Celebrating “Public/Private” with Gail Papp and Friends at the Public Theater

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Happy publication date today to my treasured author client Gail Merrifield Papp whose PUBLIC/PRIVATE: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater is out today from Applause Theater and Cinema Books, and from Audible as an audiobook narrated by actress Kathryn Grody. There was a launch event at the Public Theater last night for the book where about 150 people, including Kevin Kline, Mandy Patinkin, and Grody all feted Gail and the book. Kathryn, in particular, spoke movingly about narrating it.

It was also fun meeting Gail’s editors from Applause, book industry colleagues Chris Chappell and John Cerullo. There was an independent bookseller on hand all night selling the book who told me as the evening wrapped up that she’d sold all the inventory she brought, a cool 90 copies!

Links to online booksellers and info at the author’s website. Below is some of the early press for the book. The first review was in Library Journal:

Papp, Gail Merrifield. Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater. Applause. Oct. 2023. 346p. ISBN 9781493074860. $32.95. THEATER—Joe Papp (1921–91) is a legend in the annals of American theater history. He founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, which has offered free performances in New York City since 1956. He also conceived, nearly 60 years ago, New York’s Public Theater, where some of the most iconic American productions have originated, including Hair, A Chorus Line, The Normal Heart, and Hamilton. The distinguished cast of players who have taken the Public’s stage includes Morgan Freeman, Colleen Dewhurst, Meryl Streep, Patti Lupone, and Denzel Washington. But that is only half of this story. Papp and the award-winning play developer who authored this book met as colleagues at the Public Theater. Then their work relationship developed into a personal one; they married in 1976 and remained together until his death. Their story is deftly woven into the fabric of this compelling account. Since it is also a history, there are appendixes that list the actors, choreographers, composers, directors, and playwrights who worked on the Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, and there’s a helpful bibliography too.
VERDICT A terrific twofer that’s both a fascinating history and an affecting personal memoir. Will likely appeal to theater fans everywhere.—Carolyn M. Mulac
—-

The second write-up on the book was on Graydon Carter’s website Air Mail, where the book is an Editor’s Pick:

 

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Book Cover for “Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater”

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Thrilled to see that Applause Theater and Cinema Books now has the cover and the book catalog page up for Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater live on their website. The cover—and a full listing with price, pub date, and ordering info—is also now posted on major book retailing websites—Bookshop.org, BN.com, and Amazon—with many more booksellers to come. Gail Merrifield Papp’s memoir, with many photographs, will be published October 17, 2023.

I first wrote about the project when we sold it to Applause last summer and it was announced in Publishers Weekly. To offer readers of this blog a sense of the book, I’ll quote here from the pitch letter we sent to publishers.

 

Gail Papp has written an engrossing and highly entertaining book that blends an affecting memoir of her life alongside the founder of the Public Theater Joe Papp with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. She opens with the Public Theater’s beginnings more than a half-century ago in a narrative that spans the decades-long association the couple enjoyed until Joe’s death in 1991. During that span, the Public mounted hundreds of productions, from Shakespeare in the Park to such plays as for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Sticks and Bones, to the musicals Hair and A Chorus Line—with many actors whose careers were launched at the Public, including James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, Gloria Foster, George C. Scott, Diane Venora, Morgan Freeman, and dozens of others.*

In a witty conversational style, the author paints a comprehensive portrait of the creative process of one of America’s most acclaimed theater artists, highlighting the innovative ways the Public operated, driven by Joe’s ambition to create a year-round producing home focused on original plays and musicals from new voices, while employing non-traditional casting which made it a home for scores of the most creative people in American pop culture. In Public/Private she traces the founding of the Shakespeare Festival, when its role was for a time limited to small venues around New York City, later moving into Central Park where its Shakespeare renditions became an indelible feature of summer in the city, and the Public’s evolution toward cultural renown and national significance, a beacon for social change.

New aspects of Joe Papp’s many battles with the establishment are also highlighted, from tilts with Robert Moses to theater critics to conservative poohbahs in the US Congress. The scourge of AIDs is also documented, in the form of people close to Joe and Gail, Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, and in the toll it exacted on Joe’s son, Tony.

