Ed Victor
Hugely successful literary agent who struck deals for clients ranging from Iris Murdoch to Eric Clapton
ED VICTOR, the literary agent, who has died aged 77, was credited with bringing the transatlantic literary deal to Britain and became almost as much of a celebrity as those he represented. Tall, leonine and bearded, with elegantly swept-back collar-length hair and a penchant for Armani suits and huge cufflinks, Victor looked like an actor playing the part of a successful New York agent in a Hollywood film – possibly one made by Mel Brooks, one of his numerous celebrity friends.
He lived the part too, jetting in Concorde from London to America and striking multi-million dollar deals. His client list ranged from literary figures such as Iris Murdoch and Stephen Spender to hugely profitable ones such as Douglas Adams and Jack Higgins.
Victor’s technique was to offer a publisher the manuscript, or even just a few pages, to read overnight or possibly a weekend, with a firm price tag and little room for negotiation. On one occasion he managed to sell Jonathan Cape the rights to Barry Humphries’s first novel for £120,000 before Humphries had even put pen to paper.
He had little patience with publishers who found it difficult to make up their minds. “Hey, c’mon Matthew!” he was once heard to shout at a well-known literary editor across a crowded Ivy restaurant. “Let’s get down on the mat. Let’s deal now. Let’s get down on the mat and do it, huh?”
Victor told Will Self, a one-time client: “You know, Will, people outside the literary world imagine that books get bought and sold by a small group of people who all know each other, and all dine with each other and all weekend at each other’s houses. And you know what? It’s true.”
Victor was a ubiquitous presence anywhere the beautiful, famous and talented gathered together. Tatler magazine once put him and his wife Carol at number two in the list of most invited people in London, with only Elton John ahead of them, a fact of which Victor was inordinately proud. “The adjective that has most often accompanied my name in the press is ‘flamboyant’,” he admitted.
Almost everyone who was anyone was claimed as a personal friend – Ruth and Richard Rogers, Simon Jenkins and Gayle Hunnicutt, Ken and Barbara Follett. “Ed is not a name dropper,” Will Self observed. “He is a name wielder, a name bulldozer, a name invader, a name surfer.” Yet when a member of the audience at the Hay literary festival asked how, if they were not invited to the sort of swanky parties Victor attended, they could get their manuscript to him, his answer was abrupt: “You don’t.”
He had three tests of whether a project was worth the effort: “Is the person fabulous? Is the work good? And is there a lot of money in it?” But his critics sometimes objected that the second test counted for little.
His first major deal was a typical Victor coup. In 1977 he sold the film and book rights for The Four Hundred by Stephen Sheppard for £1.5 million. It was a complete flop, but his client had the money, and he took 15 per cent (some way above the going rate at the time). “Publishers will return happily from lunch with him and remain unaware, sometimes for days, that they have somehow mislaid an arm and a leg,” one literary journalist observed.
Ed Victor was born on September 9 1939, the son of Russian-jewish immigrants, in the Bronx district of New York, and brought up in Queens where his father ran a photographic equipment store.
From his local high school, where he played baseball and basketball, Victor went on to the Ivy League Dartmouth College and in 1961 came to Britain on a Marshall scholarship to Cambridge. Here he studied for an Mlitt on the work of Henry James, James Joyce, George Gissing and George Moore, but became convinced that “back-biting” academic life was not for him.
When he left Cambridge aged 23, Victor married an Englishwoman, Micheline Samuels, and decided to stay in Britain. He got a job with a small publishers called the Oborne Press, part of the Daily Express, then moved swiftly to Weidenfeld and Nicolson, replacing Nigel Nicolson as head of the illustrated books department.
But he soon got bored with “coffee table books about the great houses of Ireland”. One day, according to legend, he cornered Lord Weidenfeld in the gents and, with characteristic forthrightness, insisted that he be moved to general books, on the principle that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”. Before long, he was running the department. From 1967 to 1971 he was editorial director at Jonathan Cape.
By 1970, however, his marriage, which had produced two sons, was failing, and he had become bored with working for an establishment publisher. In 1971 he left publishing to join Felix Dennis and Richard Neville, two co-founders of Oz, to start up a counterculture newspaper called Ink. It lasted only a few issues before being wound up. “I had never failed at anything on quite that scale. It knocked me sideways,” Victor recalled.
He returned to America where, rather half-heartedly, he joined Knopf as a senior editor and also fell in love with Carol Ryan, a glamorous lawyer. They took a year off, during which they decided to move to England to be near Victor’s children, and Victor determined that he would make some serious money – as a literary agent. They married in 1980.
His career move was regarded with incomprehension by traditional publishers, one of whom described the whole notion of agency as “a lamentable postwar trend”. But over the next 30 years, Victor’s networking skills and his willingness to thump the table on his clients’ behalf served to alter this perception.
He built up a celebrity list that included U2, Nigella Lawson, Sophie Dahl, Anne Robinson, Frederick Forsyth, Ruth Rogers, Candice Bergen, Keith Richards, David Blunkett and Kathy Lette. He made the deal for the
River Cafe Cookbook and its sequels and in 2004 he sold Eric Clapton’s memoirs for $4 million.
He was the agent chosen by Alastair Campbell to promote the diaries of his time in No 10, and in 2016 was reported to have agreed a deal in the region of £800,000 (he claimed the figure was higher but would not specify by how much) with the publisher William Collins for David Cameron’s forthcoming autobiography. Among a few more literary names, he oversaw Iris Murdoch’s literary estate and that of Raymond Chandler. In 2005 one of his clients, John Banville, won the Booker Prize.
Victor’s property portfolio included a house on Long Island (composed of two 17th-century English barns, which he had dismantled and shipped over); a weekend cottage on the Sissinghurst estate, an apartment in Regent’s Park, and a house in Bedford Square.
In 2001, after shedding 40lbs in nine months, Victor decided to embark on a new career as an author, cashing in on the demand for self-help diet books with The Obvious Diet, a work mainly notable for its celebrity contributions and endorsements.
He served as vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Almeida Theatre, a trustee of the Arts Foundation, a founding director of the Groucho Club, and a founder of the Digital Village. He was also much involved with various Aids charities.
In 2002 Victor was taken seriously ill and rushed to intensive care suffering from viral pneumonia, an indirect result of chemotherapy which he had undergone for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia three years earlier, and which he had managed to keep a secret until then.
He was appointed CBE in 2016. Victor is survived by his wife, Carol, by their adopted son and by the two sons of his first marriage.