The Tale of the Man Who Wore Two Hats

For centuries, people have believed they could serve God or mammon, not both. A local variation on the dilemma faces the writer who feels forced to decide between art and commerce--especially commerce in one of its most lucrative guises, television.

But Sherman Oaks writer Clyde Phillips has found a way to do both. He creates TV shows, such as Fox’s “Get Real” and the NBC Brooke Shields vehicle “Suddenly Susan,” and has also made time to write two highly praised crime novels, including “Blindsided” (William Morrow), a recent Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Taking a leave from television in 1997 while his wife was expecting their first child, Phillips wrote his first book over a period of six months.

“I’d been burning to write a novel,” he said.

He had just come off “Suddenly Susan,” which had not been an especially good experience, he said, although he has nothing but praise for Shields. Then in his late 40s, Phillips reasoned that writing fiction would also give him more time to nurture his family--his wife, writer Jane Lancellotti, and their daughter, Claire, now 3.

That first tale was the story of a San Francisco police detective named Jane Candiotti who almost loses her life battling a charismatic psychopath. Candiotti, who looks like Phillips’ wife and whose Italian American name echoes hers, returns in “Blindsided,” matching wits with a serial cop killer.

Although many writers describe the process as painful and lonely, Phillips said he loved bringing his fictional characters to life.

“I was excited every day I was doing it,” he said. “Rather than depleting me, it repleted me. And I knew from the beginning, as awful as it sounds, that it was good.”

To his surprise, the first publishers who looked at the manuscript turned it down, although a number of editors took the time to write encouraging letters detailing how they thought the book could be improved.

Lying in his home office one day, he noticed a copy of Thomas Harris’ “The Silence of the Lambs” on one of the bookshelves. Taking it down, he was struck by the minimalist, cinematic quality of the prose.

“I went back to my book and stripped out the purple and stuck to the lean,” he recalled. “We sold the book right away. All those editors were right.”

Someone once said that you can make a killing as a writer in America, but you can’t make a living. If that first book and, now, its sequel have not made Phillips rich, they have given him some singular pleasures. He was thrilled to spot someone reading it on a flight. And he was even more excited when Bickerton & Ripley, the legendary bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, where he has a summer home, included his first book in the bag it puts together every year for the nation’s First Reader, President Clinton.

The media, including NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw, glommed on its inclusion in the presidential care package--no doubt because of the book’s title, which could have been written about the president himself--”Fall From Grace.”

At least 100 news outlets ran the story, giving the book “a nice little sales spike,” Phillips recalled.

Phillips grew up in a tough neighborhood in Boston and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He graduated from Van Nuys High School, earned a degree in English from UCLA, then went to graduate school at Cal State Northridge.

There he was mentored by the late Robert Deutsch, an elegant, charismatic English professor who helped refine Phillips’ admiration for the work of Wallace Stevens, John Berryman and other great American men of letters. Phillips developed an easy intellectual camaraderie with Deutsch that he had not found with his teachers at UCLA.

His relationship with his father had been a troubled one, he said, and Deutsch was a supportive and scholarly surrogate, who taught Phillips such important personal lessons as “to embrace, with confidence, my masculinity.” Moreover, Phillips said, “I was looking for a man of my father’s generation with whom I could have a conversation about intellectual things.”

Phillips taught creative writing and other courses at Northridge and worked with Deutsch on a book about Stevens. But he was also interested in writing for Hollywood. Deutsch gave Phillips his blessing, assuring the young man that he could make it as an academic, even as a poet, but pointing out that he probably hungered for more than the limited pay and action that academia could provide.

As graduate students often do, Phillips needed money and found a time-honored way to get it.

“If you live in New York, you go and drive a cab,” he recalled. “If you live in Los Angeles--and it was never more true than it is today--you go on a game show.”

The show was “Split Second.” Phillips won $500 but lost the final round.

“I don’t remember the question, but the answer was Daphne DuMaurier.”

Afterward, he went home and wrote 300 possible questions for the show on 3-by-5-inch cards (“recipe cards,” he calls them) and sent them to the show’s producers.

Days later, he was working on the show as a writer-researcher.

“I got my little toe in the door,” he said. However small that initial step, he felt that he had it made.

“I’m walking around on game day with a clipboard looking and feeling important,” he recalled with a laugh.

In television, Phillips served an apprenticeship that included producing disease-of-the-week movies for such stalwart actresses as Linda Gray, Suzanne Pleshette and Jane Seymour, then began to get steady work creating shows known for being hip and stylish. That continues today, despite his being over 30, a condition that has driven some writers to seek out younger people to pitch their work.

“I believe in talentism rather than ageism,” he said, when asked about TV’s tendency to “graylist” older writers. “I believe if you don’t have the chops and you’re young, you’re going to be found out, and if you do have the talent and you’re old, you’re gonna stick. Nobody can afford to hire anybody a second time, no matter how fashionably young, if they’re not talented.”

After he wrote his first book, he found himself longing to reenter the collaborative world of television.

“I had this wonderfully romantic writer’s life, and I missed the action. I missed the power of doing a show.”

After working hard all season on “Get Real,” Phillips said, “now I find myself missing the solitude and independence of being a novelist.” He has already plotted a third Jane Candiotti book and has begun the prewriting portion of a book on fathers and sons “that’s burning a hole in me.”

In fact, he said, he feels privileged to be one of perhaps 100 people in the country who create TV shows and to be a novelist as well. The two kinds of writing provide a welcome balance in his professional life, he said.

“I still can’t believe I can make a living putting words on paper, writing a story,” he said. “I keep expecting the impostor police to knock on my door and say, ‘You don’t deserve to have this much fun.’ ”

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Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at socalliving@latimes.com.