Dove Books Publisher Is in the Show-Biz Moment : Celebrities: Founder capitalizes on books on Simpson, Menendez cases. Some question the caliber of the material.

Michael Viner soars on the uniquely contemporary jet stream of publishing, Hollywood and sensation. But lately he’s had to buckle up for a bumpy ride.

“We have the most classy library in the world,” said Viner, the president and founder of Dove Books. “We’ve done piece after important piece. We’ve worked with good people. Paul Scofield and Ben Kingsley have done half a dozen books for us. We’ve worked with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman.”

Yet the attention these days is going to some of the other authors on Dove’s list, such as Faye Resnick, who wrote the breathless “Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted”; Michael Knox, who is writing a diary of his days before he was ousted as a juror in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, the third player in the Simpson drama to sign up with Dove.

On Friday, Viner, 51, became part of the case when he was summoned to the courthouse for a meeting with Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who was concerned that the Knox book might give the names of the people remaining on the panel.

After the closed-door session--”We explained that for 1st Amendment reasons we couldn’t answer any questions about the book’s contents”--Viner faced a crowd of reporters inquiring about how the Simpson case is paying off for Dove Books.

“None of our publishing has been about money,” Viner said. “I’m sure we’re doing reasonably well. We’ve turned down other books that would have been lucrative, but we didn’t believe in them.”

Viner’s bulky figure explaining himself before a bank of microphones may be unfamiliar to the public, but he and his actress wife, Deborah Raffin, are familiar in Hollywood’s high-altitude celebrity swirl. As movie and TV producers and founders of Dove Audio, which features movie stars reading books on tape, they are regularly mentioned in Liz Smith and Army Archerd columns. They get the strategic corner table at Drai’s. They’re well-connected in Los Angeles, Washington, New York and London.

And things are heating up as they prepare to publish a series of taped conversations that make up “The Private Diary of Lyle Menendez: In His Own Words!” as well as “You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again,” which Viner promises will be the ultimate tell-all book about sex for hire in the film industry.

“It’ll make more of an impact on the second trial than the O.J. book,” Viner says of the Menendez volume. “It’s the view inside the mind of a killer. It’s more chilling than ‘In Cold Blood.’ ”

Perhaps the most coveted prize in Hollywood, beyond money, status and prestige, is to be in the heat of the show-biz moment, where every day is Super Bowl Sunday and only a limited number of players are out on the field at any given time. Right now, Viner and Raffin are among them.

But their work--particularly when it comes to the Simpson case--has also made them magnets for critical comment.

“Michael Viner has very cleverly and cannily carved out an extremely profitable niche in a marketplace whose appetite for the vulgar and coarse has no end,” said Steve Wasserman, editorial director of Times’ Books, a division of Random House.

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Viner was stung by a much-discussed article that came out in April in the Wall Street Journal. Headlined “Tabloid Books Make Publisher a Star,” it crystallized the general opinions of his critics. While sketching in some features of Viner’s career as a producer and noting that, as major shareholders in Dove, he and Raffin are worth $20 million and climbing, the article used such words as splashy to describe Dove’s venture into hardcover publishing.

Citing the Beverly Hills-based company’s 28% burst in net revenue for fiscal 1994, it noted that a large part of that growth spurt came from the Resnick book which, according to Viner, is expected to show a seven-figure profit. And it quoted a Random House executive looking down his nose at the success of Dove Books, calling it “vulgar.”

“I was so hurt by that article,” Viner said. “It made us out to be the opposite of what we think and stand for.”

“Our O.J. book changed people’s perceptions,” he said. “Everyone was automatically assuming he was innocent. He was still being idolized. If I thought he was innocent, I never would have published it. As for ‘You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again,’ I can’t comment on how good it’ll be because it hasn’t come in yet. But I intend it to show the dark side of ‘Pretty Woman,’ how a lot of young women come to town with stars in their eyes and quickly find themselves in desperate straits.”

Nobody questions Dove’s success. Taste and judgment are another matter, however.

If the Resnick book was intended--as Dove says it was--as an homage to a good friend trapped in a brutal marriage, and as solace for battered wives everywhere, what are Nicole Brown Simpson’s children to think when they read of their mother’s racy sex habits and her party-girl lifestyle?

Raffin’s face darkens at the question. “This company has to have its commercial successes, and there’s no denying that Faye Resnick’s book was commercial,” she said. “But you would hope a book like that is presented in a quality manner. And people had forgotten that Nicole and Ron Goldman were killed. The whole discussion had turned to O.J. being wrongly accused. A book like this helps us finance another book that teaches children self-esteem. It’s a delicate balance.”

Another critic and deeply interested party is Terri Towery, Lyle Menendez’s public defender, who says the book is based on surreptitiously taped conversations and said, “This book is an intentionally negative portrayal. I think it’s very unfortunate that we have these sensational books that don’t have literary merit.”

