that a friend had an American relative visiting, she would arrive on their doorstep bearing the gift of an English edition. On the train, in the street, in a shop, her hearing as fine-tuned as any animal’s, she lay in wait for someone with an American accent, accosted them and thrust into their hands one or, if she liked the look of them, several English
Hayseeds
. Once, in what was possibly her finest hour, she saw a tourist reading the American edition on a bench outside Salisbury Cathedral and—a madwoman in a beaded hairnet—lurched towards them, waving her stick
and shouting,
“Echt, nicht ersatz!”
like a battle cry as she grabbed the book out of their hand.

By then, of course, the books were famous in Britain. Their success had seeped back over the Atlantic. There seemed to be endless news stories about how these obscure children’s books had become a sensation in America—“The Five Little Books That Could,” as the
Daily Mail
put it—and articles with titles like “Tragedy Behind the Best-seller List,” with the story of Arthur’s death and a photograph of me alongside one of Lila’s drawings.

How quickly the books that had come from nowhere seemed to slot into a tradition, acquire precedents and imitators, passionate supporters and vehement detractors, correspondence in newspapers and mentions on television. The very elements that seemed so anchored to the story became detached and took on a life of their own, took flight and floated in the ether, ready to be plucked and used by people for their own ends. When Neil Kinnock, faced with Mrs. Thatcher’s intransigence over the miners’ strike, shouted, during Prime Minister’s Question Time, that she was “in danger of becoming known as Mrs. Toppit” and the headline of the next day’s
Daily Mirror
read “Thatcher Turns Toppit!” I knew we had entered a theme park from which we would never escape.

The week after my eighteenth birthday, I was in a big silver limo with Martha and Rachel heading to the set of the TV series that the BBC were making of
The Hayseed Chronicles
. I had never seen anything being filmed before. I wasn’t passionate about films, like Rachel and Claude, who spent their lives testing each other on old Hollywood movies, but who wouldn’t want to go and see something being made? It was also my last day before going away. I had finished exams, finished school, got into university, and saved up enough money to go to Los Angeles and stay with Laurie for the summer. Martha thought it was a terrible idea.

After all this time, it seemed extraordinary that the books were going to be on the screen. In the five years since Arthur’s death, Martha had turned down many offers to turn them into a film. There was a pattern to the overtures: the American producers stayed in suites at expensive hotels and organized cars to take her to posh restaurants. The British ones were more low-key and expected her to get to less posh restaurants under her own steam. Wherever she was meeting them she tended to order a succession of vodkas and a large plate of smoked salmon, which she would leave untouched.

The classic approaches could not always be relied on to find favor with Martha. Previous box-office successes, development deals with major studios, access to the big players, assertions that they were, in fact, the big players, guarantees that
Steven always returned their calls
no problemo
, major stars who already seemed committed to the project, invitations to summer places in Santa Barbara or the Hamptons seemed to hover above the table at the restaurant without ever finding their way to Martha’s side, as if an invisible forcefield lay alongside the salt and pepper shakers.

At best her responses could be construed as elliptical, a perverse concentration not on the thrust of the producer’s argument but on the minutiae that hovered at the edges. Seemingly oblivious to the list of stars who had attended some producer’s son’s bar mitzvah, Martha wanted to know what fish, exactly, was
gefilte
. When a producer talked of how quickly he could move, how guaranteed this project was to happen, should she grant him the rights, Martha quizzed him on whether the phrase “fast track” had originated during the construction of the Union Pacific railroad in the 1860s or whether it had to do with the layout of metropolitan tram lines.

In her willful obliqueness the erroneous presumption was that she must be playing a uniquely British form of hardball, a careful game designed to give her more control or to improve the terms of the deal, but whatever it was, as the expensive flowers delivered the day after the lunch wilted in the vase, so did the hopes of any number of film producers.

There were those who believed that Martha was reluctant to sell the film rights because, under the original book contract, the Carter Press were in for an unfairly large cut of the proceeds, but that was fundamentally to misunderstand what drove her. It was never about money. When she decided she was going to start litigation against the Carter Press, she ignored conventional wisdom, which was that cases like hers were unlikely to succeed. Martha’s view was that the original
contract had been simply “unfair,” not a term that carries much legal weight.

The nub of the case was that it went against industry “custom and practice.” By any standards the contract was a bad one: the royalty rates were unusually low but, more than that, with the Carter Press effectively acting as both publisher and agent, they took a much higher percentage of other rights—film rights in particular—than an agent would, rights that they had no real experience in handling. On top of that, the Carter Press were technically in breach because they had not even adhered to the regular accounting procedures they themselves had proposed. If Arthur had chosen to employ a literary agent, the terms would have been much more favorable to him. The problem was that he had not.

Martha was on the line. Although a lot of money had already come in, she would have been liable, if she lost, not only for her own court costs but most likely for those of the Carter Press, not to speak of the embarrassment of losing the case if things went against her. But, luckily, embarrassment had never been a blip on Martha’s radar. Rachel, in particular, had begged her not to go ahead with it, although it was unclear whether that had come from her or whether she had been prompted by Graham. At that time Rachel was working at the Carter Press, in what capacity nobody seemed sure, although whether it was “designing the stand for Frankfurt,” “managing the slush pile,” or “a sort of PR thing,” her job description clearly did not involve early starts or following conventional office hours: she seemed, as usual, to spend most of her time knocking around with Claude.

For Martha, none of it was personal. She always spoke warmly of Graham, behaved, indeed, as if it had nothing to
do with him. Despite the lawyers’ letters, they still had almost daily contact, dealing with various aspects of the
Hayseed
industry, and if he attempted to talk about the impending court case, she would simply deflect him.

