The room is clammy and the food pap at the 2004 PEN annual gala, at the Pierre hotel in New York, which makes it easier to concentrate on the real purpose of the evening: gauging one's place in the literati pecking order. (Where's my seat? Where is it relative to Salman Rushdie's?) After several minutes of M.C.-ing by a tanned and bow-tied Tom Brokaw, the writer A. E. Hotchner announces this year's winner of the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award: Barbara Parsons Lane, one of the writers in Couldn't Keep It to Myself, a collection of testimonies by women prisoners, edited by best-selling author Wally Lamb. "It is published by HarperCollins," Hotchner begins.
A glowering brunette looks like she is going to leap out of her seat. "ReganBooks!" she shouts. Judith Regan fumes. "Every fucking time we do something prestigious, they overlook us. But God forbid we do a piece of shit … " The people at her table laugh weakly and follow the standard protocol recommended by veteran Regan staffers: Just don't look her directly in the eye.
Which is not to say she doesn't have a point. Judith Regan, quite possibly the most successful woman in publishing, is also the industry's Rodney Dangerfield: she gets no respect. Fear, yes; loathing, certainly. But no respect. This year, the company that bears her name generated more than $80 million in revenue and in August had three books on the New York Times best-seller list, an extraordinary achievement for a small imprint. ReganBooks has the highest profit ratio at its parent company, HarperCollins.
"She has an incredible hit rate—she had 13 books on the best-seller list this year," says Michael J. Wolf, the managing partner of McKinsey & Company's media and entertainment practice. "Some of her success becomes this urban legend. But I do think she probably knows better than anybody today how to promote a book."
More recently she has begun to have success in the field she's been gunning for for a long time: television and movie production. She's one of the executive producers of Growing Up Gotti and was the executive producer of the docudrama based on Michael Bergin's tell-all, The Other Man: John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette and Me. It was one of the highest-rated specials of the year on A&E. Never one to miss a chance for cross-pollination, after she turned up last season as a guest judge on the finale of The Swan, she is now publishing a book on the series, The Swan Curriculum: Create a Spectacular New You with 12 Life-Changing Steps in 12 Amazing Weeks.
Regan calls herself "an average American with a two-minute attention span." But her thinking about the book world is anything but average. It was Regan who first realized that talk-radio audiences and others who seemed entirely outside the reach of literary culture would, in fact, buy books, and signed up Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and the guys from the World Wrestling Federation, all of whom became best-selling phenomenons. While she professes no personal right-wing leanings (close friends roll their eyes—"She's to the right of Genghis Khan," says one), she has endeared herself to HarperCollins owner Rupert Murdoch with her successful publishing of right-wingers such as Robert Bork and Sean Hannity and tough guys such as former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik and Iraq-war majordomo General Tommy Franks. But she goes where the money and interest are, which means she has also published Michael Moore, left-leaning Alan Colmes, and, startlingly, right before the election, Glenn W. Smith's Unfit Commander: Texans for Truth Take On George W. Bush.
Above all, while she does publish literary darlings such as Wally Lamb—an Oprah favorite—her name has become synonymous with sex, with books like last year's She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, the Jenna Jameson bio, and next year's oral history of the porn-film industry by Legs McNeil. "I don't publish pornography," she recently told The New York Times. "I publish smart books about sex. A lot of people try to imitate what I do, but they don't do it well."
Many in publishing would agree. When it comes to picking books, "Judith doesn't listen to anything or anybody," says brand-identity designer Jeff Stone, who is also the companion of HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman. "A man has a golden gut. She goes with her golden vagina."
Yet, with her enormous success, and with her company celebrating its 10-year anniversary, Judith Regan is widely known as the Angriest Woman in Media: tormented, and a tormentor—the Scott Rudin of books. As one woman who'd worked in both publishing and television production told me, "She has a pathological personality that's totally appropriate in the film business. But it doesn't exist in publishing." Several prominent agents I talked to will not take their projects to her; even some of her admirers didn't want to talk on the record, because they don't want to be anywhere on her radar.
