The Modest Midas : Unpretentious John Jakes, Mining ‘California Gold,’ Extends His Best-Seller Streak

John Jakes is sitting in a fashionable French restaurant politely dissecting the grilled tuna slices that are folded over his Salade Nicoise. He wears a discreet diamond ring, its stone sunk like a tiny iceberg into the gold setting.

When he’s not being interviewed, he’s lounging pool-side at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. And, as James Michener does, he’s insisted on a small extra perk--that his wife, Rachel, accompany him on his book tour, even attending his interviews.

For the cognoscenti of blockbusterdom, these are telltale signs that Jakes, a modest man who prides himself on writing with “the common touch,” has entered the exclusive club of authors whose names are as well-known as household cleaning products and whose books set off vicious bidding wars.

Jakes’ new novel, “California Gold,” was won by Random House for $4 million, beating out his former publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. With Michener in his 80s, Jakes’ future at the house seems as resolutely rosy as that of any of his romantic heroes.

“I hope John will become what Michener has been for so long, and continues to be, for Random House,” says publisher Joni Evans.

Already, Jakes has become a publishing phenomenon.

Of his 11 commercially published books, all have become No. 1 best sellers.

The eight-book paperback series, the “Kent Family Chronicles,” which made his reputation as a popular historical fiction writer, sold 40 million copies, while making miniseries and TV movies of his books has become a cottage industry.

This week, “California Gold” also obediently hopped onto the best-seller bandwagon.

But, says the author with a whiff of melodrama, “One thing I’ll never apologize for is my success. I paid my dues for 25 years. I worked my fingers down to the bone.”

The essential element of his success is Jakes himself; he has made it on being the sort who, along with his wife, dresses for lunch in neat khaki clothes.

His books may never have been praised for their stylish prose; still, readers think, “maybe the book isn’t as well written as some of the others, but I like that person,” the author explains.

So they read Jakes, as he says, “through thick and thin.” Indeed, they would certainly be pleased to meet John and Rachel--a close, congenial, smiling couple--and might comfortably join them at the table.

For while the Jakeses enjoy the rewards that his success as a novelist brings, they don’t do it with any gold-chains-sort of display. They belong to a wine-and-cheese society, travel to Europe, own a saltbox condominium in Connecticut and winter in a recently built home at Hilton Head, S.C., where Jakes’ glass-windowed office overlooks the passing yachts and shrimpers on the inland waterway.

They normally stick close to home, with Jakes enjoying an occasional game of golf. In Connecticut, they visit Jakes’ friend, David Nevin, author of “Dream West,” and his wife. On a typical evening the four will go out for a pizza and beer, coming home for a cup of “decaf” in the living room.

Nevin describes Jakes as an easy-going, unpretentious man. “It’s a rare thing to catch him in a tie,” he says with a chuckle. He also has a strong social awareness, but doesn’t discourse on any particular issue that Nevin knows of.

In short, he is the portrait of the perfect blockbuster author, easily accessible to a vast audience.

Jakes talks about himself with a combination of verbal flourishes and workmanlike soberness.

Stock Ingredients

His career, as he tells it over lunch, could be culled from one of his own success scenarios, with chance, the morality of hard work, the poignancy of long-unrewarded struggle all appearing as stock ingredients.

His father followed a characteristic rags-to-riches route, Jakes points out. With barely a high school education, he began work at 16 as a wagon driver with the now-defunct Railway Express Agency; when he died, he had worked his way up to general manager of the corporation.

In turn, Jakes worked conscientiously to raise his four children, holding a string of advertising jobs, the last of which was as creative director at Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample in Dayton, Ohio. Meanwhile, in a smoky basement office of his house--a converted coal bin, he says--he banged out pulp novels for the penny press. At his lowest point, he wrote a novelization of the last “Planet of the Apes” movie, a three-week, $1,500 hack job he remembers with bitterness.

But, with Hollywoodian timing, just as Jakes started to think, “maybe it was time to hang it up,” he got his break.

Second choice of a New York book packager, Lyle Engle, he was asked to write a near two-century family saga to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration, and, with it, the lusty Kent clan was born. In 1982, the “North & South” trilogy, charting two decades of family loving and feuding preceding the Civil War, began publication in hardcover, securing his fame, and guaranteeing that Jakes would never again write in a coal bin.

Doting Readers

But if Jakes has anyone to thank for his success, it is his readers, who have doted over the author every bit as much as they have cheered and wept over the fates of the characters he’s created.

As Jakes has taken more time researching and writing his books, reports have cropped up that he’s dead, in ill health or upset, because, as you know, Rachel has just walked out on him.

If his readers are the kind aunties of his career, however, reviewers have been sometimes caustic when describing his prose. At the upper end of the scale, The Washington Post’s critic Jonathan Yardley has written that the author assembles “an intelligent, unpretentious entertainment many readers will find undemandingly enjoyable.”

In the hard-fisted league, one reviewer observed that Jakes’ success was “enough to make every gifted writer in America turn over in his wastebasket.”

Jakes stolidly rebuffs such blows: “I don’t like to be called junk!

“There’s an unfortunate lack in American letters. You have either very literary material or the trash end of the spectrum.”

The middle range of popular fiction writers, to which he says he belongs, gets crowded down with what he calls “the Beverly Hills shopping novelists.”

“People don’t know how to review these middle-ground books.”

Nevertheless, Jakes is realistic about his talents, calling himself “a journeyman writer.”

He idolizes Charles Dickens, saying humbly, “I’ll never be able to touch the hem of Dickens’ robe,” though adding, “I try to put some of his spirit (of humanity) into my books.”