Of course, there was publicity about the case and this, in the end, worked in Martha’s favor. As our circumstances had changed, so had Graham’s. Before
Hayseed
, the Carter Press was scarcely on the publishing map. Notorious for their nonexistent advances and their late, inaccurate payments, they were at the bottom of any author’s wish list—even Wally Carter’s autobiography
Hooray for Hollywood
had been published elsewhere. Now they were written up in the City pages as an extraordinary success story with little graphs showing their exponential growth. They had bought a warehouse building in Clerkenwell and had it expensively converted—“supervising the redecoration” had been another of Rachel’s nebulous tasks—and now employed forty people. Even though their list had expanded and they had found a niche as the home of the quirky and offbeat, they were always defined as the publishing house that had “picked up”
Hayseed
and “masterminded” one of the great publishing success stories of the 1980s.

“Squabble in the Publishing Playground” was the kind of piece written in the run-up to the court case, and it was far more embarrassing for Graham than for Martha. She, after all, did not have a business to run. Cleverly, the hearing had been timed to take place soon after the Carter Press’s end-of-year results were published, which showed that the children’s division was responsible for almost two-thirds of the firm’s turnover. It didn’t need a code-breaker to divine that there was, really, no children’s division at the Carter Press—it was just the
Hayseed
books.

Graham might have won the case, but the price in bad publicity would have been too high. If Martha had appeared in court—the widow-lady with her fatherless children—with her elegant but shabby clothes, her glasses falling off the end of her nose, her hair in disarray, and her peculiar way of answering a direct question, she would come out of it better than him in every way other than, maybe, financially. He backed down the week before the case was due to come to court.

In the papers it was described as an “amicable settlement”—as amicable as lawyers fighting round a boardroom table can be—but by then Martha had grown bored with it. In the two or three days it took to hammer out the settlement, when decisions had to be made quickly, when each incremental advantage had to be signed off, she consistently forgot to return her lawyers’ phone calls, ignored the faxes that spewed out of the machine, then called Graham, insisting he be dragged out of the fevered negotiation, to tell him that she didn’t like the typeface used on the new jackets for the Swedish paperback edition. There was a gag clause so neither side could reveal the settlement, and a succession of photographs were taken of Martha and Graham with their arms round each other to prove there were no hard feelings.

Part of the settlement was that now Martha was in total control of the film rights. The approaches from producers that she had had, and continued to get, tended not to vary much with their interchangeable but consistent set of triggers—“passion,” “vision,” “dream,” “commitment”—and the letter she received from a junior script editor at the BBC, called Jake Cotton, was not much different except that there was a handwritten postscript that seemed to have nothing much to do with the business at hand: he mentioned he had read in
a newspaper piece that Martha had done a PhD on the First Crusade and that his particular passion was the building of the crusader castles.

To his astonishment, Martha called him and, after a half-hour conversation in which the books were never mentioned, he found himself suggesting lunch because that was what everybody else seemed to do—no limos and expensive restaurants this time, but a wine bar in Shepherd’s Bush. Unlike the nonalcoholic Americans who had lunched Martha in the past, Jake, for whom vodka, splash of water, hold the ice, was not his drink of choice, found himself keeping up with her out of politeness. As he stumbled back to work at four, he had the strange feeling that, although he did not recall anything specific they had said about the books, Martha seemed to have agreed that the BBC could have the rights.

That the money she received was a fraction of what she would have got from a Hollywood deal, as Graham kept pointing out to her, was immaterial. She came out of it very well: the news that the BBC would film the books was greeted by the press with the kind of patriotic fervor normally reserved for a campaign to prevent a Gainsborough masterpiece found rotting in an attic from being sold to an American museum. Everyone had forgotten that if it hadn’t been for what had happened in America the books would probably have been long out of print. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded if Luke had been played by some kid from a brat-pack movie with an accent like Dick van Dyke’s in
Mary Poppins
. In fact, I would have welcomed it.

Rachel and Claude spent a lot of time compiling lists of child actors. Their favorite was the boy called Christian Bale who was starring in
Empire of the Sun
, which although it hadn’t opened yet had attracted a lot of publicity. They had no
compunction in sharing their views with Jake Cotton, who had not realized that Rachel had elected herself consultant to the project with an opinion on every aspect, from casting to script to locations.

In the end she and Claude had no input in the choice of Luke. There was a talent search, unequaled, as the papers rather ambitiously put it, since the frenzy over who was going to play Scarlett O’Hara. The boy they eventually picked was called Toby Luttrell, a regular in
Grange Hill
who had had a small part ten years before in
Bugsy Malone
. The photograph that kept appearing of him, with slicked-back hair, a trilby, and his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, did not fill me with much confidence but he had the great advantage of looking nothing like me so I was all for it.

Poor Jake: not only did he have Rachel and Claude on his back, he also had Lila. She had assumed that her illustrations would be used in the title sequence and offered her help to him. She telephoned him; she wrote to him; she threatened to “drop in.” Would he like some special drawings for the credits? It might be a nice idea to use one on the cover of the
Radio Times
when the series was broadcast. Might it not be interesting to use the illustrations as breaks between sequences, like chapter headings, no?

No. Jake had languished at the BBC long enough, passed over for the really interesting projects, something of a laughingstock in his department, where he was known to his colleagues as Joke Cotton. By virtue of his triumph in acquiring the rights and maintaining that “the family” were very sensitive and only prepared to deal with him, he had elbowed himself into becoming the producer of the show and he was going to do it his way.