Her friends, several of whom were prompted by Judith to contact me for this article, argue that it's not so much anger as passion—for the books, for winning—that drives her. Her enemies, who are legion, say she is (as one former friend put it) "the highest-functioning deranged person I've ever known."
Crazy, or crazy like a fox? We'll never know for sure, because Regan declined to be interviewed for this article. But she seemed only too eager to have her friends speak for her. They called; they sent e-mails; they sent Instant Messages. Regan may have alienated most of the New York media, but she is fiercely loyal to those friends she has, and they to her. "Judith's story is a triumphant one—she's had to endure so much to achieve what she has—happy children and a great career," writes Doug Schoen, the Clinton pollster and founding partner of the research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, in an e-mail. "Have some courage and tell the truth: she's beautiful, she's bold, she's smart and she did it—against all odds. If you see her company logo you'll understand. It's a woman with a baby on one hip and a sword on the other."
The company logo does say a great deal about her. She sees herself as a warrior: she is fond of quoting Patton (at one point, she had taped to her computer "The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on"), and in her home had a painting of the biblical heroine Judith, who delivered Israel from a foreign army by first beguiling and then beheading the Assyrian commander Holofernes. There have been periods in her life when she persevered through enormous pain and quite remarkable bad luck. (Her capacity for picking winning books is equaled only by her capacity for picking the wrong men.) But like a lot of great warriors, when there is peace she doesn't seem to know what to do with herself. She gets bored. And then the next thought is: I know what I'll do! I'll start a war!
"What is she so angry about? That is the $64,000 question," says a former boyfriend. "Her politics, a childhood of deprivation, not being considered an insider in publishing … in some ways, anger animates her life."
In August 2004, Regan trumpeted her recent successes with this steamy inter-office memo: "ReganBooks has achieved nirvana. General Franks is on top of Jenna Jameson in the #1 and #2 positions."
And there you have it. Sex and violence, the yin and yang of Regan's life. And she's never been shy about saying so.
Judith Regan spent her early years on a farm in Massachusetts living with her immigrant Sicilian maternal grandparents; a photo of her as a child, seated with her grandfather, is the cover of ReganBooks' winter 2005 catalogue. (The back cover is Judith today, slinky and coiffed.) By the age of 10 she had moved with her family to Bay Shore, a solidly middle-class community on Long Island.
Judith was the third of five children. Her father taught fifth grade; her mother had bigger dreams for her children. The two brothers were hard acts to follow. The eldest, Leo, graduated from Yale and lives in Ireland; John, the second-eldest, is a renowned spinal surgeon in L.A.
"Judith was told by her mother how worthless she was: You're nothing," says Al Lowman, the literary agent who considers Regan "a sister." It is easy to see how Regan—who kept photos of herself dressed as a man around the office, and has been known to shout "I have the biggest cock in the building!" at a meeting when she felt her colleagues were wimping out on an editorial decision—might feel she needs to act like a man, or, rather, a caricature of a man, to come out on top.
Regan herself joked on her late and unlamented talk show, That Regan Woman, that she had to become something because her mother always told her she couldn't. Regan's younger sister Maureen—a singer turned literary agent (she recorded an album with songs such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find; A Hard Man Is Good"), who has a book about infertility coming out from ReganBooks this summer and is purportedly writing a memoir about her family—puts a slightly different spin on it. "My mother wasn't sitting there telling us how great we were. It's a tough way to grow up. But you know what? You achieve things from being driven."
