Fame Is a Novel Concept He’s Learning to Like : Solana Beach Lawyer-Turned-Author Copes With Being Called a Virtuoso

Riding in a taxi on his way to a radio station in northern England, George Bernau of Solana Beach heard a commercial that caught his attention.

A famous American author would be in the station’s studios that afternoon, the announcer said, to discuss his new novel about the world that might have been had John F. Kennedy survived the assault on him in Dallas 25 years ago.

Critics have praised the recently published book as not only a bold and entertaining epic, but finely crafted literature as well. The writer created history within the American publishing industry by earning the largest advance of all time for a first novel--$750,000.

As he listened, Bernau smiled. The famous author the announcer was talking about was him.

During the past six weeks, the 43-year-old Bernau has burst on the international publishing scene like the middle-aged baseball rookie in “The Natural.” A complete unknown in the writing world, he is being talked about in publishing circles as the new virtuoso of the American novel.

USA Today named Bernau one of 50 people to watch in 1989.

It’s all more than enough to turn this former lawyer’s head. A quiet, introspective man who has spent the past six years wrapped in the solitude of a tiny office in his ocean-front home, scribbling the 641-page novel on spiral notebooks, Bernau says that assimilating his new status is a mind-boggling task.

Depression to Euphoria

“It’s very hard to keep on any kind of even keel about all this,” he said. “I go from depression to euphoria.”

While “Promises to Keep” has yet to hit the best-seller list, its success is almost guaranteed. It titillates the ultimate political fantasy held by millions of baby-boomers: What would the United States, indeed the world, be like if JFK had lived? How would things be different? That question is what drove Bernau to keep working, never knowing whether his words would make it to print.

“Certainly there were times I felt very cocky (about the novel), but there were times I felt very depressed,” he said.

He was never completely sure the plot would sell.

“Not everyone thought it was a slam-dunk idea. I can’t say that when I laid it out at a cocktail party, everyone went for it.,” he said. “It’s a little like a joke. Some people get it and some people don’t.”

Apparently, the right people did. When Bernau shipped off the novel during the summer of 1987, he had no idea it would sell within weeks.

“The week they auctioned if off, the agent didn’t contact me. And I was thinking it was a failure. At the time I was feeling so depressed, they were bidding it up by hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Next fall, ABC will air the story as a miniseries. The paperback is due out shortly after that.

Bernau is surprisingly soft-spoken for a man who is big enough to play lineman for any pro football team. But his gentleness doesn’t hide a ferocious drive.

He believes the publishing frenzy surrounding his novel has not yet neared its peak.

“It’s going to take some time for people to understand what this book is . . . that this is not just another Kennedy conspiracy book,” he said.

The irony of Bernau’s new-found celebrity is that his work has barely been recognized in San Diego. The lack of notice has thrown another bump into the roller-coaster ride Bernau says he’s been on since “Promises” hit the stands Oct. 24.

In London and New York, he was fawned over, written about and interviewed scores of times. One renowned British critic praised him for inventing a new genre, terming it “What if?” fiction. Three imitations of “Promises” have already been printed.

Yet in San Diego, no fanfare greeted the book’s release. Bernau has yet to be interviewed on a single local radio or television show. After his publicity tour to the East Coast, Los Angeles and Britain, he says his return to San Diego was both a relief and a puzzle.

When he waits in line at a grocery store, dozens of copies of “Promises” stare back at him. But if he were to pick up the book and show it to the person in front of him, chances are the shopper would say he had never heard of Bernau or his tome.

Timed to Event

The fact that Warner Books has not promoted “Promises” in San Diego is part of the explanation. That it has yet to hit the best-seller list is another.

Whether the story has been overly hyped by its publisher and the media remains to be seen. Certainly, the timing of its release--a month before the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s death--was a publicist’s dream. Yet the public relations department at Warner also took the risk that “Promises” could be overshadowed by other Kennedy books timed for the anniversary. Sales have yet to bear out the success of Warner’s marketing strategies.

Still trying to recover from his 17-day publicity tour of Britain, Bernau acknowledges that he doesn’t know what to make of the contrast between his sudden celebrity and his local anonymity.

He says it’s nice to return to the calm of Solana Beach, where he’s already begun work on his second novel, due on the publisher’s desk in September. After the tumult of emotions the tour raised, he says it feels good to write again, to focus. When he’s writing, he says he feels like he’s doing what he’s supposed to do. Yet he yearns for the hometown recognition that’s eluded him thus far.

“It’s probably for the best,” he said. “Otherwise, I’d just be going at too intense a level all the time.”

