The Dream Maker
Brilliant, touched, and more than a little bit magical, Bill Gladstone was a literary agent like no other
Bill Gladstone, who died last December at age 74, was a wheeler-dealer extraordinaire. The California-based literary agent helped to launch the wildly successful “For Dummies” series, selling the first five titles for that series, which ultimately sold over 250 million books. He negotiated more than 5,000 book deals — including for housekeeping goddess Marie Kondo, German guru Eckart Tolle, and spiritual guide Deepak Chopra as well as political radio host Thom Hartmann, environmentalist Paul Erhlich, and Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch — generating over $500 million in author royalties.
About 20 years ago, the literary agent swooped into my world — just when the writing experiment I call my life was faltering big time. Even though I’d just sold a book to a major publisher, I was already broke again, hungry, and trying to sell a new book — this one about Europe. The New York agent who’d sold that first book was instead pushing an entirely different book that I did not want to write.
Luckily, Bill walked into my life right then — selling the Europe book for me and six more.
We had a curious connection from the start. The day I first called him, I’d been sitting in my bedroom in Barcelona, which looked onto the balcony of a neighbor. As I prepared what I would say to this new agent, I caught sight of my neighbor — smiling and talking animatedly on the phone. A few minutes later when I called Bill, he was excited to talk with me, saying he was coming to town in a week.
“In fact,” he added, “I just got off the phone with a client of mine in Barcelona.”
Turned out that his client was my neighbor, who I’d just glimpsed talking to him on her balcony.
Whenever Bill came to Barcelona, which he visited frequently — the next time bringing Gayle, a mystical blonde beauty whom he’d met in Hawaii, after saving her from a river where she was nearly drowning — he wined and dined me, told me crazy tales, and encouraged me to pitch him more ideas.
I told him about a surreal experience I’d had while writing an essay about Albert Camus — and how it had inspired me to write a novel about the ghost of Camus, an idea he loved. I wanted to visit Lourmarin, the village in the south of France where Camus was buried and had spent his final year writing — and asked Bill if he’d been there. He hadn’t.
A few days later, Bill and Gayle set off on a road trip to Italy. He wrote me shortly thereafter, saying they’d planned to stay in Avignon, France, but upon arrival, decided against it. They stopped at a restaurant and the maitre d’ recommended a village an hour’s drive away — and even made a hotel reservation for them. Unfortunately, as they set off at sunset, it started pouring rain and their GPS wasn’t working — and they had only the vaguest idea of how to get there.
Gayle, who was driving, was confident that she’d find it — despite being in the very poorly-marked countryside on a dark, rainy night. She later said that whenever the car sputtered, she knew to turn. And using the “sputter-turn method,” they finally ended up in the charming village — which happened to be Lourmarin, where they met Camus’ daughter.
Bill insisted that I go there for research on my novel about the ghost of Albert Camus — even paying for an apartment there. So I went — and this is where the story gets more peculiar.
Wherever I went in that tiny village of stone buildings where the nearby forests were aflame with the colors of autumn, when people heard my accent, they’d walk up and say, “Ah, you are the American writer!” I was already dumbfounded — I wasn’t famous and I hadn’t told anybody there that I was a writer — when they invariably added, “You’re writing about the ghost of Albert Camus!”
I asked Bill if he’d mentioned me or my novel-in-progress to the apartment owner or to anyone, but he hadn’t. Towards the end of my month-long stay, I was out at a café when someone mentioned that he’d driven “the American writer” to the airport that very day. It turned out there had been another American writer in town — doing research about the ghost of Albert Camus. I mentioned that statistical improbability to Bill.
The other writer had unearthed a story about Camus from his former gardener, who claimed that after Camus died, the gardener saw the writer’s bicycle riding around — on its own.
A couple of weeks later, Bill wrote to me saying that the other American writer had just contacted him. She was his former client and told Bill that she’d just returned from Lourmarin, and wanted him to sell a nonfiction book she was working on — about the ghost of Albert Camus.
Bill emailed both of us, commenting on what a fluke it was that we’d been there at the same time, researching the same thing — although my version was a novel and hers was nonfiction — and suggesting that we talk. Her response was immediate: “Methinks not a wise idea!” she wrote. And then she accused Bill of giving me her idea — which I’d told him about months before.
The reason I’m mentioning all this is what happened last Friday, when Gayle Gladstone and his agency Waterside hosted a celebration of life event for Bill — including a Zoom live-streaming event, which is how I viewed it. A more colorful memorial service I’ve never seen.
Gayle, who is from Kauai, wore a lei — and placed a second lei atop a chair on the stage, inviting the spirit of Bill to sit. A spiritual guide, who’d been a client, led a visualization to summon Bill. A Korean princess, also a client, did a Tao death dance honoring him. An African queen — of the Order of the Leopard in the Congo — in full regal garb, told of how he’d gotten her a book deal, a “Dummies Guide” on how to be a queen. Victor Villasenor, author of the bestselling Rain of Gold, wearing a purple coat, dramatically threw his cloak on the floor and declared, “Bill Gladstone saved my life!”
Another writer talked about how he’d shown up at Bill’s door, broke and barefoot, to hand Bill his manuscript, which Bill promptly sold. And the stories went on and on of the magic Bill had worked on writers’ lives. After a while, I was fairly convinced Bill was sitting in that chair on the stage.
While there are oodles of literary agents out there, I’m not sure any are capable of helping so many writers rewrite their personal stories the way Bill Gladstone did. He certainly worked wonders for me, selling nearly every book I presented him — save for the novel about the ghost of Camus — admittedly, Bill was a nonfiction agent. Regarding that book, I fully expect Bill to sell that one for me, too — somehow pulling strings from another realm. Then again, Bill always appeared to be working on another realm even when he was in this one.
The agent is the one who saves the writer from his solitary craft. A good agent can change your life, but a bad one can ruin it. I have mixed feelings about them. I've had two, and I suppose my mistake was being too impatient. In fiction, they say you have to wait five years to see results! Ha!
I wrote this when the Plandemic video came out for my MAGA relatives. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A85LlbNx0kNPmdaKwrquskxzD9YP-70MEgCSSL4yFWQ/edit