Never Published, but $750,000 Richer : First-Time Author Turns His Speculations About John F. Kennedy Into Gold, in Black and White

What if John F. Kennedy had survived that bullet on Nov. 22, 1963?

Every baby boomer worth his Moby Grape albums has pondered that question.

But 42-year-old George Bernau of Solana Beach had the foresight to put his reveries on that quintessential “what if?” down on paper, and his efforts have proved so successful that aspiring novelists with a low envy threshold are advised to stop reading right now.

Although it hasn’t received much publicity except in the trade press, last July Bernau’s New York agent sent the unpublished author’s manuscript to a dozen or so publishing houses, and within a few days Warner Books had agreed to fork over a $750,000 advance.

That’s “by far the most money for anyone’s entry into the publishing world,” said Russell Galen, Bernau’s agent at the Scott Meredith Agency.

Even as Bernau revises the 1,400-page manuscript of “Promises to Keep” for an October, 1988, publication date--timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination--the book has been optioned for a miniseries.

Left the Law Behind

And--further salt in the wounds of the jealous--Bernau is not an alcoholic artiste holed up in some Venice Beach flophouse, a literature professor living in borderline poverty, or an ink-stained journalist with a manuscript hidden between news clips. He’s an attorney, with a rambling redwood and stained-glass home across a eucalyptus-lined street from the ocean.

The money “hasn’t made any change in my life style,” he said with unaffected modesty.

Which is not to say Bernau hasn’t suffered since he abandoned his law career six years ago to write full time.

“I’m a fairly tired guy,” the 6-foot-6-inch man said, his emotions stirring easily after six years of self-imposed solitary confinement interrupted only by a surge of unexpected personal glory.

How It Began for Him

Bernau traces his success to an evening in 1977. He and some friends were returning from a football game between USC (his alma mater) and Stanford, when an apparently drunk driver pulled out of a side street and broadsided their car.

“I was in the back seat and I went halfway through the driver’s side window--no easy task for me,” Bernau said in a quavering voice. “They took me to the emergency room . . . and the doctor came in and said that I wasn’t going to live.”

The “very young, very inexperienced” emergency room doctor’s hasty prognosis provided Bernau with a few dramatic hours in which to re-evaluate his existence. Bernau realized that as much as he enjoyed law, it wasn’t what he was meant to do with his life.

“It took me a year or two to come around to understanding that being a novelist is what I had to do,” he said.

“I had to reach a point in my life where I had something to say.” By the time he did, his wife, Laurie, was “doing great” as a psychotherapist. So, after scaling back his own practice, in 1981 Bernau--who had taken “lots of English classes,” but never studied writing formally--abandoned the legal profession.

“I left on a Friday, with no idea what I was going to write. But I bought a pad of paper and started writing.”

Bernau co-wrote a screenplay about a unicorn, and a novel tentatively titled “High Wire Act” in which a character dedicates her life to perfecting a single artwork. (“It’s not something I’m going to release until I’m dead or maybe an old guy or something,” he says of that first novelistic effort.)

‘A Party Game’

Then, in the spring of 1983 while he and a friend were in Palm Desert “drinking and talking politics,” Bernau raised the hypothetical question of how their lives--and how the world--would be different if President Kennedy hadn’t been killed.

“It was a party game for us; we kicked it around for a half-hour.”

Over the next couple months, he started making notes, then began working full time on “Promises to Keep.”

“I knew the opening sequence. Five years and 1,500 pages later, I knew the closing sequence,” he said.

That pivotal night Bernau spent facing his mortality provided inspiration for the opening scene, in which “a young president named John Trelawny Cassidy fights for his life on an operating table.”

“The character in the novel is shot in a motorcade in Dallas and makes it through a difficult night, ‘Because he’s alive, the whole world begins to change a little.’

as I did,” Bernau said. “I was given a second chance, and in the book I give this very young president of the United States a second chance to keep the promises he made as a person and a candidate.”

Bernau is clearly itching to spill his guts about the “very complex but very accessible” work that has consumed the past few years of his life. On the advice of “just about everybody,” however, he will not reveal much about the plot of his novel, and the phalanx of editors, agents and publicists that have clustered around him is guarding the manuscript as if it were one of the Bard’s original folios.

‘A Writer’s Dream’

Bernau would say that “it’s a writer’s dream to have a story that’s so full of characters that people instantly identify with. But there’s also enormous suspense because they’re in a new world doing new things and no one can know how it will end.”

