The extraordinary life of London's leading agent

Feline grace: Pat Kavanagh
13 April 2012

With the passing of the celebrated literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died on Monday at the age of 68 from a brain tumour, London's publishing industry has lost a glamorous link with an older and less ruthlessly commercial era. It has also lost, authors, publishers and friends said yesterday, a "feline" character who could manipulate, terrify and charm in equal measure.

Kavanagh was one of the ringleaders of last year's collective walk-out from the literary agency PFD, a protest essentially against the dumbing-down of the publishing industry and its takeover by celebrity-obsessed international media conglomerates. With a list of authors that included poet laureate Andrew Motion, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Drabble and Kavanagh's husband, Julian Barnes she was the grandest and most experienced, of the refuseniks. The woman who had known Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee and Kingsley Amis was also the least likely to take the diktats of big business lying down.

"Publishing has always been pretty cut-throat," says the novelist Robert Harris, another of Kavanagh's authors. "But nowadays the growth sector is certainly in ghosted celebrity books or memoirs; and the idea of good writing, or what the reader thinks and loves, isn't what drives the market. Cash drives the market. Of course good books are still being published. But it's often quite hard to find them in the pile 'em high, buy-two-get-three culture. That wasn't Pat. The Richard and Judy Book Club? That wasn't Pat."

At first meeting, Kavanagh could appear very fearsome. Always immaculately groomed, she seemed utterly in control of herself and quite beautiful, with wide eyes and delicate cheekbones. As a young woman, new to London from her native South Africa, there was something of Katharine Hepburn about her. Sir John Mortimer knew her when she arrived in 1964: "I'd often take her out to dinner, and she was obviously hugely attractive to everyone. Very sexy."

In those days, Kavanagh wanted to be an actress (in the film Under Milk Wood she kissed Richard Burton) but found her niche in copywriting and literary management. Because she was South African, says Clive James, "she didn't come from any recognisable British social stratum" and "counted herself as having come from nowhere". In 1960s London, such rootlessness mattered less than youth, spirit and wit and Kavanagh had all three.

Yet she could also appear aloof and reserved in the most English of fashions. If you knew her well, you might realise that her "lethal silences" as Francis Wheen, another of her authors, puts it were in part the result of shyness. But they could also be a highly disconcerting means of manipulating publishers, putting down aspiring writers, or even expressing disapproval to established and successful authors.

"She struck the fear of God into most people," says a well-known journalist whose work she rejected. "She dismissed me quite harshly, though I have to say she phoned me a week after that to check that I was OK. Perhaps she thought I was going to top myself."

Even some of Kavanagh's best-known writers would wait nervously by the phone after submitting a book to her, wondering if she'd like it enough or would ring back with the fateful words: "This won't do."

"There was always a slight frisson of terror whenever I told people that Pat was my agent," says Wheen, who was with her for more than 25 years. "If you ever said anything stupid or inadequate, she'd just look at you in silence, which would make you feel very stupid indeed.

"I think that's what she did with publishers. If she was negotiating a deal and they suggested a figure she regarded as too low, instead of saying, 'Well, that's not nearly enough', she'd simply say, 'Really?' and then let them flounder in with a better offer. She and Julian always had this thing of speaking in italics. It was an absolutely devastating tactic."

Kavanagh and Barnes were one of literary London's most glamorous and private couples. They met at a party in 1978, and the next day Barnes wrote a note to Kavanagh to ask her out. After marrying 18 months later, they lived in a large detached villa in Dartmouth Park, with a library and a snooker table and a huge wine cellar.

They lived the regimented, well-disciplined life of the childless and were scrupulous about punctuality. Both would work exact hours, perhaps stopping for a single glass of wine and a single cigarette at lunchtime, until, at 7pm, Kavanagh would take a bath and listen to The Archers. The couple, says a close friend, would go out for dinner immediately afterwards, having phoned their hosts to find out what was being served and thus to plan which bottle of wine would go perfectly with the meal. Dinner, no matter where, always ended for them at 10.30pm. Afterwards their hosts would find a beautiful hand-written thank-you note in the next post.

Barnes and Kavanagh were often described as utterly self-contained and fiercely loyal, except on one notable occasion. Even their closest friends would not have dreamt of asking either of them about Kavanagh's affair with the novelist Jeanette Winterson, for whom she briefly left Barnes in the 1980s.

At the time, the affair was a matter of intense gossip and speculation in the press; and therefore "agony", says Harris, for all three of them. "Pat may have made glancing references to press stories about it," he says, "but I never discussed it with her. She was a curious combination of the extraordinary and private and that's what made her unique, particularly in a world of flashy über-agents."

Yesterday Winterson emailed the Standard: "There isn't anything I want to say [about Kavanagh's death] and what I feel is too private to be said," she wrote. Yet she was also keen to point out that, contrary to several newspaper reports, her novel Written on the Body, a story of lost erotic love between two women, is not about Kavanagh.

"I wrote The Passion (1987) for Pat. That's her book. The rest was an invention by the press who still think that anything a woman writes is somehow autobiography."

If Kavanagh disliked the world of flashy über-agents, she had to exist in it and when in 1995 one of her most famous authors, Martin Amis, decided to leave her for the American Andrew Wylie (nicknamed The Jackal), the fall-out was personal as well as professional.

Amis and Barnes had been best friends. Barnes is godfather to Amis's first child. But the "betrayal" of Kavanagh ended the friendship for more than 10 years.

"If someone was thought to have treated Pat badly, Julian would leap in to protect her," says Wheen.

Kavanagh's authors have always felt protective of her, too, and were prepared to follow her during the biggest crisis of her career. The break-up of PFD was an episode of intense drama, beginning with its sale to American sports agency CSS Stellar in 2001.

Initially in favour, Kavanagh quickly began to express reservations. She felt, says an insider, that CSS wanted simply to absorb PFD into its multi-media empire and that the job of individual agents, all of whom knew their authors well and were trusted by them, was beginning to blur at the edges.

"Pat felt CSS wanted an all-singing, all-dancing crossover kind of business," adds the insider. "None of the old PFD agents wanted to find themselves suddenly acting for the ghosted memoirs of American baseball players, about whom they knew nothing. Still less did they want funds generated by them being taken out of PFD and pumped into that baseball player's career."

Kavanagh devised the £4 million PFD management buy-out plan last year, which CSS rejected. So when she decided to leave PFD to set up a new agency, United Agents, shockwaves washed over the publishing world. Thirty agents left the business, and with them went not only Kavanagh's client list but also talents such as Nick Hornby, Tom Stoppard, Kate Winslet, Ricky Gervais and Keira Knightley.

"Actually," says Robert Harris, "I think and she was 67 when this whole thing started she could have done without the drama. But I also think she felt she had no choice [but to leave]."

The word "feline", used by more than one of Kavanagh's friends, quite independently, to describe her, in the end seems to sum her up perfectly. She could be intimidating and inscrutable. But Kavanagh was also one of the sleekest, sharpest and perhaps most subtle operators in London's literary world. Many feel tonight that an era is over.

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