Monday morning, I somewhat facetiously floated the proposition, with reference to the A Long Way Gone controversy, that “if News Corp. were a smoothly running synergistic conglomerate, would The Australian keep hammering away at an author who’s being published by HarperCollins in the UK and Australia?” One reader chimed in with what he recalled as “the immortal words of Errol Flynn” when quizzed about the impact of gossip about his penchant for the younger ladies on his reputation: “I don’t care what they say, as long as they say something.” As this reader noted, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Well, there’s that to be considered, but there’s also the fact that News Corp. is one of the most smoothly running synergy generators in the media game, as savvy Page Six readers have long recognized. Earlier this week, James Frey was reaping the benefits, with a soft announcement (over lunch at Le Bernadin, no less) of the plans for a Richard Prince-designed dust jacket on his upcoming HarperCollins novel, Bright Shiny Morning, along with a limited-edition art book pairing Frey and Prince with photographer Terry Richardson.
And, as usual, no mention of the corporate ties between the Post and Harper. Which couldn’t possibly have anything to do with how the column which in 2006 described Frey as a “mendacious memoirist” and a “literary laughingstock,” then openly wished for “a book burning of [his] phony memoir” now sympathetically casts him as an “outsider” who was “sandbagged” by Oprah. Mind you, I’m not saying he wasn’t… and, in all fairness, between the turnovers at Page Six and the plain ol’ passage of time, maybe the column has simply moved on. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: “Look, you got your $15 worth of story, didn’t you? Quit yer bellyaching.”)
What I want to know is: Have they actually seen the new novel?