Kovic Combines Low-Key Politics With Book-Signing at UCI

Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic insists he hasn’t yet decided whether he’ll run for the congressional seat held by Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), but there was no question that he was testing the political waters at a book-signing before his appearance with film director Oliver Stone at UC Irvine last week.

Four dozen students, clutching paperback copies of Kovic’s autobiography, “Born on the Fourth of July,” were already in line when the paralyzed anti-war activist wheeled into the campus bookstore.

“Thanks so much for coming. We’re going to have fun, OK?” the balding, 43-year-old veteran with the bushy mustache said as he worked his way to the front of the line.

Seated at a table, Kovic shook hands and chatted briefly with each student, many of whom had yet to be born when an enemy bullet severed his spine on Jan. 20, 1968, leaving him paralyzed from mid-chest down.

Within a year and a half of being hit, the young man who grew up on Long Island believing that “war was going to be a glorious thing” became one of the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War.

“Do you think we need change in this country?” Kovic asked one student.

“What kind of difference do you think I could make if I run?” he said to another.

“Would you help me if I did run?” he said to yet another, a young woman who asked if she could give him a hug.

Kovic, who with Stone has been nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of the hit movie based on the book, sought to inspire the students:

“You can do anything if you just keep believing. Don’t ever give up on your dreams.”

Because of widespread media interest in Kovic’s UCI appearance and not enough time to grant every interview request, no interviews with Kovic were allowed before or after the book-signing, which lasted two hours.

But during his talk with Stone before a crowd of about 3,500 that evening on the making of “Born on the Fourth of July,” Kovic described how he wrote his book in the mid-’70s while living in a small apartment in Santa Monica.

“I remember I was all alone,” Kovic said. “I had no telephone--a good way to write a book--and I had a mattress on the floor in my bedroom and about 500 blank sheets of paper. I went down to the Sears and Roebuck in Santa Monica and I bought a manual typewriter for about $45.”

Using the hunt-and-peck method of typing and listening to one side of a Judy Collins album “over and over again,” Kovic said, he would write from 10 p.m. until dawn.

“I was tremendously determined. I had never written a book before in my life,” he recalled. “I remember I wrote single-spaced, lower case, no paragraphs, (on the) front and back of the pages.

“I just kept pouring it out--a tremendous outpouring--and I believe I was born with a bit of a gift: Words have always come to me--I feel I’m very blessed in that respect--and I wrote that book in one month, three weeks and two days. And I took it to New York with a friend and within a week we had sold it to McGraw-Hill.”

“Born on the Fourth of July” was published in August, 1976.

Kovic, who at the time was staying at his parents’ home in Massapequa, on New York’s Long Island, remembers going down to a 7-Eleven store on a Sunday morning and seeing a review of his book on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

For someone who attended summer school in order to graduate from high school, it was a glorious triumph.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. “It was an exciting feeling to realize that what I had done every night in that humble apartment in Santa Monica--without even a telephone, and a mattress on the floor--was now beginning to reach several million people: My story was beginning to get out.”

Kovic’s story, described by one reviewer at the time as “the most powerful book on the Vietnam War yet to be published,” is still getting out.

The new Pocket Books paperback edition of “Born on the Fourth of July,” tied to the release of the movie, is now No. 6 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list and No. 10 on the Publishers Weekly list.

Author Marti Leimbach, in Irvine last week during a publicity tour for “Dying Young,” her critically acclaimed first novel, seems to be taking her success in stride.

Leimbach began writing the novel--about a love triangle involving a young woman, a terminally ill young man and another man whose vitality attracts her--as a graduate student in UC Irvine’s Program in Writing in 1987.

“Dying Young” has earned the 26-year-old writer nearly $500,000, including a $150,000 advance from Doubleday and the sale of foreign rights and motion picture rights to 20th Century Fox.

“Success is a hard thing to talk about,” the Harvard graduate said in an interview. “You can’t say I’ve been considered successful because of the money: It’s going from my hands to someone else’s eventually, right?

“You can’t really say I’ve had success because of the attention I’ve had: The attention is wonderful for the book, but will soon be given elsewhere. So where is it you find the success?

“Partly you have to find it inside the work and feel that what you’ve presented to the world and presented to yourself is of value. And partly you feel successful when people read the book and like it, or like some part of it.

“Student writers always ask me about how to get published. I really try to emphasize that you have to understand as a writer that there are much larger forces at work than whether you happen to be able to turn a phrase, to write well. At the same time you have to believe that fine writing will eventually triumph. It’s a necessary delusion. Or else you won’t want to write. And you have to continue to love and hate, with passion, the act of writing itself.

“All your expectations and hopes have to be concentrated on the work and not the repercussions--if it sees print, or your mom likes it or whatever.”

Leimbach, who is currently working on her next novel, lives in Hull, Mass. Despite her good fortune, she said, she hasn’t bought a house, a new car or much of anything else.

“There’s something about acquisition which makes me nervous,” she said, adding that she has put “the money in the bank and these very boring safe places and I proceed to ignore it.”

What her “Dying Young” earnings have brought her, however, is the opportunity to write full-time.

“It is exactly buying time to write another novel or two and to not feel you have to hurry up and write,” Leimbach said. “I really have a certain luxury of being able to write another book without any concern if it takes me an extra month or two or five or 10.”

Book Signings: Jon Breen (“Loose Lips”) and Michael Collins (“Chasing Eights”) will sign their new mystery novels from 1 to 3 p.m. today at Book Carnival, 870 N. Tustin Ave., Orange. . . . Huntington Beach author Larry L. Meyer will read from and sign “My Summer with Molly: The Journal of a Second Generation Father” from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday at Fahrenheit 451 Bookstore, 509 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach.

National Writers: Author Hugh Stevens will speak at a meeting of the Southern California chapter of the National Writers Club at 10 a.m. today at the Irvine Marriott, 18000 Von Karman, Irvine. Members, $10; non-members, $12.

Poetry Festival: San Francisco poet Susan Griffin will read at 2:30 p.m. today at Laguna Poets Poetry Festival in the Forum Theater, 650 Laguna Canyon Road., Laguna Beach. $10. The award-winning poet also will sign her books at 4:30 p.m. today at Fahrenheit 451 Bookstore in Laguna Beach.

Author Talk: Newport Beach author Suzanne Forster will discuss “Breaking Into Romance Writing” at noon Tuesday in the Newport Center branch of the Newport Beach Public Library, 856 San Clemente Drive. Free.

Let’s Talk: “Ain’t Love Grand?--Books About Love and Romance” will be the topic at the Let’s Talk Books meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Orange Main Library, 101 N. Center.

Author Evening: Rizzoli International Bookstore in South Coast Plaza will hold its fifth Evenings with Authors from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday. Reading and discussing their novels will be Louis B. Jones (“Ordinary Money”) and Judith Freman (“The Chinchilla Farm”).

Round Table: Actor-photographer Roddy McDowell (“Double Exposure--Take Two”), singer Carol Lawrence (“Backstage Story”) and animator Chuck Jones (“Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist”) will speak at the Round Table West luncheon at noon Thursday at the Balboa Bay Club, 1221 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach. Cost: $30. For reservations, call (714) 548-1447.

Send information about book-related events to: Books & Authors, Orange County Life, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Deadline is two weeks before publication.