"Judy was so full of life, and funny, funny, funny, a lot funnier back then than she is now," Maureen adds. From the time she was little, she loved to shock. "She would come home to this Irish-Sicilian Catholic family and just shout out 'penis' to get my father. Or she'd mold her mashed potatoes into big penises, and then she'd say, 'Maureen, look!'" Money was tight in the Regan household, and during high school, where she played violin and served as yearbook editor, she got a job at a local Carvel store. Soon she was promoted to manager—and that branch of Carvel became particularly profitable. ("It became known for the decorations on its cakes," Maureen explains—which, thankfully, given her food-sculpting talents, were limited to flowers and butterflies.) Regan was at the top of her high-school class (in 2003 she was inducted into the Bay Shore High School Hall of Fame; other inductees include soul singer Patti Austin and 70s roots rocker Commander Cody) and received a scholarship to Vassar.
She took to college a Saint Bernard named Pippin, a fierce ambition, and a significant chip on her shoulder, says former friend and college classmate Michael Wolff. (Wolff, now a writer for this magazine, had a falling-out with Regan over a 1999 article he wrote about her in New York magazine. But for 25 years they were close friends.) According to Wolff, she resented the wealthy Vassar girls and their effortless social ease.
Regan's critics say she's a self-dramatizer who's constantly portraying herself as a victim of predatory males, and that may be partially true. But at the same time, from an early age she seemed to be a magnet for the troubled and troubling. Over the years, Wolff and others would hear so many bizarre stories that, at a certain point, they just couldn't believe that they had all happened to one woman. In fact, much of Judith's life reads like a ReganBooks best-seller.
Partly it was her approach: She knew how to be charming, but often in the most highly sexual way. She seemed to raise the level of every confrontation—men were always exposing themselves, or she was being stopped and abused by police. (In 1980 she won a lawsuit in Utah after making an illegal left turn and being strip-searched. In 1990 she was arrested in New York City—and was eventually issued a desk warrant for disorderly conduct, obstruction of government administration, and resisting arrest—after she allegedly leapt to the defense of a cabdriver she felt the police were bullying. She threatened to sue, but dropped the case.) Maureen insists that, no, she's really a person whom trouble finds. "I swear, you get in a cab with my sister and you're on the most frightening ride of your life."
One former friend described the chaos Regan creates around herself this way: "Judith is the sort of person who insists you stay with her, and then you arrive and find out that her ex-boyfriend is also staying in the same room, and there are no sheets, so you have to go buy them, and she tells you to get the best ones and she'll pay you back, and then she won't and she'll say, 'I've noticed that you let people take advantage of you.'"
When she graduated from college, in 1975, she got a job as a secretary at Juilliard and then moved with a boyfriend to Boston, where she worked as a secretary at Harvard. While there, she answered an ad in the paper for a reporter for The National Enquirer. This was 1978, when the Enquirer was interested more in three-headed alien babies and sightings of Elvis than in celebrity weddings. She got the job. And a star was born.
Shortly after she started her Enquirer job, still living in Boston, she met David Buckley, a charming, handsome psychiatrist. According to her, he was a manic-depressive who hit her, frequently. Regan nevertheless loved him, and got pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Patrick, in 1981. She and Buckley broke up, and he reportedly went to jail on drug charges. Sometimes she left her infant son with her mother, but often she took him on the road while she chased her stories.
In the early 80s she relocated to New York. By this point youthful cuteness had given way to beauty, and with her heart-shaped face, natural pout, and enormous dark eyes, she was a heartbreaker.
But her looks did not buy her luck. In 1984 her apartment in Manhattan went up in flames, and she lost everything. She rented a home in Weehawken, New Jersey, and got back together with David Buckley, who was out of jail. She became pregnant with his child, but she started to hemorrhage. She has said that physical abuse caused her to lose her child.
"I sat with her and watched her baby die," says Maureen Regan. "Judy almost died. And I'm the one who had to tell my sister her baby girl died." Judith looked at her sister and said, "Oh." She closed her eyes for a minute and opened them again. "I have to move on," she said.
