[Thank you, Alex Katz for drafting that sketch when you were just a student at Cooper Union in 1948.]
Today is John Grisham’s birthday.
Six degrees of separation.
He was born in Arkansas a year before me. We are both one of five siblings.
John attended the University of Mississippi Law School and began practicing law in 1981.
I attended Fordham University School of Law and began practicing law in 1985.
He practiced for 10 years and then started writing.
By the early nineties, John’s writing career had been launched into the stratosphere with his books to movies –
5 John Grisham Books That Have Been Made Into Movies and How to Watch Them
I was tinkering with the writing of screenplays in the ’90s while working more than full-time at the entertainment boutique law firm, Gold Farrell & Marks. Most of my attorney friends come from GF&M. (Pete Sheridan and John Bricker – who both appear in WTLLM and FR (see below) – were from my more posh and powerful Cahill, Gordon and Reindel Wall Street days – Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP | Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP – I know, I can’t believe they hired me either.)
But back to GF&M:
Neil Ross – Another Old Friend – The Wise Novelist
Mark Lafayette became an AUSA character in the beginning of The Wise Ass.
Marissa Banez later joined me at Black Rose Writing where she is a successful children’s book author.
In the early ’90s, Len Marks – the entertainment related powerhouse behind GF&M – walked a tall, good-looking man through the office hallways obviously selling him on the busy bees buzzing in the hallways and glass surrounded library. We busy bees were not introduced to the potential client, but after he passed a group of us, I asked Bob Mulvey – my best friend at the firm and one of the most brilliant attorneys I have ever worked with – and casually replied, “John Grisham.”
I remember blurting out, just after JG had passed me, right by the file room area, where I could see Buford wrapping up an accordion legal file – “I want to be him someday.”
You see. John G had made it. He had escaped the POW stockade fence. He had crossed into freedom. I was brutally jealous.
I was still Steve McQueen as Captain Virgil Hilts trying to escape the law on my motorcycle.
For the record, I rode a motorcycle to work in Manhattan at GF&M. I bought the bike from another GF&M attorney, Marna Brown. It had been her ex-husband’s.
Unfortunately, about a year later I was knocked off the bike on 23rd street heading to work one morning. I survived – battered and scrapped – but the bike was toast.
Marna must have forgotten to take the curse off it.
Lisa – whose one brother Mark Wallen (yep from FJM) had died in a motorcycle accident at the exact time my eldest son Luke was born – wouldn’t let me replace it.
Anyway, that was as close as I got to meeting JG.
But I never forgot the feeling of JG passing me in the law firm hallway. He was walking in the direction I wanted to go – writing success. I remained stuck in that intolerable place – the practice of law – for another thirty years. Back in the cooler.
Here’s another factoid.
Rae’Ven Kelly, who played the little girl, Tonya Hailey, in the film adaptation of Grisham’s A Time To Kill,
Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly – Wikipedia
was professionally managed at the time by her mother Phyllis Kelly. I had gotten a screenplay I had written that had a young black girl as one of the lead characters into PK’s hands and we spent over a year trying to get it set up. Shared many a phone call trying to make it happen. Phyllis got it into the hands of many prominent actors. Samuel Jackson purportedly read it. Indeed, that is the same screenplay that Steven Furst –
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1bc5v16u6M/
was attempting to produce and direct at the time he died.
I’ve now decided to turn that screenplay into my next novel. So, stay tuned. It’s a beauty.
As an aside, Matthew McConaughy and Sandra Bullock, two of the stars of ATTK, would make an amazing Jimmy and Gina in The Claire Saga, just saying.
Anyway, when I finally sat down to write The Wise Ass, it started out very Grisham-like, indeed its cover blurb describes it as “Grisham on mushrooms.” (Thank you Colin Broderick). I just didn’t feel I had the chops yet to leap with both feet into writing a novel set totally in the world of the law. At the time I wrote TWA and the other novels in The Claire Saga – I was still a practicing lawyer. Writing about the law felt like talking about your wife to another woman.
However, I absolutely love the resulting series – The Claire Saga. It taught me that I could write.
So, having officially retired from the practice of law this past fall, on October 31st – my favorite holiday – I began Free R.A.D.I.C.A.L. Fifty-four days later it was finished.
That file clerk from GF&M, Buford Johnson, who was born in Georgia, became the very popular and charismatic black lawyer from Atlanta – Buford Johnson – in FR.
FR is truly Grisham-Esque. I put my legal soul – unfortunately my heart was taken from me when I passed The Bar – into writing a purely legal thriller. And, unless everyone else who has read the draft are lying to me, I nailed it.
I’m just giving the manuscript one final pass before it goes to BRW for publication, presently scheduled for January 2027. I’m really hoping Reagan Rothe finds a slot for its publication this fall.
I hope I fare better than Captain Ahab in his pursuit of that white leviathan, as I really believe this book gives John Grisham a run for his money.
What the hell, I could never harpoon Moby Dick. I would rather harpoon Captain Ahab. I would have just gone down with the Pequod.
But I am forever in JG’s debt, for not only appearing in my back story without even knowing it, but because he helped establish the legal thriller as a best-selling genre which can be easily adapted to lucrative film that can transition a now poor country lawyer into a writer with fuck-you money.
Claire’s and Honey’s mani-pedis don’t come for free –
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17jNEpfq4H
If anyone knows JG, tell him I said hello. And thanks. Respect, my legal and author brother.
Anyway, that’s my six-degrees of separation story for today.
I have to head out on my errands.
Hopefully, you fine, five readers get to enjoy the Super Bowl.
And no matter what else we get up to. let us make today a great one.
