An Author and His Passions

A shining pot of freshly brewed morning coffee stands tantalizingly on a tray in the hotel suite. Beside it is another pot filled with frothing steamed milk. Cups are set on paper doilies, napkins are laid out, pastries can be spied.

And so it all remains, as Dominique Lapierre, the 59-year-old author of “The City of Joy” and his current bestseller, “Beyond Love,” talks on.

What passions can cause a Frenchman to forget food and drink?

“The poorest of the poor,” those Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity care for in India; “the soldiers of hope,” the scientists and doctors who are “dedicating their lives to meet the challenge of AIDS”; the workers “on the battlefield” in the leprosy clinics and hospices for the dying in Calcutta’s slums--all subjects of Lapierre’s recent books.

Dressed in the classic gray trousers and double-breasted navy blazer worn by brigades of French bankers and businessmen, Lapierre talks about suffering and sacrifice as if he were a shirt-sleeved missionary just back from the front lines of saving humanity.

“Beyond Love,” published last week by Warner Books, reconstructs in dramatic narration the course of the AIDS epidemic from the first case in Los Angeles in 1980 to the proof of the effectiveness of the drug AZT in prolonging the lives of some patients. The story also weaves in the work of Mother Teresa’s nuns in the slums of India and their arrival in New York to set up an AIDS hospice.

On a 21-day, coast-to-coast blitz of 14 cities to promote the medical thriller, the author has been holding to a determinedly optimistic line on the disease.

“This issue has been so political in the United States. You always have an impression that the only thing people talk about is (former President Ronald) Reagan cutting the budget and pharmaceutical companies making money with AIDS,” he says.

His own viewpoint, presented in a global scenario, already has sold 2 million copies in Europe and is selling well in the United States. It has received a mixed response but has garnered a dust-jacket blurb from no less a personage than Pope John Paul II--hardly a regular on the Rolodexes of publishing’s publicity executives.

But Lapierre’s work also has run into trouble. “City of Joy,” now being filmed in Calcutta, has provoked fierce opposition from leftist politicians and artists.

The book, which focuses on a Polish priest and a rickshaw puller who lived in Pilkhana, one of Calcutta’s grimmest districts, has been accused of presenting a slanted image of municipal poverty.

“It was a personal crusade by the minister of culture,” says Lapierre, speaking of Buddhadev Bhattacharya, an official in the Marxist government of West Bengal, who has called the book “an insult to every Indian” and attacked the Westerners behind it as “racists” and “colonialists.”

“I’m sure he hasn’t read it,” says Lapierre, adding: “It was an extremely bold decision to shoot a film like that in Calcutta.”

However, Lapierre prefers to consider the positive results of his book, which he terms “an electroshock” to the city. In 1987, Calcutta launched a 10-year program of slum renewal dubbed “City of Joy: Designs for Tomorrow.”

Adding to municipal initiatives, Lapierre annually contributes about $1 million--half his royalties from the two books, plus lecture fees and donations he solicits from his readers--to more than a dozen projects, including clinics for leprosy and tuberculosis victims, schools, orphanages, farm irrigation and slum sanitation facilities.

However, he demurs, “I don’t pretend to be a mini-Mother Teresa. I’m a writer trying to write good books.”

Still, Lapierre’s crusade to help the downtrodden has been spilling over from his book pages for the past decade.

In 1981, the author traveled to Calcutta intent on helping the poor with $50,000 in royalties earned from “Freedom at Midnight,” his book about India’s fight for independence in 1947. Mother Teresa, “a fireball with eyes radiating compassion,” directed him to an Englishman, James Stevens, who had run out of money to support his home for leper children.

Back in France, Lapierre wrote articles soliciting help and raised another $300,000 for the project. Later, Stevens took the author to the slum where he found his first leper child--in the teeming, malodorous area called Pilkhana. There, Lapierre was introduced to the two main characters of “City of Joy”: the Polish priest Stephan Kovalski, who came to live among the slum-dwellers, and the rickshaw puller Hasari Pal, a man so poor he sold his blood to support his family.

Lapierre, who lived for two years in Pilkhana to research “City of Joy,” pulls a small brass bell connected to a thick rope from his tote bag and jingles it. Before Pal died of tuberculosis in 1985, he gave the bell, his rickshaw puller’s horn, to the author as a remembrance.

Lapierre carries the bell with him as he walks along Rodeo Drive or the Champs-Elysees, where the wealthy, he notes, “look so somber and preoccupied. I’ve met people in the slums of Calcutta who have nothing and yet who are able to smile and share.”

It was an unexpected link to the Calcutta slums, appearing amid the affluence of New York, that launched Lapierre on three years of research for “Beyond Love.” Visiting Manhattan in 1985 to promote “City of Joy,” he read in the newspaper that Mother Teresa was opening a hospice in Greenwich Village to care for AIDS patients.

“It was unbelievable to see the same sisters arriving in the West to confront a plague that (we) were not prepared to confront. . . . I raced to the place,” he says with hallmark drama.

His account of the struggle against the HIV retrovirus is riveting, the scientific descriptions clear to the lay person and the characters persistently upbeat--the women scientists are all pretty and all the men are young.

But in describing the discovery and subsequent identification of the retrovirus, Lapierre runs into the highly charged issue of U.S.-French competition to claim scientific laurels.

He recounts how Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris cultivated lymphocytes suspected of harboring the retrovirus in a special laboratory set up in an antiseptic former laundry room.

On Jan. 27, 1983, Barre-Sinoussi recorded the first radioactive indication of the virus’ presence; on Feb. 3, the institute’s photographer captured an image of “a small black sphere breaking out of the surface of a lymphocyte” and shouted, “That’s it. I’ve got the bloody virus!”

Nevertheless, Robert Gallo, the American scientist who discovered the first human retrovirus, HTLV, continued to claim that the French virus, called LAV, was none other than the one he had previously claimed.

Goaded by the French success, Gallo called a staff meeting in April, 1983, and Lapierre quotes him as saying that it was “with a sense of shame that I stood up in front of my team that April morning . . . ashamed that we hadn’t discovered that blasted virus before the Pasteur people.”

A year later, however, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced Gallo had discovered the real AIDS virus, which belonged to the same family as the HTLV virus he originally had identified.

In 1985, the genetic codes of the French virus and the new virus discovered by Gallo’s laboratory were deciphered and proved to be one and the same. Neither was connected to Gallo’s original discovery.

An international committee ended the poisonous competition in 1986, combining the abbreviations, LAV and HTLV, to arrive at HIV (VIH in French). The following year, the American and French governments signed an agreement recognizing the contributions of both groups.

Gallo has written to Lapierre. “He was hurt by the way I described things,” the author says. Yet Lapierre dismisses his “tricks” and calls the fierce competition a “tempest in a test tube.”

“Gallo is a great scientist,” he says. “He would have perhaps discovered the virus four or six months later.”