Her touching remembrances lend the narrative a keen, emotional edge, which will captivate readers and bring a human side to the legendary figure whose theater continues to thrive today, operating at both the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in the theaters on Astor Place and at Joe’s Pub, a live music venue dedicated in his honor.

At a time when America remains divided over issues of race, identity, and sexual orientation, Public/Private reminds us that theater is a powerful force for social change and community-building, a place for people to gather.

*A marvel of the book will be its impressive appendices of more than thirty pages appearing under the headings: Featured Actors, Choreographers, Composers, Directors, and Playwrights.

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“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

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There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

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The Joys of Synchronous Reading, Part II

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I’m a big fan of what I’ve come to call synchronous reading, a phenomena I first wrote about in 2014, after I read Emily St. John Mandel’s engrossing pre-Covid post-apocalyptic plague novel Station Eleven and Nevil Shute’s scalding post-nuclear event novel On the Beach, published in 1957.

More recently, I loved Jim Steinmeyer’s 2013 book Who is Dracula? which explores the many sources that fed the creative imagination of Bram Stoker (1847-1912), and the late 19th century London milieu that led to him publishing Dracula in 1891. Players on stage here include Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Walt Whitman, Francis Tumblety, who may well have been Jack the Ripper, and actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

Before picking up Who Was Dracula? I’d just finished Joseph O’Connor’s novel Shadowplay featuring many of the same characters as in Steinmeyer’s book, especially the thespians Henry Irving, an irresistible force and the winsome Ellen Terry who had a deep friendship with Stoker. He worked as the manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater in London. The novel has some great parts, like the writing lair that O’Connor imagines Stoker resorted to in the rafters of the Lyceum when the pressures of the theater, and Irving’s frequent hectoring, became too much for him.

I’m very glad I followed Shadowplay with Steinmeyer’s nonfiction account. Reading them back-to-back, gave me a really rich perspective on Victorian London, and the personalities of all these fascinating real-life characters, all of whom were capable of conjuring from their imaginations a rich tapestry of make-believe and human drama.

In 2002, I published Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, which was reviewed by Teller in the NY Times Book Review in 2003.  Steinmeyer is without question, one of most interesting writers on magic and the theater, and I published several more of his books, pictured below. For the record, The Conjuring Anthology, was published by Hahne, while the others were published by Carroll & Graf where I worked from 2000-2007. At Carroll & Graf, I also published The Illustrated History of Magic by Milbourne and Maurine Christoper.

I remain fascinated by all books associated with magic and theater, reflected in the authors  I represent nowadays as a book developer and literary agent, Alexis Greene, author of Emily Mann, Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2021) and Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp (forthcoming in October 2023 from Applause Books). I’ve written about both of those books on this blog, here and here.

 

 

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The Legacy of the Late Ruth Gruber Lives On

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I keep a Google Alert on for my old friend and longtime author, the humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), as I still enjoy seeing mentions of her and her many accomplishments when they appear in media, as they still do with some frequency. One such item popped up yesterday.

I was tickled to see that one of the refugees Ruth helped rescue and escort to America on the Henry Gibbons ship in 1944—as related in her book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WW II Refugees and How They Came to America, and in the 2000 CBS mini-series “Haven,” with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s role—has celebrated her 101st birthday. As reported by journalist John Benson in this Cleveland[.]com article,:

“Liberated by the British in 1944, Musafia, her mother and sister were one of 1,000 women and children selected by Ruth Gruber, per instructions from President Roosevelt, to be relocated to the United States.

They arrived with $17 at Fort Ontario camp in upstate New York, where Musafia finished high school and learned how to type.
‘My mother and sister, we were always together,’ Musafia said. ‘In that respect, we were very lucky. My father was a different story.’

Sadly, while her father escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Hungary to live with his sister, he eventually died in a Russian prison.

