Sohmer’s ‘Patriots’: To Market, to Market

As guests arrived at Chasen’s California Room Thursday, they first passed between two 4-by-8-foot reproductions of the cover of Steve Sohmer’s new novel, “Patriots.”

Actors in Marine Corps dress uniforms stood at attention on each side of the entrance. Just past the red-white-and-blue bunting there was a small area made to look like the Oval Office. On the desk sat a 40-pound cake in the shape of the red hot-line telephone.

Nearby an “electric jazz harp” trio played approximations of patriotic music. The opulent buffet was weighted with expensive protein--shrimp, lobster, cracked crab, prosciutto and glazed ham. Dostoevski never got a book party like this.

“Dostoevski didn’t get the advance Steve got,” said CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky, who hosted the party with his wife Christy Welker. “He’s Hollywood’s answer to the Renaissance man,” said Welker. Sohmer’s advance was $750,000. He could be making much more if “Patriots” is made into a miniseries. This is the treatment his first novel, “Favorite Son”--which sold 2 million copies worldwide--received. “We’re thinking about it,” was Sagansky’s coy remark regarding the TV prospects.

One of the talents Sohmer brings to the literary world is marketing skill, a talent he once employed as president of Columbia Pictures and as an executive at CBS and NBC. He was once called “the P.T. Barnum of network television.” He’s a novelist now, well aware there’s a reader born every minute.

“After I left Columbia, I swore I’d never take another job again,” said Sohmer. “I’ve gone from lily pad to lily pad.”

At this particular spot on Sohmer’s leap-frog to financial independence were many of his show-biz friends. Among the 250 guests were Harry Hamlin, George and Jolene Schlatter, Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed, Jennifer O’Neill, Chuck and Ava Fries, Patti Davis and Dierdre Hall.

The party was only the opening round in the book’s promotion. There are a 12-city media tour, a Sunset Boulevard billboard, television commercials and whatever hoopla Sohmer can think up along the way. “He’s a genius at marketing,” said Sagansky. “He wears that hat too when he writes.”

Sohmer credits his success to a more mundane quality. “I was good to my mother,” he said with his best P.T. Barnum smile.