Regan was not sure what to do next. She loved the tabloid business, but she wanted to stop traveling. In 1987 she approached Simon & Schuster with an idea for a book that—interestingly, for a woman who seemed to be torn between high drama and domesticity—was a study of the average American family, with Ozzie and Harriet as its centerpiece. The editor at Pocket Books, Jack Romanos, didn't want the book, but he sensed that Regan had good instincts. With no publishing experience, she started working for the company as a consultant and soon began churning out a string of hits—celebrity cash cows such as Drew Barrymore's Little Girl Lost and Kathie Lee Gifford's I Can't Believe I Said That!, and then hits by Stern, Limbaugh, and Mike Judge, the Beavis and Butt-head creator—books that made her name as the woman with her finger on the pulse.
Regan's books were review-proof. So was she. In print, she constantly thumbed her nose at the publishing establishment—"They're snobs," she was fond of saying—and they returned the love. Judith chafed at being underestimated by what she saw as the terminally elitist publishing world, which dismissed her success with the notion that if their books appealed to the lowest common denominator they'd have an endless stream of hits, too. "If it were so easy to do what Judith does, then everybody would be doing it," says David Hirshey, executive editor and vice president at HarperCollins. "It's not like other publishers haven't tried. Does anybody think there would be a Paris Hilton autobiography if it weren't for Judith?"
"Look," adds her friend the critic and essayist Stanley Crouch, "if a woman becomes successful in New York and carries herself like Melanie in Gone with the Wind, she'll be forgiven. But if she doesn't find a way to constantly apologize for being successful, she's gonna have problems."
Regan was bringing in piles of money for Simon & Schuster but didn't feel she was being properly compensated. After a few years, she was threatening to quit. There were also rumors that, despite the amount of money her books were making, someone at the top of Simon & Schuster parent Viacom wanted her out. "Somebody in a high place at Viacom, if not the highest place, said, 'Her toxicity was ruining the company—she has to go,'" says another former Regan friend.
In 1994, Rupert Murdoch came courting, with promises of her own imprint and a piece of the action. (Eventually, HarperCollins bought her out for a fat sum and agreed to pay her probably the most generous salary in book publishing, according to industry consultants.) But he also offered what Regan had always craved: a chance to be a star outside hothouse media circles. She'd have a television talk show. She'd have a chance to do movie and TV deals. She would be the Queen of All Media.
"Judith played the damsel in distress, and Rupert liked that very much," adds the onetime friend. "But of course he's no fool. He knew what she could do for him."
And she did it all—while at the same time going through one of the longest, most contentious divorces in New York State history. After moving back to New York, Regan met Robert Kleinschmidt, a then married financier. He had money; she did not have much. "From the beginning she doesn't like him," says a friend. "It's this torrent of negativity, and a torrent of sexual perversion." Maureen Regan testified that Kleinschmidt was stealing his wife's panties. The friend adds, "For most women, I'd think that would kind of be a warning signal."
Regan almost broke up with Kleinschmidt three months before their wedding, when she discovered his affair with a 15-year-old babysitter. They married in 1987, had their daughter, Lara, in 1991, and separated in 1992 when Regan discovered that—surprise!—he was having another affair.
During the divorce proceedings Kleinschmidt requested custody of their daughter and 88 percent of their marital assets. He insisted he could pay only $14,000 a year in child support, despite an annual salary of about $1 million.
Three trials, at least six lawyers, and more than a million dollars later they were divorced. Regan held on to everything, with the possible exception of her sanity. "She was entirely vindicated," says her high-profile matrimonial lawyer, William Beslow, who has also represented Robert De Niro, Demi Moore, and scores of other celebrity divorcés. Still, even though Beslow got her exactly what she had wanted, he and Regan sparred bitterly in the press. Her legal bills were sometimes $70,000 a month, and in 2001 she and a private investigator demanded her files from Beslow's secretary. Beslow turned around and filed his own charges. She had already changed to yet another lawyer when Kleinschmidt appealed one of the verdicts. Winning did not seem to assuage her fury.
