Book maven not afraid of controversy

NEW YORK – At a recent lunch on Park Avenue, O.J. Simpson publisher Judith Regan rose and offered a toast to Spokane novelist Jess Walter, a finalist for the National Book Awards. Regan spoke of her friendship with the 41-year-old author, dating to a conversation a decade ago when Walter, she joked, still had “not reached puberty.”

Only half-true, responded Walter. If he had yet to come of age before knowing Regan, their first chat made him into a man.

Regan, the object of much outrage for her plans to interview Simpson on Fox and then publish a book in which he imagines killing his ex-wife, is not known for being easy on the innocent.

“She’s just a total publisher, very aggressive about signing authors and then promoting them. And she has the best Rolodex in the business,” says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent and the former head of Warner Books.

“I’m not saying she’s not a terrific publisher. She is, but she’s slimy,” says Otto Penzler, who publishes his own crime books imprint for Harcourt.

In a statement released Friday, Regan said she decided to publish “If I Did It” – which she considers to be Simpson’s confession – in part because she was a victim of domestic violence herself while in her 20s.

“I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives,” she said.

She also said she did not pay Simpson directly for the book.

“I contracted through a third party who owns the rights, and I was told the money would go to his children,” Regan said. “That much I could live with.”

“What I wanted was closure, not money,” she added.

The book and a related Fox Broadcasting special not only bring back memories of a shocking celebrity trial, but add yet another installment to the ongoing saga of the literary world’s most shocking publisher.

Labeled a “foul-mouthed tyrant” and the “enfant terrible of American publishing,” Regan has long stood out in an industry that still values – or claims to value – propriety over profit. Envied for an uncanny history of best-sellers, she’s a scrapper and a survivor whose life would make a most fascinating movie, if only Joan Crawford were alive to play the part.

Born in 1953, Regan is an alumna of Bay Shore High School on Long Island who went to Vassar College, resented her wealthier classmates and, after graduating, became rich on her own.

She began her publishing career as a reporter for the National Enquirer. In the 1980s, she showed her tabloid touch at Simon & Schuster by backing celebrity hits by Drew Barrymore among others.

Her decision to publish Howard Stern, she says, brought accusations of bad taste, death threats, and, of course, plenty of sales.

“What she does very well is connect a personality with an audience, someone with a fan base whom she can deliver a book to,” says Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos.

Over the past decade, running the ReganBooks imprint at HarperCollins, she has proved a moneymaking fit with the Murdoch empire, consistently on best-seller lists with such smashes as Jose Canseco’s “Juiced” and Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.”

She has also stayed in the gossip columns through numerous travails, including a prolonged divorce trial and her reported affair with former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik.

She is the rare publisher to put her own face – and not a whole lot of clothing – on the cover of one of her catalogs. She is enough of a character that one former Regan employee, Bridie Clark, has fictionalized her experiences in the upcoming novel “Because She Can,” which features a maniacal publisher with her own imprint at a major publishing house.

Regan often points out that she doesn’t only publish pulp, with Walter, Wally Lamb and Douglas Coupland among her authors.

Walter is an Edgar Award-winning crime writer whose latest novel, “The Zero,” was the first Regan book to gain a National Book Award nomination and the rare Sept. 11 story to receive literary approval.

“My experience has been great,” Walter says. “They’ve published all of my books, and my editor, Cal Morgan, is a great, old-fashioned editor. I don’t think a house’s other books really affect an author. Certainly, readers don’t know the difference.”

But just as this week brought together the high and the low of the Regan experience, with news of the Simpson project coming out on the eve of the National Book Awards ceremony, so Walter’s career leads back to a few folks from the wild side, like Kerik – and Simpson.

Research for “The Zero,” a densely narrated tale of city police after a terrorist attack, was based on firsthand observations of Kerik, with whom Walter spent time at ground zero.

Walter also collaborated with Christopher Darden on “In Contempt,” in which the Simpson prosecutor tells his side, the losing side, of the murder trial.

Some passages from “In Contempt” might seem familiar: Darden addresses Simpson directly, finds him guilty as charged and imagines how he committed the crime.