Putting on the Dog With a New Breed of Best Seller

At a gathering of Famous Writers, Garrett Simmons might have a hard time holding a straight face and confessing that yes, he is the author of a book called “Pupple Weekly” (subtitle: “All the Poop That’s Fit to Scoop”).

But four days after this slim little Milkbone of a literary endeavor was published last week, it had already hit the B. Dalton best-seller list. A week into its existence, the “book” (a generous description of this 80-page, magazine format collection of prose and pictures) had more than 250,000 copies in print. Simmons, brimming over with celebratory margaritas, was cheerfully anticipating some of the very same fame and fortune “Pupple” makes fun of.

A Passion for Pets

“I may be immodest,” Simmons said. “I think the book is funny.”

It also follows hard on the pawprints of a trend that merges magazine parody with America’s passion for pets. “When you look at the intersection of those two sets, it’s a very large group of people,” said Gene Brissie, publisher of Perigee, the parent (so to speak) of “Pupple.”

“When you parody a popular magazine like People and use celebrity dogs and not celebrity people,” Brissie added, “you find a special audience.”

Just two years ago, a former pet fashion designer named Eileen Hochberg tapped into that audience, and found it was not only special, but also enormous. Hochberg’s “Dogue,” published in 1986 by Main Street Press of Pittsdown, N.J., became a national and international best seller. Its feline sequel, “Catmopolitan” (Pocket Books, 1987), also by Hochberg, has more than 725,000 copies in print. Next month, Pocket Books plans a first printing in excess of half a million for Hochberg’s “Vanity Fur,” featuring a full-court kennel of dogs and cats.

“People love their animals,” Hochberg, who is prone to understatement, said.

A refugee from retailing, Hochberg loved her own animals so much that she first launched a company called Dogwear, and later, in order to publicize her canine couture line, a publication called Dogwear Daily.

Hochberg, the owner of 12 dogs, intended the takeoff on Women’s Wear Daily to be a single-shot promotional device. She printed 20,000 copies of the free newsletter, and was stunned when more than 2,000 readers inquired about subscriptions. Immediately, Hochberg “switched gears” and put together the fashion magazine for dogs called “Dogue.”

That, too, was published as a once-only venture.

“I knew I couldn’t do an ongoing magazine. I knew that would soon exhaust my supply of information,” Hochberg said.

Missing the Joke

Still, “some people miss the joke,” she said, and continue to request subscriptions to “Dogue” and “Catmopolitan.”

For Simmons, the inspiration came less from an affection for animals than from “the lunacy surrounding celebrity.”

“As an American society, we are so mesmerized by celebrity, by fame,” he said. If “Pupple” makes a cosmic statement, said Simmons, “it’s ‘Isn’t this ridiculous?’ ”

Though Hochberg dismisses her books as “bubble gum for the mind,” and even Perigee publisher Gene Brissie calls the genre “part silly, part frivolous,” the success of the magazine/pet parody books made “Pupple” an attractive commodity when Simmons’ agent took it to auction. Sensing that, as Brissie put it, “the market is right,” Perigee paid Simmons a comfortable six-figure advance.

Parodying Celebrities

It took Simmons less than three months to complete the project. Working with Los Angeles photographer Sunny Bak and production assistant Dorian Yeager, Simmons used the dogs of friends and friends of friends as subjects that parodied famous people ranging from “Barkara Streisand” to “ ‘Miami Lice’ star Don Johnson.” Many of the mutts were discovered, and summarily immortalized, at L.A.’s renowned doggy park off Mulholland Drive.

“We put up little signs, ‘Your dog can be a star,’ ” Simmons said.

His own pooch, a 6-year-old Old English sheepdog named Princess Fi, achieved such immortality by serving as Simmons’ cover dog.

But even Garrett Simmons saw a serious side to the canine celebrity satire.

“People magazine best represents the madness,” he said. Its readership is “26.1 million copies per week. Egos become highly inflated, and should on occasion be brought down to earth.”

Rather than appreciating “major accomplishments in science, medicine or human rights, things that I believe really matter to this country,” Simmons said, “we seem to applaud and appreciate those things which have no lasting value, and that have little to do in bettering our stations.”

Merchandizing Plans

With a “Pupple” toy line, television series, “the whole merchandising schmeer” in progress, Simmons concedes “there is a certain part” of commercial exploitation in his own undertaking. But Simmons, a 30-year-old former press secretary to a U.S. commissioner of fine arts and one-time vice president of an entertainment management concern, also quips that maybe the real world drove him to the dogs.

In Santa Barbara, a small publishing firm called Daydream hopped on the pet parody bandwagon with “Cowsmopolitan.” Main Street Press also has come up with “CQ,” or “Canine Quarterly.”

“Let’s face it, they’re one-joke books,” Gene Brissie said.

But just as in the AKC, success does breed success.

Eileen Hochberg has yet another parody stored up in her mental pet shop. “I can’t say yet which animal” it will involve, she said, using tones of secrecy more appropriate to discussions of nuclear disarmament.

Oh, come on, she was asked: “Horse and Garden?”

Hochberg laughed, but refused to answer.