In 1989 while James A. Michener was nearing the end of his research for what would become his 35th or 36^th consecutive best seller, Caribbean, he agreed to be interviewed for an article about the book in American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines.

It was a natural for American, the dominant air carrier to the region and, despite the automatic book store sales that come with Michener’s name on the cover, he never took for granted the continuity of success. A positive feature article about the book in the airline’s magazine wasn’t something to shrug off.

At some point in his conversations with the airline’s magazine and public relations people, they suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea to fly him down to the West Indies for a week, replete with a professional photographer they would hire, to get some scenic shots of him actually in the islands he was writing about.

The idea appealed to Michener, but the often stoic-looking writer remarked he didn’t want to be away from his wife, Mari. . .and let the implication of what he was saying hang there, incomplete, for his listeners to jump on.

Of course, they said eagerly, the trip would be for both of you.

That out of the way, Michener casually noted that the only island mentioned in the book that he had not previously visited was Nevis, the smaller of the two islands that make up the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. He said he would really like to see it since he had a chapter in Caribbean entitled ‘A Wedding on Nevis.’

It centered on the 1787 marriage of future Lord and Admiral Horatio Nelson to a wealthy local woman, Fanny Nisbet.

Well, there it is, the PR person declared: Nevis, we’ll fly you and Mari and a photographer to St. Kitts and Nevis. Someone from American Way suggested the PR people hire a local guide, or get St. Kitts and Nevis’ PR agency to escort the Micheners around and point out the historic sites. The idea resulted in affirmative nods around the table.

Enter Tim Benford:

In 1982, as Michener was finishing up work on his Random House epic, Space. I was just starting research for my Harper & Row tome The Space Program Quiz & Fact Book, which I would eventually co-author with Brian Wilkes. During a Cape Canaveral event, Astronaut Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard introduced me to Michener. We hit it off immediately and began a long distance friendship and correspondence that lasted till he passed away in 1997.

Though my first two books had been published in 1982, I remained active in my public relations career. One of my clients happened to be the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which I still represented in 1989 when the Michener trip came up.

The American Airlines PR person knew me and mentioned that Benford Associates, Inc., handled the tourism promotion and PR for St. Kitts and Nevis. They offered to find out if Tim Benford was available to escort and show the Micheners around.

“I know him!” Michener cut in. “He’s worked with those islands for years. He would be excellent.”

Needless to say, once I was approached, I jumped at the opportunity to spend a week with Michener, and finally meet Mari, whom I had spoken to several times on the phone.

To make a long story short, our different American Airlines flights all connected through San Juan, where the Micheners, photographer Tim Boal, and yours truly boarded the smaller, 36-passenger maximum, American Eagle puddle jumpers for St. Kitts. Then, after brief meeting I had prearranged for Prime Minister Kennedy Simmonds in the airport VIP lounge with the Micheners, we were airborne again on an even smaller aircraft, a 9-seater, for the five minute flight across the channel to Nevis.

Our accommodations, and base of operations, on the island were at The Mt. Nevis Hotel, a then very new, air-conditioned, modern looking property which some guide book writers said is out of place among the several colonial and historic plantation inns Nevis is so famous for.

But the Mt. Nevis was a necessary choice. The more picturesque plantation inns were not air conditioned. And James Michener was 83 years old and recovering from fairly recent surgery. My consideration was his comfort and to avoid possible heat distress problems.

We visited all the historic sites on the island, specifically locations related to the Nelson-Nisbet wedding at Montpelier Estate. Photographer Boal clicked off various candid shots as well as a few posed ones for the magazine article. I managed to get a few photos of my own.

This trip was taking place while my literary agent, Heidi Lange, was talking to Scribner’s about manuscript revisions for my seventh book, Righteous Carnage, a true crime about the List family murders in Westfield NJ, which I was co-authoring with James P. Johnson. Ned Chase, father of comedian Chevy Chase, and something of a legend in the publishing business, had been the acquisitions editor who inked the original deal for the book. Once that was done, Chase was out of the picture.