"Sometimes throwing pots and pans at one another is a way to continue the conversation," says a former boyfriend. Besides, he adds, "as a lawyer said to me, 'In a divorce, you can see going through two lawyers, maybe even three, … but when you're on your sixth lawyer, it's about you.'"
Divorce is wrenching for almost everyone, but in the melodrama of Judith Regan's life, it was something more. It has informed her worldview and her publishing agenda. Regan could always be counted on to be interested in books "about women who have been victimized," says Kristin Kiser, now the editorial director of Crown, who, while at ReganBooks, had worked on a book called Divorced by Justice, about women hurt by the legal system when they were divorcing. "She looked on it as a calling."
"If you have a book where the theme revolves around a man abandoning a woman," says one agent, "you send it to Judith."
ReganBooks books are many things. Dumb is not one of them. Even if the subject is light, the execution is not. "Nobody has her work ethic," says Kiser. And she puts a lot of herself into the design—sometimes literally. Regan was the cover model on a book called Hunger Point, and in a book called The Paris Apartment she included a photo of herself in a black negligée, one hand to her breast, staring seductively at the camera. She's also starred in ads, most famously wrapped in a towel and lying in bed, with the tagline "I love to read in bed."
She is known for paying relatively puny advances (Tommy Franks's $5 million notwithstanding), and for mocking colleagues who overpay. But she sells books, and authors tend to like that. Notes former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, whose memoir, The Lost Son, was published by ReganBooks in 2001, "She is brash, very assertive, extremely demanding, and talks like a man…. But you know what? I've run the largest police departments in the country, I've run the largest jail. Sometimes it takes a person like that to get things done." Kerik still speaks of Regan with tremendous fondness—she cared for his sister's children when the sister was ill. Rumors of an affair abounded during the project, but both Regan and Kerik denied them. "When we met she said to me, 'I'm not going to promise you a lot of money, I'm not going to promise you a best-seller. I promise you'll have a good book.' And, look, it turns into a best-seller." Kerik's memoir came out right after 9/11—when Kerik was everywhere in the news—thanks to Regan's insistence that he keep his November 2001 publication date.
Although pushing the New York City police commissioner to meet his deadline so that his book could be pegged to the most devastating terrorist attack in American history might not have been in good taste, good taste has never been Regan's forte. When Berkeley sociology professor Bob Blauner spent four years working on a serious and considered book about men mourning their mothers, Our Mothers' Spirits, it was his bad fortune that just before it came out the Princess of Wales died. Regan talked him into writing an essay about her death as the book's foreword—despite the fact that, as Blauner admits, he didn't actually know which country she was a princess in—and then insisted that the cover illustration of the Madonna and Child be replaced with a photo of Diana and her boys. When top management protested that this was in bad taste, Regan became apoplectic. "Everyone in this place is a pussy but me!" she shouted at an editorial meeting about the project, and the book was published as she demanded. The big chains such as Barnes & Noble initially hesitated to carry it, then relented, but by that time the publicity had been so scathing, there seemed to be almost a boycott of the book. It sold fewer than 3,000 copies.
Still, Regan does take risks; she gets enthusiastic about books no one else will touch. Former New York City Ballet dancer Toni Bentley's The Surrender—an intelligent, funny memoir that happens to be almost entirely about anal sex—was reportedly rejected by a dozen publishers before it reached Regan, who loved it. "She is my heroine," says Bentley. "I felt like she trusted me as a writer completely. No requests to tone it down, make it more politically correct, or take out any of the many … graphic details or spiritual yearnings."
Regan has probably had more public brawls with authors than any other publisher. She lambasted Madonna for stealing what she claimed was her idea for a book on erotica; she spanked Monica Lewinsky in the gossip columns, implying that Lewinsky was stringing her along on an offer to buy her tell-all book. Marla Maples was another target of her venom (Regan canceled her memoir), and she famously feuded with respected authors Peter Manso and Ellen Hawkes over their ultimately unpublished Margaux Hemingway biography.
