Last September, Mr. Moyers dismissed all that to The Observer as hogwash. “I’m moved by their empathy,” he said of the folks who were worried about him. “I ask them to give me a soul X-ray a year from now, and if I have black spots on the lungs of my soul, then, you know, they can just rush me to the infirmary and fill me up with drugs.”
At CPC last week, it seems the checkup came two months early. Had the time finally come for Mr. Moyers to justify his allegiance to Mr. Wylie?
No, no, no, according to Ms. Feldman. “It was totally tame,” she said. “I just said, ‘Why do you think he has a reputation?’ And Scott defended him diplomatically and talked about how great he was.”
But there was a little more to it than that. In addition to affirming that Mr. Wylie is a very good agent—that he earns every client in his stable with his dedication and ingenuity—Mr. Moyers also said that his boss’ supposedly amoral tactics are not so uncommon in the industry at large—that other agencies go hunting, too, with no smaller a bazooka than Mr. Wylie.
“He was very diplomatic but mentioned that other agents are known for poaching as well,” Ms. Feldman said of Mr. Moyers. “He was looking Jay’s way, but he wasn’t referring to Jay, I don’t think.”
“Jay”—that’s Mr. Mandel to us—couldn’t really tell.
“It was just a weird little moment,” he said in an interview a few days after the panel. “The implication may have been that clients come and clients go, that it happens all the time and that there wasn’t a moral distinction between the way Wylie functions as an agency looking out for authors’ interests and looking for new business, and the way other agencies do.”
Whatever he meant, the subtext of last Monday’s exchange may have gone over the heads of the 100 students who witnessed it. As Ms. Feldman put it, “It was a nonstarter! It just wasn’t worth it, in front of these kids. If the three of us had been having lunch together, O.K., but we were supposed to talk about what we do as agents, not who’s who and what’s what and who’s doing what to whom.”
She went on: “The kids could care less and don’t even know who Andrew Wylie is.” Didn’t, anyway.
lneyfakh@observer.com
