One

I'll begin my story in New York, with the main dilemma I had to face when my brand-new small press decided to publish Stephen's poetry. In October 2005 I was in a Brooklyn bar having drinks with Andy "The Rebel Bookseller" Laties, where I explained it to him.

"Suppose I do manage to get a reading for Stephen Gyllenhaal at some bookstore in New York. What I'm afraid is that the room will be packed with girls expecting to get a glimpse of Jake and they don't buy anything."

"Who's Jake?" said Andy.

"Jake Gyllenhaal, Stephen's son. They're very close. The whole family's very close. If his dad gave a reading, he'd come to support him." This was right around the "Jarhead" craze but a couple of months before "Brokeback Mountain" was released.

"Oh yeah, that guy. Well, that is a risk," said Andy. "What do you think you'll do about it?"

At that point, I didn't know what I'd do about it. I didn't even know if we were even going to end up publishing his book. I'd sent Stephen the contract twice, but he kept insisting he never received it. The only thing I knew is that from the moment I first contacted him on the phone back in July, I'd entered into a strange relationship with him.

My relationship with Stephen had begun that July when Michael, my husband and literary partner, discovered three of his poems in a batch of submissions to the literary annual we were being employed to edit. We were working out of our apartment in Woodside, Queens at the time. We didn't have our own publishing company then, but were working for John Edward Gill, the man presently responsible for illegally freezing our personal assets. More about that later.

The poems were head and shoulders better than anything else that had been submitted. Gill had sent us the poetry submission batch with the express order, "Don't read ‘em, just stick ‘em with a rejection slip in an envelope and send ‘em all back." But Michael took his job seriously and read each and every submission. He takes poetry — all literature, in fact — seriously and treats the efforts of writers and poets with the greatest respect.

Michael called me over and had me read them too. They were good. They were written in a young style but addressed mature issues, which made us both wonder about the author. We looked at the name but didn't recognize it.

"I think it's Swedish," I said. (I was born and raised in Minneapolis.)

Michael and I read the cover letter, but it was only superficially informative. It mentioned about a half-dozen literary quarterlies that had published the author's poems. It also mentioned the fact that the author worked in Hollywood and that his two children were actors. We still didn't recognize the name. The letterhead, however, was one for a motion picture company called Rollercoaster. I decided to Google it and found it.

"There's a phone number," I called out to Michael, who was still at the kitchen table reading through the poetry submissions.

"Great. Why don't you give him a call? Maybe we can find out about this guy." Michael thought he might be an unusually mature grad student. Because of the address on Hollywood Boulevard — which I recognized because in the 70s I'd lived about five blocks away — I thought he might be some middle-aged but established independent filmmaker and manque man of letters.

"And as long as you're at it, ask him about the fourth line in ‘Blindside'," added Michael.

"What do you mean, the fourth line?"

"I've read the poem again and it doesn't make complete sense. I think there's a line missing. Ask him about it." I reread the poem as well and agreed.

So, I called the number and got the recording: "You have reached the Rollercoaster Film Company. We're not open now, but if you want to leave a message..." Since it was a Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, this made sense. "Hi, we're the editors of [here I mentioned the name of the literary annual]. We're reading the poems you sent and one of them doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. It's the one called ‘Blindside' and it appears that there's a gap between the third and the fifth line. Do you think you could call us back at your convenience and supply it? Thanks." I left our phone number on the recording and hung up, assuming that the best response we'd get would be some assistant who'd either supply us with the answer or put us in touch with the author. And we pretty much forgot about it for the moment.

Three days later the phone rang. I picked it up, and a young-sounding male said, "Hi! This is Stephen Gyllenhaal." The brightness and familiarity in his voice threw me, and so instead of replying in a professional tone, I answered back just as brightly, "Oh hi, Stephen!"

"I understand you're reading my poetry," he said. I explained to him that we were considering his submission for publication for the literary annual we were editing. "Which poem did you say you're you having trouble with?" he asked. I told him. "Oh, I changed that one slightly." And over the phone he proceeded to recite an entirely different poem with an entirely different title. I pointed this out to him. "No no, I just changed one or two words." That should have been my first tipoff that Stephen was not going to be the clearest communicator.

But just as brightly and swiftly, he turned the conversation to other matters. He explained how he got into poetry writing — it had been prescribed to him by his analyst, more or less, as therapy. With a fresh willing audience, he went on to talk about all sorts of things, from Socrates, "that old fraud" (he was taking a long-distance course from Columbia University), to the movie business. "Dinosaurs! They're all dinosaurs!" he exclaimed.

I was as impressed as a freshman listening to a professor speaking off the record. We discussed all sorts of topics without mentioning the literary annual or his poetry again. After forty-five minutes he asked me, "Can I call you sometime?" Of course I said, "Sure." We said our goodbyes and I spent the rest of the day walking on air.