After spending two years at Fort Ontario, the family relocated to Cleveland. Eventually, Musafia moved to New York City, where she married a fellow Holocaust refugee.
They were married for 36 years; Musafia said he died 36 years ago.
She lived in Florida for a while before deciding to move closer to her niece, who lives in Northeast Ohio.
‘In my old age, I figured it was time to come here, so I bought a condo,’ Musafia said. ‘I don’t particularly like the weather, but what can you do.’
As a Holocaust survivor who sees fascism once again rearing its head, Musafia offers sage advice.
‘Believe what they tell you,’ Musafia said. ‘People can do very good and people can do very, very bad. What’s going on now, some people can’t believe it. But I believe it because I know what I went through.’”
In Haven, there is a census printed at the back of the book listing the names of the refugee passengers on the Henry Gibbins. I took a photo of the census and include it here for the record. On the fourth line down from the top left, it shows that Gordona (spelled Gordana in Benson’s article) Milinovic (Musafia being her married name) was born Jan 2, 1922 in Yugoslavia, thus confirming the content of the story.
[caption id="attachment_13723" align="alignright" width="175"] In 2000, “Haven” was adapted for a TV movie with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth Gruber. That year, I published a trade paperback edition of Haven with a Foreword by Ruth’s niece Dava Sobel, author of the bestseller Longitude.[/caption]
A hearty happy birthday to Gordana Musafia, who’s lived her long life thanks to Ruth Gruber, and the USA who brought her out of war-torn Europe.

If Ruth Gruber is a new name to you, I invite you to read some of the other posts on this blog about her, and view some of her photographs, like the ones below, of refugees embracing, and a photo of Ruth from a different period in the 1940s when she worked for the FDR administration in Alaska.

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Looking Back on 2022, Another Good Year in Editing and Agenting

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Yesterday I began totaling up the volume of business for Philip Turner Book Productions in 2022, to prepare to send agency clients full accounting of monies we received from publishers for them in 2022, and to write an annual year-end blog post. I’m pleased to note the figures confirm how it felt while we working at it—2022 was a very productive year for the company I founded in 2009, which I began operating with my adult son Ewan three years ago.

It’s fun and rewarding to have such a knowledgeable colleague and partner whose instincts and judgment I trust completely. When the year began he was our Managing Editor, and then mid-year I promoted him to Executive Editor and Literary Agent, which was announced in the Publishing Trends newsletter in July. The dual role is emblematic of our makeup as a joint editorial services consultancy and literary agency. He’s heading our New Stories division, devoted to cultivating new work in fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir.

Looking back on the year that ends this week, I see that

• On the editorial side, we edited manuscripts and book proposals from 15 different authors;
• On the agency side, we made seven new deals with book publishers and audiobook publishers for titles that will be published in 2023 and beyond;
• With a backlist of author clients and their books that have now been published and selling for a decade or more, we also paid out advances and royalties from various publishers to seventeen different authors and rights holders.

Some of our sales in 2022:

• PUBLIC/PRIVATE: My Years with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp to Applause Theater and Cinema Books; audiobook rights sold to Audible who is working with the author to recruit an A-list actor to provide the narration. Told in an entertaining way, the book blends an affecting memoir of the author’s life and work alongside the founder of the Public Theater, Joe Papp, with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. News of the book deal appeared first in Publishers Weekly’s Deals column. The book will be published in October 2023.

• MOLYVOS: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis by educator and humanitarian John Webb, sold to Potomac Books, for publication in 2023. Webb’s book tells the little-known story of the intrepid Greek villagers, who in the early months of 2015-16 bootstrapped an effective humanitarian response to aid the tens of thousands of Syrians, Afghans, Ethiopians who’d launched themselves in flimsy vessels across the Mediterranean and the Adriatic seeking safety and succor in Europe, before well-known NGOs were on the ground, months before those vaunted organizations mounted no response at all, while people of Molyvos did heroic work.

• In the popular POT THIEF mystery series—whose author J. Michael Orenduff we’ve been representing since 2010—we placed his tenth title, THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED CALVIN, to be published by Open Road Media in coming months. Orenduff will also be publishing a nonfiction book with Open Road in coming months, details to come.

• We arranged for the writing of a history of a regional American theater by a prominent arts critic whom I represent, and engaged the participation of a theater benefactor in the project, details to come.

Books we had sold in earlier years, set to be published in 2023:

• THE NEEDLE AND THE LENS, on the interplay between music and storytelling in movies, by Nate Patrin, author of Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, University of Minnesota Press, May 2020; Nate’s second book will also be published by UMP.