One notorious story of Regan's Machiavellian business dealings has made the rounds. At the height of speculation about whether or not Hillary Clinton would run for the Senate, Regan called Washington speechwriter Peggy Noonan's agent, Joni Evans. (Noonan had written a critical article about Clinton in The Wall Street Journal.) Regan asked Evans if Noonan could write a book about Hillary in three months. (Typical of Regan. As author Peter Lance put it, "She runs her imprint like a newspaper.") Evans and Noonan agreed; a price was set. Noonan turned in the manuscript on time, to deafening editorial silence. After weeks of delay, a 14-page list of criticisms arrived on Evans's desk. Toward the end of the letter, Regan stipulated that, even if all the noted problems were addressed, the book was such a disappointment that she wasn't planning on paying the author the remainder of her advance. Evans immediately found two other publishers willing to buy the book and pay accordingly. After she informed Regan of the other offers, Evans received a letter stating she would be sued. Eventually, the two sides agreed that Evans would not take the book elsewhere if Regan accepted the manuscript as submitted and paid the full amount immediately. The book, The Case Against Hillary Clinton, published by Regan, came out in March 2000, quickly hit No. 7 on the New York Times best-seller list, and ultimately jumped to No. 1 (where it was tied with Tuesdays with Morrie). "She's her own law," says a publishing insider familiar with the story. "Regan has never paid attention to the rules, and in some ways it's worked for her, and then again, it hasn't."
"There are people who, if they didn't have a pretty face, they'd have a bounty on their head," says a former boyfriend, also in publishing. "Judith used to say to me, 'If I were a man and I were this aggressive, everyone would praise me.' And I was like, 'Excuse me, if you were a man and you acted the way you do, some guy would knock your teeth out.'"
If Regan is theatrical in her author dealings, she is positively operatic with her underlings. In the last two years, at least a dozen people have left her employ—pretty impressive for an imprint that consists of only six or seven staffers. "She is," says a woman who has worked happily for other demanding bosses but lasted with Regan less than a year, "a destroyer of souls."
Ex-staffers talk about strange stress-related illnesses and nervous breakdowns; one person became so overwhelmed after working at ReganBooks he left New York City. Another, former Rolling Stone writer Debby Bull—who was also nursing a broken heart at the time—moved to Montana and took up canning.
"You have no idea how crazy she is. None," says one former editor. "Many of us who worked there still get together years later. We became very close, because you had to stick together to survive it."
Regan doesn't seem to have a sense of the boundary, however fuzzy, between work and life. She left topless photos of herself in a table drawer in her office; she also stored voluminous records for her divorce in a closet where anyone could peruse them—and some did. On the set of a later incarnation of her Fox television show, called Judith Regan Tonight, she crossed the work-life boundary one too many times. In 2001, she accused members of the production team of stealing her cell phone and jewelry, and somehow strong-armed Kerik—or, if Kerik's version is correct, someone who worked for Kerik—into sending detectives to the houses of five of the crew and rousting them out of bed in the middle of the night to question them. The show was canceled a year later.
At HarperCollins, Regan is fiercely competitive with colleagues—particularly C.E.O. Jane Friedman. "She and Friedman hate each other," says one former editor. "So when she had to report to Jane, she'd call all the editorial assistants into the office, turn on the speakerphone, have this charming, polite conversation, then hang up the phone and say, 'Well, that was a courtesy call. Now we'll do what we want.'"
She is also fiercely competitive with her employees. She is, according to innumerable reports, terrified that someone other than herself might get credit for a good decision. Angry Blonde, Regan's best-selling book by the rapper Eminem, was actually bought for $450,000 by a very young ReganBooks editor known for her savvy on hip-hop culture; she has since left to start her own small imprint. "But if you asked Judith, it was all because of her," said one editor familiar with the deal. "Here she is, this middle-aged woman, and she needs everyone to think she's the authority on youth culture, but she's not so in touch."