The day-to-day editing fell to a young editor at Scribner’s who was trying his best to rewrite the story the way he felt it should have happened. He was also very busy slashing his red pen through pages and pages of background and setup copy, which would prove necessary later in the story. Looking back, that was the most frustrating experience I’ve had in more than three decades of professional writing.

In short, I was outraged and fit to be tied. At one point I even suggested during a phone call from Nevis to my agent that if this butchering wasn’t stopped I wanted my name taken off the book and replaced with ‘Edward Smith.’

There was a brief silence before Heidi asked “Who is Edward Smith?” 

“He was the captain of the Titanic.” I replied, “And this dimwit is trying to sink my book!”   

I repeated that to Jim and Mari the day it happened and despite my distress, we had a good laugh.

During this same time I was discussing the film treatment for the movie adaptation of my first novel (published seven years earlier) Hitler’s Daughter. I spent a lot of free time making phone calls back to New York and California for progress and updates on both projects. 

Each day, while we toured Nevis, I would complain and gripe and bring the Micheners up to speed on the latest problems, goings on, and my complaints about the book deal and the movie project. I was particularly upset that each time the movie script was revised or rewritten it seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the storyline in my novel.

Michener listened patiently but offered very few suggestions, until one day near the end of the trip when he decided to share his philosophy about books-to-movies deals with me:

Sayonara ha been his sixth book. His first, Tales of the South Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the beloved Rogers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific and eventually a movie. His fifth book The Bridges at Toko-Ri had also gone to the screen.

So, by the time he sold the film rights to MGM for Sayonara in 1956, Michener had been around the block with the folks from Tinseltown. It was a done deal, quick and easy. Yet, he told me, two executives from the studio suddenly showed up unexpectedly at his house one day for a meeting. And they seemed very uncomfortable and nervous.

“Back then many men wore fedora hats,” Michener said. “These two had theirs, and they kept fidgeting with them as Mari served a tray of sodas, ginger ale, or ice tea, which neither of them ever even sipped.

“After a few minutes of small talk that was obviously going nowhere, I finally put them on the spot and said I didn’t think they had come the long distance just for a social visit or pointless chit-chat.

“That was the ice-breaker they couldn’t seem to find for themselves, but once I raised the issue they told me why they had come. The lead had been offered to Rock Hudson, who turned it down. Now the studio desperately wanted Marlon Brando to star in Sayonara, but the mega-star would only do it if the script was rewritten to have a happy ending. These executives had been sent to see me and ask my permission to change the ending!

“Well, I was amused by that but didn’t let it show. Instead I got up from my chair, locked my hands behind my back, and slowly paced around the living room appearing to be in deep thought, for some time. From the corners of my eyes I could tell they were intently watching me. So I paced a little longer, adding a frown every so often, furring my brow, slightly moving my head from side to side.

Finally I stopped and addressed them: ‘Fellows, I write books, not movies. You’re the people who make movies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid me a lot of money for Sayonara. You bought the rights, you can do anything you want with it.”

James A. Michener, the consummate professional with more than 30 blockbuster novels, the celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning author, gave this writer a lesson: if you’re fortunate to have lightening strike and get a novel published, and that very rare occurrence happens when Hollywood decides they want to make a movie of your book, just be happy you wrote a book that was published. Take the money from the studios and let them do with the movie what they will.

However, that wasn’t the end of it. There is a PS to this story: Two years after our trip to Nevis, Michener’s next book, The Novel was published. It’s an excellent story about the trials and tribulations many writers go through in the process of being published.

In one scene, the lead character, named Yoder, and another writer are sitting in a literary agent’s outside office. Yoder is patiently listening as the other writer bellyaches and complains about how editors are destroying his work, cutting this, rewriting that, etc.

I immediately recognized, almost verbatim, some of my own complaints, gripes and expressions uttered to Michener in Nevis.

The name of the writer pouring out his feelings to Yoder was Renford. If that wasn’t enough of a clincher, he drives the point home a bit more later on by introducing another author . . . named Tim.