“He doesn’t think of himself as a literary writer at all,” says Jakes’ editor at Random House, who begs anonymity, saying he would receive a barrage of “lousy” manuscripts.

‘North & South’

When a “North & South” volume topped the best-seller list, with E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” in the second slot, Jakes worried to a colleague that his book had blocked Doctorow’s literary achievement.

“I’m not sure the best writers get to number one,” he says now, wryly smiling. “You take it with a grain of salt.”

Jakes’ strength lies in storytelling. “I try to wring the readers’ emotions at various points,” he says. “I put readers on the literary equivalent of a roller coaster, so that they keep going up and down and can’t stop until they get to the end.”

He also gives them a big, juicy slice of history.

In “California Gold,” that history encapsulates the quintessential American dream. California, says the author, “is the world’s bright symbol of hope and opportunity. People look at this place and say, ‘If only I were there things would be better.’ ”

For Jakes’ main character, Mack Chance, things do get extraordinarily better. The son of a ruined Forty-Niner, Chance walks and hitchhikes from Pennsylvania to California to find his fortune in the state’s true gold, the 1880s land boom.

From the time he throws off his rags as he descends into the sunshine from the high Sierras, until he flies off into the sunset in his custom-built plane, the reader follows him through the injustices of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly, the agricultural labor wars in the Central Valley and the terror of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Along the way, the reader is presented with a veritable stage cast of California’s good guys and villains.

There is “Swampy,” based on Henry Miller, the state’s largest landowner, who declared good land to be sodden and bought it at a bargain. Says Jakes, “You could walk all the way from Sacramento to San Diego and never get off his land.” Still he refuses Chance a drink of water at a stream.

‘A Good Villain’

Appearing as himself is “a real good villain,” C. P. Huntington, and his nephew Henry, founder of the family-named library and museum in Pasadena. Both took a hand in running the Southern Pacific Railway, the subject of Frank Norris’ 1901 muckraking novel, “The Octopus.” By the time C. P. died, says Jakes, he was known as “that old crocodile.”

Then there is a young, lanky William Randolph Hearst, a k a “Wasteful Willy,” says Jakes, known for the money he spent getting news for his fledgling San Francisco Examiner.

In one factual incident, a Hearst reporter throws herself into the San Francisco Bay to prove that the heartless Southern Pacific ferry prefers to keep its schedule rather than save a drowning woman. “I thought this stunt is too good to pass up,” Jakes says delightedly.

He acknowledges having fun with the book’s material, which originally appeared to him in a moment of near-epiphany.

Walking down Rodeo Drive one day some 10 years ago, he looked up at the Santa Monica Mountains “all sunlit” and wondered about Beverly Hills before the boutiques.

When writing, he visualizes scenes so vividly he says he could shoot them if he had a film crew and the appropriate location.

“I have this gigantic cinemascope screen in my head. I always see what I’m writing about in terms of the colors of the clothes, the weather, the sky.” But, he insists, “I absolutely don’t write to get my books filmed.”

Still, he credits his bent toward histrionics to a childhood diet of such movie adventure classics as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk,” starring Errol Flynn, and Tyrone Power’s “Captain from Castille” and “The Mark of Zorro.” “I loved the drama, the color, the sweep, the exaggeration; they’d jump around with a sword and gut the villain.”

Later Jakes became a community-theater actor, and when “The Seekers” was made into a television movie, he played a bit part, the great moment of which was being lavishly murdered, both shot and strangled, by George Hamilton, and swan-diving to his death.

Man of Method

Despite the melodrama, however, Jakes is a man of method who views his work conscientiously and describes the techniques of his craft as a dispassionate professional.

He takes pride in the accuracy of his historical data--a service he says he owes to his readers. His books, he feels, “might be the only shot a person would get at a particular chunk of history.”

To research “California Gold,” he consulted some 200 books, plus charts and maps, and in an “afterward,” fastidiously avows that the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that Mack Chance drives was not produced until one year after it appears in the story.

He answers all 50 to 100 fan letters a week that pour in after a new book’s appearance, and remembers the “touching” ones, like the convict who, after finishing the “Kent Family Chronicles,” went on to read the biography of Benjamin Franklin.

He is also careful to provide his audience with a bit of moral sustenance as well as entertainment.

Whereas Mack Chance bears the classic earmarks of the newly rich--he brands all of his possessions with three initials, a la L. B. J., says Jakes--he is also a combination Dickens-Dynasty millionaire. “If Oliver Twist or David Copperfield got rich, I’d like to think they’d have a resemblance to Mack Chance.”

As to the underpinnings of his work, they are more reliable, well-hewned tools than muse-tuned literary inspiration.

Jakes has never suffered writer’s block. He works rapidly, producing an average of 2,500 words a day (in his busiest pulp year he churned out seven books), and in the last seven years has bought five computers, each faster than the previous model.

Wide Appeal

Concerned about reaching a wide audience (“The more readers a writer gets the happier he is”), Jakes works out the subject of upcoming books with his publisher. His characters are broadly drawn (“People want to know whom they should care about”) and, unlike their colleagues in literature, never surprise their creator with sudden whims or erratic excursions, but dutifully follow a meticulous plot outline (130 pages for the 650-page “California Gold”).

So, with these simple guidelines, can any writer who is passably competent with a pen dash off a $4 million book?

Jakes says not. Remember his long years of prolific but unrecognized work? The key to his success was that he did not plan for it, he says.

Why then did he suddenly hit the public’s pulse?

“There’s an incredible amount of luck in it,” he answers candidly. “People don’t want to admit it, but often it’s being on the right corner when the bus comes by.”