• CINEMA OF SWORDS: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers) by Lawrence Ellsworth, translator of four Alexandre Dumas novels we’ve sold to Pegasus Books; we sold Lawrence’s new book to Applause Theater and Cinema Books.

• THE ULTIMATE PROTEST: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World by Ray E. Boomhower (author of Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, University of New Mexico Press, 2022); Ray’s new book on Malcolm Browne will also be published by UNMP.

• THE KREMLIN’S NOOSE: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight, author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017). We sold Knight’s new book to Northern Illinois University Press distributed by Cornell University Press. Amy’s new book is a dual portrait that documents the rise of Putin and the mogul Boris Berezovsky, who helped make Putin ruler, then feuded with him till his death in London, which like so many Kremlin critics, occurred under unexplained circumstances.

Books we had sold in earlier years, published in 2022:

[av_one_half first av_uid='av-2gxgfuj']THE BARRENS: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson (Arcade Publishing, May 2022), sold under our New Stories rubric. Chosen by the Women’s National Book Association for their annual Great Group Reads program, attesting to its suitability as a novel for book clubs. “Two young college women embark on a canoe trip down the Thelon River in Canada’s Barren Lands when a tragic accident turns a wilderness adventure into a battle for survival in this debut novel…A poignant and engaging thriller with a formidable lead character.”—Kirkus[/av_one_half][av_one_half av_uid='av-29t36rf']ROOSEVELT SWEEPS NATION: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza (Diversion Books, August 2022; Blackstone Audio). “Historian Pietrusza creates a brisk, spirited narrative, abundantly populated and bursting with anecdotes, revealing the president’s trials and turmoil as he faced reelection….Prodigiously researched and exuberantly told.”—Kirkus, starred review[/av_one_half]

[av_one_third first av_uid='av-1tubbcr'] HEROES ARE HUMAN: Lessons in Resiliency, Courage and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber (City Point Press, September 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Offers insights into life on the front lines during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic…An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.”—Kirkus[/av_one_third][av_one_third av_uid='av-195qm7v']LURKING UNDER THE SURFACE: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us by Brandon Grafius (Broadleaf Books, October 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Grafius teaches us how to welcome horror as a constant companion in a world plagued by real evil.”—Sojourners[/av_one_third][av_one_third av_uid='av-rrcgnv']LAST CIRCLE OF LOVE, a novel by Lorna Landvik (Lake Union, Amazon Publishing, December 2022; audiobook narrated by the author, Brilliance). “This warm and funny book is vintage Landvik, with an ensemble cast of salt-of-the-earth women with names like Marlys and Charlene who tiptoe into the world of lust and examine what, as they say, turns them on. None of it is really erotica, of course, but more practical things like gallantry, compliments, understanding and forgiveness.”—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star-Tribune[/av_one_third]

After 2023, we eagerly anticipate publication of DEVOURING TIME: Jim Harrison, a Life by Todd Goddard, the first biography of the acclaimed master of the novella, gourmand, ardent friend, hunter and fisher, which will be published by Blackstone Publishing.

Major thanks to all the authors who entrusted us with editing and representing their work in the past year. We really appreciate it.

Also doing our own creative work in 2022:

Under Ewan’s pen name, M.G. Turner, he published essays on this website about Ernest Hemingway; photojournalist Ruth Gruber; and special effects film pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and continued developing his fiction, with a completed short story collection and novel which we’ll be circulating in 2023. He also assisted children’s book scholar Michael Patrick  Hearn in lectures for the Grolier Club.

I published a review/essay on a formidable nonfiction trilogy about Canadian indie rock n’ roll by Michael Barclay and other authors, highlighted by Barclay’s book, HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 (ECW Press, 2022), and a review/essay on Robert Gottlieb’s enjoyable publishing memoir, AVID READER. I also contributed an essay, “The Education of a Bookselling Editor,” to AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of 20th Century Publishing and Bookselling, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

We’re each looking forward to a great year in 2023. As always, please get in touch if you or someone you know is seeking guidance about publishing. Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com. Our company email is ptbookproductions [@] gmail [.] com.

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