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From preparing French toast to providing counseling, author escorts perform the tasks that keep book tours from falling apart. BY SARAH TOMLINSON 243-2122 |
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Escort services call to mind unsavory associations: women in stilettos and low-cut dresses fawning over sleazy, fat-cat businessmen, for example. Amy Nielsen works for an escort service, but her job involves nothing of the sort. She is one of the unseen laborers in the literary world, the assistants who ensure that harried touring authors arrive on time to readings, television appearances and departing flights. It's not a disreputable job, but it can entail some bizarre encounters--and it's not easy. Nielsen works for Expressly for Media, a small author escort company. She fondly remembers accompanying David Sedaris during his stop in town last June--an effortless assignment--but she says that hosting other authors has required skills she never expected to use. Her first assignment was to escort the author of a new cookbook, and to her surprise she found herself up to her elbows in cooking. When a touring cookbook writer presents goodies live on TV, it turns out, the food isn't prepared by the author--it's made by the escort (though larger escort companies often hire a professional food stylist). Nielsen had received a list of the author's needs for his television appearance. "It was so exact...I had to have what they call the 'beauty plate,' which was French toast, cut and on the fork," she recalls. "And I had to have one for the teaser shot...and then one whole bowl full of just bread, that he would pick one slice out of." Janet Taylor, the owner of Oregon Book Tours--which handles between 150 and 175 author tours a year--remembers a different kind of ordeal with an author. Her most challenging experience in the business was when her company escorted Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, the day after Frank Sinatra died. Janet remembers a hysterical Luft: "She was a basket case. One of my gals was handling her, and all of a sudden this turned into way beyond what I ask my assistants to do. So I swung over and did some of the work--it took two of us. Basically we had to help this artistic, sensitive, exhausted woman not only do live television--with all the extra national media that was demanding to see her--but help her on the day after a devastating family loss. You do your best work on those days." Even with such challenges, Taylor loves her profession. "The worst day of media escorting is better than the best day of anything else I've ever done," she says. "It's my calling." "The escorts consider themselves sort of the invisible backbone [in the book-tour world]," says Halle Sadle, who started her author escort business, HMS Media Services, in 1991. "We help quite a bit with the behind-the-scenes." Her company handles approximately 200 author tours a year and, along with Oregon Book Tours, accounts for the majority of author escort services in Portland. She says that much of the business time, beyond actually escorting authors, is devoted to advising publicists about media options available in Portland, including the best reading and interview venues in town. Sadle has bought wheat grass for Boy George at 6 a.m. and helped one author work through a nervous breakdown that unfolded in Sadle's car. When she was first getting started in the business, Sadle sometimes assisted Rock Bottom Remainders, an author band whose lineup includes Stephen King, Dave Barry and Amy Tan. One night in Manhattan, she found herself watching Friday the 13th on a tour bus with Stephen King before going into the Bottom Line for the band's show. "There were tons of fans and fanatics," she says. "When we were crossing the street, he said, 'You'll have to be my bodyguard.'" Sadle is 5 foot 3, and King is over 6 feet tall; she remembers thinking, "Oh boy. Well, maybe they'll miss him." In the course of a day on the job, Sadle has taken authors to emergency
chiropractor appointments, gotten shoes fixed, found hairdressers and
makeup artists, changed airline tickets and even called one author's
mother--all the little things that people who are away from home need
help with. Taylor says she's done laundry for authors, sewn on buttons,
gone on deli runs and held babies. Taylor also describes part of her
job as being at readings; even with all the planning and publicity devoted
to the tour, authors sometimes face empty audiences. This means "taking
them out for a beer afterwards and listening to them bitch about it--for
perfectly understandable reasons," Taylor says. "I mean, these guys
are giving up a lot of time and a lot of money and Sadle listed some of the titles escorts and authors have come up with to describe the job. "Molly Ivins called me her 'minder.' There's keeper, wrangler, mother--Gerry Spence called me 'Mother Teresa'--bodyguard, concierge-on-wheels, tour guide and paid co-dependent." This wide variety of jobs, from mothering to chauffeuring, is all in a day's work for author escorts. However, both Taylor and Sadle acknowledge that the author-escort industry has changed in the past decade. Publicists very rarely schedule month-long, fifty-city tours for their authors any more. These days, authors have shorter, geographically specific tours, and they go home for weekends in between appearances. Taylor sees that the growth in both reading and media venues in Portland allows for greater options when bringing authors to town. But the changes in the publishing world have altered the face of author book tours, and Sadle speaks of the less positive impact. She has seen a general decrease in author tours because publishing companies are less likely to bear the expense for an author who is not a celebrity, literary or otherwise. Also, with the rise in Internet usage, authors can now reach vast numbers of readers in online chats, avoiding the hassles of airports, weather and scheduling conflicts. Because Portland is a small city, publicists sometimes do not think of it as an important stop on the new compressed book tour. Both Taylor and Sadle say that one part of their job is to convince New York City publicists that their authors will find enthusiastic audiences in Portland. Amy Nielsen feels rewarded by her job when authors like David Sedaris send appreciative notes. Both Sadle and Taylor love the unpredictability of owning a business that often requires saving the day--sometimes for writers who have been their heroes for years. As long as there are still book tours, escorts will be backstage, making sure authors are in the right place at the moment the camera rolls or the reading begins with hair, buttons and sanity in place.
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