BILL Clinton's bio. Out next month, it's still - if you can believe it - in the tinkering stage. At last week's in- house exclusive chat - a surprise visit - with 250 Random House executives and sales force, he said: "I'm just about finished." These hardcore booksellers have seen it all. Still, he electrified them. It was a 15-minute off-the-cuff talk. Not a note in front of him.
"My Life" is so lengthy that, as long as it took him to live it, it could take the rest of us to read it. Longhand, the thing was 4,000 pages. Weighs more than Rosie.
One exec high up in the publisher's food chain asked, "Mr. President, you intending to run for office again some day?" Clinton said, "No." Said the person: "Then, maybe you really do not have to list absolutely every single human being you ever met in Arkansas." (I deliberately say "one exec high up" so the named shivering, quaking creature needn't stammer: "I r-r-really d-d-didn't s-s-say th-th-that.")
Although highly embargoed - meaning precious few have read it - some preferred he winnow it down a tad. No. Clinton won't cut it by so much as a comma.
Ladies cannot schlep this as summer reading. No handbag's sturdy enough. Pack it in your luggage and there's no room for clothing. It's the same size as Ben Franklin's job. For some, exhilirating. Others, daunting. Breaking the work into two volumes was an instantly discarded suggestion because least interesting to us salacious salivating gossip-hungry slobs is its first half. Even extraterrestrials only want to know what happened to her . . . what he did/didn't/or tried doing again and again with her . . . them . . . whoever. The thinking was, nobody'd buy Book One.
Bill, who's seen what hustling did for his wife's memoir, promised to work as hard pushing book sales "as I did when campaigning for elective office." He'll drag city to city on a domestic tour. Unlike his roommate, he's not working for a living. The man has the time so his end-to-end huckstering starts in Chicago. The first Thursday night in June he'll debut at the Book Expo America convention's opening. ...
Clinton's words will sell for maybe a farthing north of $35. Asked isn't that expensive, Random House spokesman Stewart Applebaum answered: "Nobody's shuddering over it. That's the same price as David McCullough's book on John Adams. And it was a best seller. And, as you may have heard, John Adams is dead. He wasn't even around to promote it."