Some of Bernau’s characters are purely the product of imagination, but even those obviously derived from such people as the Kennedys, Barry Goldwater, Hubert H. Humphrey, and J. Edgar Hoover, are creatively transformed in the novel. “It’s not a roman a clef, “ Bernau said. “You can’t live with a book for three years and make these characters do the things they do without them becoming your people.”

In fact, one of the two main characters is a kind of renegade FBI agent who “. . . came up and knocked on the door and said ‘Let me into your book.’ I literally did not conceive of him until he just happened.”

With the help of this FBI agent, President Cassidy “starts to unravel the conspiracy to assassinate him, (becoming) almost a detective in the process,” Bernau said.

“At the same time, he makes an impact on the politics of the ‘60s. Because he’s alive, the whole world begins to change a little.”

“For me, it really shakes out memories of growing up and having Kennedy die,” said Bob Miller, Bernau’s editor at Warner Books. “ . . . it gives you a deja vu of growing up in the ‘60s. . . . It’s a collective fantasy to have Kennedy come back to life.”

When Kennedy was killed, Bernau was sitting in an accounting class at USC. Stepping outside, he saw the flag dangling at half staff.

“I felt a surprising sense of sorrow. I hadn’t realized how much that would impact me,” he said.

‘Basic and Powerful People’

Now he says, “I never thought of ‘Promises’ as being that commercial. It was just a story I wanted to tell.

“Its a weaving of basic people and powerful people. I’m interested in how we all fit together as society, how little decisions influence bigger decisions. The fact that a young president does not die in Dallas does influence, not everything, but an awful lot of important things.

“It’s the issue Tolstoy raised with ‘War and Peace,’ whether an individual really can make a difference in the world. . . . If Tolstoy had written it, he would have said that one person couldn’t make that much difference, that the social forces would have just swept through. In my book there’s a belief that we are pretty interconnected.”

But “Promises” is not necessarily Bernau’s best guess of what happened in Dallas, nor an attempt “to be the last word on anything,” he said. And he downplays the amount of research that went into the book.

Research, Imagination

“What might look to a younger reader like lots of research was just living through that time,” Bernau said. “I researched what had to be researched, but it came out of a writer’s imagination.”

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lot of work. Writing in long hand on 8x10 spiral notebooks, in a small, detached room that “looks like a bomb shelter,” Bernau worked--and still works--from 8 in the morning until early afternoon, when he picks up his 10-year-old daughter from school.

“I love to write,” Bernau said.

But six years is “a long time to go without getting the normal rewards of our society--the pats on the back and the paychecks. . . . I had to do without that. I was all by myself pretty much and just had to believe in what I was doing.”

Naively Sent It Off

When he finished “Promises,” Bernau “didn’t know what to do with it.” So he did what any naive unpublished novelist might do, and sent the “big, big package--about the size of a case of wine” to actor Martin Sheen, “who I thought could portray the main character.”

Bernau and his wife had already decided “that whatever happened, we were going to keep doing what we did best. Had ‘Promises’ not sold, I would have done another book.”

As Bernau describes it, however, Sheen received the manuscript and passed it on to an assistant, who in turn gave it to a Century City film agent. That agent, in turn, passed the book on to the Scott Merideth agency in New York, which took Bernau on as a client.

“Their judgment was, because I had no track record, that it was either going to be real big or nothing,” Bernau said.

“We get hundreds of manuscripts in this fashion every week,” agent Russell Galen said. “Many of them are rejected. Everyone thinks it is a miracle when one sells for $5,000.”

As it turned out, however, the agency sent the book to 13 publishing houses, “and they were all interested within hours,” Bernau said. “I was getting phone calls from my agent two hours apart, things were moving so fast.

Dealing With Success

“It’s a real gift,” he said of the advance, his eyes tearing again.

Bernau and his family celebrated with a quiet dinner. The realization of what occured still hasn’t sunk in, he said.

“There’s so many things to still go through,” he said. “I have to see if the book will be as big a success as everyone thinks. Some time after that I’ll probably understand.”

The real reward is “not the amount of the money,” he said. “It’s the vindication, the knowledge that I was on the right track. I’m thrilled it was a lot of money, but I would have been thrilled anyway. . . . My daughter wants to be an actress. I think its good for her to see what happens after five or six years, if you just keep working.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Mehren contributed to this story from New York.