She has a complicated relationship with women on her staff. After one especially lovely, thin woman, hired fresh out of college, complained that she was being sexually harassed by another staffer, Regan instituted a dress code: no spaghetti straps, no short skirts. Yet a former friend insists Regan's actions don't stem from envy. "To be jealous, Judith would have to see herself in competition, and she doesn't. I don't think she's very interested in that kind of attention—and she gets too much of it anyway. To her credit, I think she wants the young women around her not to stoop so low."
Often, she seems to want to foment conflict, as if she were arranging toy soldiers on a wee battlefield. At one point in the late 90s, when a young (straight) editor complained that a gay superior was coming on to him, Regan immediately reassigned the editor to work directly for the superior. The editor quit.
And politically correct she is not. Many staffers—and other colleagues—had epithets according to their sexual orientation or ethnicity: "I was the lesbian cunt," says one former competitor. "Then there was the black cunt." When she got mad, people were called "fucking retards" and "fucking idiots"; if she got really mad, she'd accuse people of being either "fags" or "on drugs" or, preferably, both. "Judith was always insisting to me I was gay—and if some issue came up that involved women, I knew nothing, because—she'd shout at me—'You've never slept with a woman!' And I was like, O.K., whatever!" says Dana Isaacson, now an editor at Random House.
"She'd seem so normal at some points," he adds wistfully. "Then, you know, the next minute she'd be screaming about the faggot mafia."
But in some ways being screamed at by Regan was considerably less unsettling than being her chum. "She's a raunchy personality, and when she feels comfortable and wants to bond, her bizarre way of doing it is to get crude," says one former editor. "Maybe she enjoys making you uncomfortable? Or maybe it's her weird way of bonding with other women?" At one point Regan told this particular editor, "I'm on so many hormones I could hump the doorknob." "Or," said the editor, "she'd say something like, 'My clit is this big'—and hold out her fingers."
There is no question she rules by intimidation. "I know this sounds ridiculous, but there was always … this vague sense she might actually do physical damage," says another former editor, who recalls this slightly alarming tale: When Arsenio Hall lost his talk show in 1994, she campaigned for the slot. "When [a Fox executive] finally told her she wasn't getting the job, we all heard her screaming in her office. 'You know why? Because he has a small dick, and he's afraid I'm going to eat it. And then I'm gonna eat his testicles. Then I'm going to eat into his body cavity … ' It was the most incredible thing I'd heard. But this was my first job out of college. I remember thinking, Huh, maybe this is the way things are in media."
Few employees have lasted more than a year. Those who have—such as editorial director Cal Morgan and managing editor Cathy Jones, who are married to each other—"have no central nervous system left," says one ex-staffer. "If it weren't for Cathy, the place would fall apart. But their life is that place."
In spring 2003 things became so bad that three of Regan's staffers—Lisa Hamilton, Renee Iwaszkiewicz, and Conor Risch—walked out, but not before first going to HarperCollins's Human Resources Department and threatening a sexual-harassment suit. They received an undisclosed sum of money upon signing a confidentiality agreement. At that point, a HarperCollins executive "was assigned to essentially babysit Judith," an editor told me.
Despite the Sturm und Drang, there were several big pluses to working for Regan. "First, she would give you all sorts of responsibility that would take years to get at a normal company," says one editor. "Of course, you would probably fail, because you didn't know what you were doing, but at least she gave you the chance." And, second, "you could get anything done within HarperCollins's corporate structure very quickly. If someone wasn't hurrying up with contracts or whatever, all you had to say was 'I'll have Judith call you,' and the thing would get done, because they didn't want to deal with her."
Adds Isaacson, who admired her at the same time he couldn't abide her, "This is her secret: she creates chaos and she is never panicked herself. And then she rides her bulldozers over all the bodies and it allows her to do things that other people have problems getting accomplished. It's very effective."