Viner’s life has had its own share of sensation, not all of it pleasant.

“I was born in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I have one sister. My father owned a laundry business and died of a heart attack when I was 11. After that I was sent off to military and private schools, the McDonough School in Maryland, then Avon Old Farms in Connecticut, then Chadwick School in Palos Verdes. I don’t have much memory of that time, except religion plays a much more important role in the East than it does here. There weren’t many Jews in those schools. I guess you could characterize me as a malcontent.”

He hints at the loneliness of his school days when he says, “Books saved me. I discovered Dickens, Turgenev. ‘Fathers and Sons.’ I read Twain, Thurber, Dorothy Parker.”

During the California summers of his Chadwick period, Viner worked in the mail room at 20th Century Fox, where he began to learn about the movie business. In the meantime, he had grown big--an athletic 6 feet tall and 285 pounds. As an English major at Harvard University, he played fullback and defensive lineman. During a scrimmage one day, he took a hit at a bad angle and fractured several vertebrae so badly that he had to spend six months in a body cast. He has been in pain ever since--despite back surgery last year.

Viner returned to the Washington area to enroll in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He thought he would enter the diplomatic corps, but the discreet charms of embassy life began to fade once he realized that “I’d be spending a lifetime shaking hands and making small talk.”

An invitation to a pickup doubles tennis match one day turned out to be one of the most pivotal events in his life; one of the other players was a young senator named Robert F. Kennedy.

They hit it off so well that Viner eventually went to work for Kennedy as a personal aide, joining another former athlete who had had considerably more success in football--the Los Angeles Rams’ Roosevelt Grier, with whom Viner roomed when they went out on the road as Kennedy advance men. Viner broke a rib as one of the men wrestling Sirhan Sirhan to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel after Sirhan shot Kennedy.

Viner was at loose ends after Kennedy’s death, when producer Aaron Rosenberg offered Viner and Grier jobs at 20th Century Fox. His earlier apprenticeship served him well; he took hold in the movie business and over the next few years moved to Universal, and then MGM.

Viner has a sense of humor that ranges from the offbeat to the black (he has published a book on how to do away with PBS’s preschooler icon Barney.) While at MGM, he produced “The Best of Marcel Marceau,” an audio recording of the famous mime which, of course, consisted of long periods of silence punctuated by applause. Like the Pet Rock, it became a peculiar success and made the charts. MGM awarded Viner with his own record division, called Pride.

When Polydor took over MGM records in 1972, Viner kept hold of Pride (he had produced Sammy Davis Jr.’s Grammy-winning “Candy Man”). He had also been expanding his base of operations, producing the televised 1972 Republican National Convention (in which Davis gave Richard Nixon his famous squeeze) as well as the presidential inaugural, and working in TV and movie production. He did “Circus of the Stars,” “Willa” and “Touched by Love,” among others.

A bout with cancer in the mid-1970s restricted Viner to managing the careers of several actresses, including his wife, but after successful surgery (there’s been no recurrence) he went to work on a movie called “Windmills of the Gods” and met its author, novelist Sidney Sheldon. They became the best of friends; it was Sheldon who dropped $8,000 in a backgammon game to Viner, who used the money to create Dove Audio in September, 1985.

“I had an uncle who was quadriplegic,” Viner said. “I’d take him audiotapes, which he enjoyed. But I noticed there wasn’t a lot of variety. I asked Sidney and Norman Cousins if they’d ever had their works on tape. They said no. I thought, ‘There’s a business here.’ Sidney has been partner to all the good things that have happened to me ever since.”

Dove joined a market that was picking up steam in the mid-1980s as Simon & Shuster, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Random House and HarperCollins--as well as a few independents--moved into spoken-word recordings. Viner and Raffin would have to mortgage their house a couple of times, but their aggressive Hollywood approach eventually paid off.

By 1994, their $22 million in retail sales placed them first among independent spoken-word tapes and compact disc producers. Numerous movie stars read for them. “Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales” won a Grammy. Gregory Peck read the Bible. Now, their library contains close to 1,000 titles, ranging from literary classics to business and educational books, comedy, National Public Radio recordings and numerous works in Spanish.

Dove went public last year in tandem with starting its book division. However controversial its choices have been, profits since then have soared. And for anyone taking an overview of the commercial publishing industry these days, Dove’s splashiness takes place in an increasingly crowded pool.

“There’s hardly a publisher in America that can now consider itself above stooping to the level P.T. Barnum brilliantly created a century ago,” concludes Wasserman, of Times’ Books. “Who can we exempt? HarperCollins? Rupert Murdoch? There are few publishers who can swim above the tide of bad taste without need of dollars and votes.”

As Wasserman spoke, the American Book Assn. convention was beginning, and Viner, fresh from his court date with Judge Ito, was flying to Chicago to join in.

Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.