Kesey: Alive and Well and . . .

Who was that Uncle Sam-like character cavorting about the stage at Town Hall here not long ago? Well, said Ken Kesey, thoroughly dispelling any possibility that he is not still Kesey after all these years, this particular red-white-and-blue persona--a.k.a “Uncle Sambozo”--was “born after 62 hours of watching the Fourth of July . . . the result of unspeakable congress between the Statue of Liberty and the Fuji blimp.” Red rose in the lapel of his “$55 Korean suit, I’ll have you know,” Kesey captivated an audience that clearly shared his unflagging belief that the ‘60s will never die. There was the legendary survivor/iconoclast, wearing funny hats, smoking imaginary joints and, quoting liberally from the Beatles, extolling the virtues of “heads across the water.” Mostly, backed by his psychedelic Thunder Machine Band, Kesey read from “Demon Box” (Viking), his first major book in more than 20 years. Challenging both public and private demons, the collection of essays and short stories is dedicated to Kesey’s son Jed. Ever since the 18-year-old (buried on Kesey’s farm in Oregon) died two years ago in an automobile accident, Kesey has made it a point to write to parents he reads or hears of who have lost children. There was no talk of such matters, however, in Kesey’s appearance here. What he did say was that he was “sending shivers through the publishing industry” by threatening to send his long-awaited novel about Alaska directly past the publishers and “straight into video.” Said Kesey, “I mean Chekhov, if he were here, he’d be using video.” One sober note did arise when someone asked Kesey about the late poet/novelist Richard Brautigan. “He was a very sweet and wonderful man, and we lost him and that’s too bad,” Kesey said. “Everyone that I’ve seen die has died from being alone, from aloneness. Let’s keep better track of each other.”

NO REGRETS: Les Brown provided the music and Red Buttons the comic monologue as Norman Lear assembled several hundred friends under a Brentwood big top last month to celebrate Sally Quinn, author of “Regrets Only” (Simon & Schuster) and husband Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post. “Was that $600,000, Sally?” Buttons asked, alluding to paperback sales made the day of the bash. Actually, informed sources now report, the sex-and-politics best-seller brought a little more than that.

“FREEDOM ALERT”: In a similar vein, the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the American Library Assn. has issued a “call to arms” alerting librarians to the “potential chilling effect” of the report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography on “the free flow of ideas.” The group faulted the commission’s conduct and conclusions as “flawed by an inordinate number” of anti-pornography witnesses, visual materials “skewed to the very violent and extremely degrading” and “an undemonstrated casual link of sexually explicit materials with sexual crime.” Most damaging, in the view of the committee, is the report’s potential for “heightening an already threatening pro-censorship climate” in the United States.

THE COLOR OF SUCCESS: Touted widely as “another ‘Color Purple,’ ” Sherley Anne Williams’ “Dessa Rose” (William Morrow) was already in its third printing within one month of publication. Paperback rights to the San Diego novelist’s first book have been sold to Berkley for $100,000, reports Williams’ agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and film rights to United Artists for an Irwin Winkler production with screenplay by Williams.

NOW WHAT? In recent days, Bertelsmann, the German publishing giant which owns Bantam, the American mass-market paperback house, has acquired Doubleday, a hardcover publisher which just a few years ago acquired Dell, another mass-market paperback publisher. At that time, Dell had a hardcover imprint of its own, Dial, which Doubleday eventually retired. Will Bertelsmann retire the large and well-established Dell paperback line in favor of Bantam? Not likely, though not inconceivable. But there is another duplication in the merger: that of Doubleday’s huge hardcover output with Bantam’s small, recently created hardcover line. Bantam hardcover would seem to be the likely candidate for elimination, but its success with books like “Iacocca” and “Yeager” has been phenomenal.

Similar rearrangements of chairs may be under way a few stops south on the Manhattan subway. British-owned Penguin has just acquired New American Library, another mass-market paperback publisher. But Penguin, well-known for its trade (bookstore-sold) paperbacks as distinct from the mass-market (drugstore-sold, airport-sold, etc.) paperbacks which NAL relies on, also owns the distinguished hardcover publisher Viking. And NAL acquired, not long ago, a complementary hardcover house, E. P. Dutton. Will Penguin keep both Dutton and Viking at the status quo?

Acquisitions in publishing are typically accompanied by promises to keep all enterprises going that have been going. And sometimes those promises are actually kept. To the lay observer, it begins to sound like a revival of “Who’s on First?”--complicated by the fact that Nelson Doubleday is selling the family publishing house to buy the New York Mets.

PLAY BALL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has teamed up with the Kansas City Royals to put together something called Boardwalk and Baseball. The amusement park-cum-baseball stadium will open near Orlando in February, 1988.

HOW DO YOU SPELL “CENSORSHIP?”: The news of People for the American Way’s fourth annual report on book censorship, that group’s Jim Kurtzke reports, is that book banners have “finally gone after Webster’s Dictionary--and succeeded.” Censorship of textbooks, library books and public school curricula rose 35% in the last school year, according to “Attacks on the Freedom to Learn: 1985-86,” and 117% since the report was first issued four years ago. The “suggestive content” of such plays as “A Chorus Line,” “Death of a Salesman” and “Grease” made those works targets for censorship, the report said, and once again, “Huckleberry Finn” came under fire. So did another frequently challenged work, “Romeo and Juliet,” but this time for a new reason: because it allegedly promotes witchcraft. Censorship cuts across the political spectrum, Kurtzke said, “but the biggest censors without a doubt are the large national right-wing organizations.” Nonetheless, he said, quite the opposite faction was at work when “last year a group in Berkeley wanted to throw out a history text because it was too anti-Soviet.”

OXYMORON POWER: With a relatively straight face, Tama Janowitz announces that she has made “the first literary video.” The author of best-selling “Slaves of New York” (Crown) said that dressed in her favorite fishnet stockings, she simply roamed the streets of her favorite city, offering a “spontaneous monologue” amid such local color as rats and pier people. Financed by her publisher, the video is running on HBO.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH HURRICANES: Gazing out his window at a giant storm while on vacation in the West Indies, artist Barry Moser became convinced that what he was really seeing was a disembodied head in the eye of the storm. “The Wizard of Oz!,” thought Moser, and soon he was busy creating the 62 wood engravings that illustrate the University of California Press’ new Pennyroyal edition of L. Frank Baum’s classic.

THE RACE IS ON: Bantam and Ballantine finished in a dead heat in 1985 in the race to be the largest mass market publisher. For fiscal 1986, Bantam showed mass market sales between $200 million and $203 million. Sales for 1985 for Ballantine/Del Rey/Fawcett were estimated at $201.3 million. Ballantine had 45 paperbacks on The New York Times bestseller list, totaling 294 weeks that those books were listed. Bantam’s 22 books on the list totaled 143 book weeks.