And what does Regan have to say about this? She enlisted her friends to speak for her. According to their reports, she can be incredibly generous: she gave one assistant a diamond Chopard watch, and, says her sister Maureen, often urged staff who wanted to have children not to worry about taking time off. "She … will go to bat for someone she believes in," says Maureen in an e-mail. "If you lie, cheat, steal, don't do your job, force her to do it for you over and over, (which translates to her as less time with her kids), after a while she will lose her patience. Who wouldn't? In fact, she endures a lot more than I ever would—from authors, staff, men etc. In fact, as far as I'm concerned her problem is that she is too nice and people often take advantage."
"Frankly," says pollster Doug Schoen, who published On the Campaign Trail: The Long Road of Presidential Politics, 1860-2004 with ReganBooks last July, "she has had to tolerate some staff members I would never have tolerated, simply because it is very difficult to attract high-quality people to the publishing business at this point." Even a former friend gives her credit for good instincts: "She deals with the morons in the book business in a completely abusive way, so people focus on how abusive she is and not on the fact that she is usually right."
Friends and enemies alike speculate about what will happen to a woman who lives to fight when there are no more bodies standing: in publishing, she doesn't have much more to prove. Her recent television successes may propel her further into the entertainment industry.
And she may feel able to leave the book world, now that her children are a little older. Regan is seen by many who know her as a doting and very loving mother.
Patrick is universally considered a lovely and intelligent young man. He studied mechanical engineering at M.I.T. and is now doing graduate work in California. Lara, a top student and class president at a Catholic girls' school in Manhattan, is said to resemble her mother in looks and, um, moxie. Says one top executive at HarperCollins, "A few years ago—I think she was around nine—I met her at a company party. She asked me, 'What's your position?' She seemed satisfied with my answer. I was a little afraid that if I told her I was a copy editor or something she'd walk away from me."
Regan is not driven by the desire for wealth per se; money, for her, is just a way of keeping score. "She must be the richest person in New York without a house," says her sister Maureen. "She's in between apartments now, living on the Upper East Side. She won't decorate. You go into her apartment, the television doesn't work, she doesn't have dining-room chairs. I go there and I'm like, 'Judy, I live better than you do.'"
She has claimed, repeatedly, that she will never marry again, but Regan observers aren't so sure. "She'd like to get a man who's strong enough to be a guy, with all that implies, and take care of business," says a former beau. "But the nature of her being is: that would blow up in her face. Because she'll try to run him down. If you stand up to her, you've got to leave."
And there are even some signs, however small, that with fewer battles left to wage the fighter wouldn't be averse to peace. At a recent surprise 50th-birthday party, organized by her ex-assistant Angelica Canales, she couldn't get over the fact that old friends from various times in her life—as far back as when she worked at Harvard—turned up; she had never, according to her sister, had a party for any of the usual rites of passage—babies, marriage. "She called me up and said, 'Do you think everyone had fun, Maureen? Really? You think so?'"
"We recently went to Canyon Ranch together. She gave it to me as a gift for my daughter's first birthday," continues Maureen. "You have to understand, my sister never takes vacations. But she said to me, 'I need to take time—I'm gonna crash and burn.' For a couple of days it was great. We laughed, and we walked and hiked." Judith was in a great mood; she'd just bought herself a new BMW with all the requisite bells and whistles. "And she's like, Maureen, look, I have controls to my own feet! There were bottles flying all over the place, food all over. She's totally full of life, happy my daughter was there. In the past she wouldn't have been like that—having a life, having some fun. I think pieces of Judy are coming back. It's like there's Judith, and there's Judy. I understand Judith and respect her and have the utmost respect for things she's accomplished. But I prefer hanging out with Judy."
Judith Newman has profiled Sumner Redstone, Rosie O'Donnell, and Bonnie Fuller for V.F. Her recent book You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother will be released in paperback by Miramax Books this spring.