“He might like to get mobbed by fans in London,” said close friend and former legal colleague Dave Noonan, “but I don’t think he’d like to get mobbed by fans in Solana Beach. I think he just wants to be acknowledged because he’s worked so hard.”

Once a successful business attorney and partner at the prestigious downtown law firm of Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps and a one-time copywriter for Universal Studios, where he created movie titles for other people’s screenplays while longing to write his own, Bernau said he never realized how badly he wanted to write until he nearly died in a car accident on the way home from a football game at his alma mater, USC.

Within two years after the accident, Bernau closed his law practice, settled his accounts and retreated from the frantic pace of law to his quiet home.

From his deck, he can see and hear the ocean. He and his wife, Laurie, a psychotherapist, transformed the stucco tract house with wood, glass and high-beamed ceilings.

Since he walked out the law firm’s doors one Friday in 1981, Bernau has fallen into another routine. He writes from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., then relaxes before daughter Erin gets home from school. Laurie arrives after a day at her Mission Valley office. They talk, have dinner, see friends. They travel when they can.

Bernau loves to watch TV sports on the weekends. Sometimes he jogs. Nothing too unpredictable. Life in North County.

Contrast that with his first publicity trip in November, when he was chauffeured in limousines from party to party, mobbed by publishing groupies, interviewed on scores of radio and television talk shows and praised so unabashedly by his publishers that it would be easy to think he was the incarnation of John Updike and Jackie Collins.

While in London, he dropped into Harrod’s department store. Spying a few copies of his book, he asked if he could autograph them. When he and his wife returned 10 minutes later, all 15 copies were gone.

Stares at Windows

He walks past Crown Books and stares at windows plastered with posters publicizing “Promises.” After he spoke to 1,000 women during a luncheon in Beverly Hills, most of them mobbed the podium to snag an autograph.

“There really have been times when I’ve been treated like a rock star and, yeah, I like it. But the trouble is you get it all at one time. . . . It gets too intense after a while.”

Bernau got some tips on handling the transition from private to public person from another new celebrity writer, Scott Turow, author of the best-selling courtroom suspense novel “Presumed Innocent.” It tells the story of a public attorney accused of murdering the female colleague with whom he was sexually involved. The book will soon become a movie.

The two lawyer-authors struck up a friendship when Turow, of Chicago, visited San Diego during a tour to publicize his book. They began corresponding, and Bernau says Turow enlightened him about the topsy-turvy world of fame.

Yet his celebrity means hardly as much to Bernau as his hope of being taken seriously as a writer.

Out of 40 reviews published so far, 38 were positive, he says. Only one trashed the novel, and another downplayed the plot’s significance. Bernau says he was stunned by the warm response.

In England, he was pleased to be treated like a serious writer rather than a chronicler of flashy Americana. In London, people asked about the politics and cultural observations involved in writing the book. In Los Angeles, talk show listeners wanted to know who would play Jackie Kennedy in the miniseries. (He doesn’t know.)

Bernau says he has two major goals as a writer. He wants to write entertaining fiction that is also fine literature, and bridge the gender gap that now exists for many authors who have either a mostly male or female following.

“Too often I find people reading books that they’re embarrassed to read but are entertaining, or books that are so intellectual they’re written for the literary elite,” he said.

While writing “Promises,” Bernau said, he often doubted whether it would sell at all. He’d had no luck peddling his first book, a thriller about an attorney who leaves his practice in Los Angeles.

Often he fell into depression. During those times, he traveled to author Jack London’s home in Sonoma. After looking at the hundreds of rejection notices London received, Bernau felt encouraged. It nourished his faith that he would be published.

‘Have to Endure It’

“You just have to endure it,” he said of the doubt. “It’s so intangible. It is faith, it is belief. I really feel strongly that I want to help other writers. But there’s no nice little turgid phrase I can give you. There’s no formula. You just have to have faith, faith in yourself.”

He says he struggled with writing, feeling the euphoria a well-turned sentence could bring, as well as the anxiety of not knowing whether his words would ever be published.

“I really love to write. It’s enjoyable on so many levels and you learn so much about you. The six or eight main characters in the book are really pieces of me,” he said.

Bernau acknowledges that he likes the fame his work has brought, but he craves quiet as well. He said he vacillates between feeling like the George Bernau who lives near the beach and the author George Bernau who travels to Britain promoting his book. Can he write for a living and still attend chi-chi publishing parties given in his honor?

The great thing about being a famous writer, he said, is that you don’t have to be recognized unless you want to be.

“If this were happening to me at 21 or 22, I’m sure I’d be a jerk,” he said. “You have to remember not to take yourself too seriously.”