Judith Regan Falls Victim To Conventional Wisdom

On Friday evening, just after the close of the daily news cycle, Harper-Collins issued a terse statement that it was firing Judith Regan, "effective immediately," from the imprint she founded, ReganBooks. It was unclear whether Ms. Regan — the flamboyant and controversial would-be publisher of "If I Did It," the hypothetical O.J. Simpson tell-all — would remain an employee of HarperCollins's parent company, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., for which she has also produced television series and specials.

Over the past 15 years, Ms. Regan has succeeded in offending just about every segment of the publishing world — except the tens of millions of book buyers off the radar screen of the Manhattan literary world. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and the adult film star Jenna Jameson are among the many authors and personalities whom Ms. Regan has published with wild success, to the surprise, and dismay, of the purveyors of conventional wisdom.

After pundits howled at the prospect of "If I Did It," then cackled when News Corp. canceled the book, Ms. Regan was preparing to provoke further outrage with the forthcoming "7: The Mickey Mantle Novel," described by its author, Peter Golenbock, as an "inventive memoir," full of undocumentable stories. It appears that Ms. Regan had tried once too often to push the envelope of what can be published.

But aren't publishers supposed to be daring, even if they act in dubious taste? In a publishing environment that is increasingly bottom-line driven, Mr. Murdoch and Ms. Regan's immediate superior at HarperCollins, Chief Executive Officer Jane Friedman, can hardly complain that Ms. Regan's daring hasn't paid off. In fact, she has probably been the single most successful publisher in the industry, perhaps in recent memory.

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ms. Regan was fired not for her legendarily difficult personality — and not, or not just, because of her longstanding rivalry with Ms. Friedman — but for her repeated affronts to the bland conformity of New York publishing. (Ms. Regan had recently decamped her operation to Los Angeles.)

Yet News Corp. can hardly avoid seeming hypocritical in holding Ms. Regan accountable to standards of taste it has not been known for enforcing on its other subsidiaries, including Fox Broadcasting Network and the New York Post. It is dismaying to see Mr. Murdoch, or at least a business unit of which he is ultimately the boss, surrendering to the conventional wisdom that News Corp. has defied so unwaveringly over the years.

The last time I remember anything remotely like this contretemps was the controversy, in which I played a supporting role, surrounding Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho," hysterically condemned as a threat to womankind and the tender psyches of bien-pensant readers. But women, children, old folks, and the politically correct universe of book publishing survived that threat. Indeed, after my former employer, Simon & Schuster, canceled "American Psycho," it went on to become a best seller for a rival publisher, Knopf, which enjoyed all of the commercial success — which Simon & Schuster sacrificed without gaining any respect in return — while suffering none of the opprobrium.

It remains to be seen what will happen to the stranded books on Ms. Regan's forthcoming lists. They are the products of such an original and entrepreneurial vision, rare in the hidebound world of book publishing, that it is hard to imagine them under the stewardship of another company.

Too frequently, book publishers today are prisoners of received opinion, all too eager to act as gatekeepers rather than as promoters of free speech. Would Ms. Regan be considered even remotely controversial if she had published, say, Noam Chomsky, Al Franken, and Karen Finley? By this measure, Ms. Regan's chief sin seems to have been that her authors sold millions of books to exactly the kind of readers that New York publishers wish weren't their customers.

As for Ms. Regan, whom I have known — and whose achievements I have admired — for many years, the world of publishing and television would be a far poorer place without her. In a braver and more honest age, she would be celebrated for her daring, rather than hypocritically condemned for her sometimes dubious taste.

rasahina@nysun.com