When Michael came home from work that night I told him excitedly, "You'll never guess who I got a call from!" Who, asked Michael. I said the name. "So," asked Michael, not as impressed as I was, "did you find out who he is?" I said no. So right then and there I proceeded right to look him up on the internet, where I made a delightful discovery.

"'Twin Peaks!'" I called out to Michael, who by this time was in the kitchen fixing dinner. "He directed an episode of my favorite TV show of all time, ‘Twin Peaks'!" True, it was in the dismal second season, but it was the episode where I won my dollar bet from Michael that Audrey was still a virgin.

"Hm!" said Michael. "So what's a big director like him sending around his poetry for?"

We both stopped to wonder about that.

A week later, Stephen called again. He said he'd written another poem he wanted to share, and he did. I listened to it and praised him, and asked him what his inspiration was. He told me a little bit about his early life and his early career, but this time I was ready for him. "I looked you up," I told him, and I mentioned almost all his directing credits I found online.

He was impressed and flattered. Then he asked me, "Did you ever see ‘Losing Isaiah'?" Before I could even answer, he exclaimed, "I hated that movie! But I did it anyway. I saved my marriage, but I wrecked my career. And I haven't worked since!"

Of course, this was not entirely true. Since directing ‘Losing Isaiah', Stephen had done many more made-for-TV movies and series episodes. But ‘Losing Isaiah' was the movie his wife, Naomi Foner, not only had written but produced as well. In other words she was his boss. I was to learn later, from him and other sources, what a donnybrook the making of that movie had been.

Then he asked me, "Are you married?" I said yes, for twenty-five years. He said he'd been married for twenty-eight. "We've got a couple of kids, you know about them?" Yes, I said. I wanted to gush about my favorite Jake film, ‘Donnie Darko', but he plowed on. "You know, Jake's in a movie soon." I knew it was ‘Jarhead' and told him. "Yeah," said Stephen, "Jake's been bulking up for that movie. His mother doesn't like it, but he's at that stage where boys like to rebel against their mothers. But don't worry, he'll come back to her." Then he asked me, "You got any kids?" I told him I had a son his son's age. "Oh, so you know all about it." In fact Rob never gave me that kind of grief but I didn't want to contradict him.

We talked a lot more in depth during that conversation because I knew more about him through my research on the net. I wanted to know how to pronounce the name of his hometown in Pennsylvania, Bryn Athyn. He pronounced it for me, "brin-athin". I asked him about his name. "It's jill-en-hall," he said smoothly, as if he'd had to do this many, many times before. I had already learned that he was a fifth-generation member of a refined Christian sect called Swedenborgianism, and I wanted to hear more about it from him. "Oh, I'm not a believer," he said curtly.

After about an hour, he told me he was going up to Vancouver to direct a TV movie, so I probably wouldn't be hearing from him for a while. I said fine. I hadn't expected even this much familiarity but I didn't tell him that. Then he finally mentioned his poetry. I told him I'd strongly urge the publisher of the literary annual to include his work in the next issue. We said our goodbyes and I didn't expect to hear from him again.

* * *

Let's skip ahead a few weeks to late August. Gill had been talking my ear off on the phone about his own book, a novel about the experiences of US Navy pilots in Japan right before the escalation of the Vietnam War, their romances with American women, and in particular the experience of one pilot who owned a whorehouse staffed by naïve Asian girls. He was looking for a small press to publish it.

"You could publish it," he told me.

"But I don't have a publishing company," I told him.

"Well," he said, "what about that dream of yours? Cantara Christopher Books or Cantara's Books or whatever you called it?"

"Cantarabooks," I said. It was true that I revealed to him my secret dream to start my own imprint. Gill and I had met that past spring at the Council for Literary Magazines and Presses Fair, where he was exhibiting his literary annual and I attended strictly as an avid reader. There we struck up a conversation about the enormous changes in publishing. Mostly I talked, he listened. I had been following changes in publishing technology since 2000 and was eager to share my observations with anyone who would listen.

After a pause, he urged me to make my dream come true. "Great! Where's the money going to come from?" I said.

"Oh, don't worry. I'll throw you more work on the magazine." I found out later that, due to his erratic nature, he had perennial trouble holding onto a staff. I also found out much later that he ran his magazine through a questionable nonprofit organization, of which he was the president.

But of course I knew none of that at the time. All I could hear was that someone believed in me and my vision, and was going to help me make my dream come true.

Gill continued. "So — you'll publish my book, you'll publish Michael's, and to make it look good you'll publish another one by someone else. Maybe some poetry."

I leapt at this opening. "Poetry? How about that poet I've been telling you about, Stephen Gyllenhaal? Do you think you could accept some of his poems for the magazine?" I'd spent most of July and August pleading with Gill to include Stephen's poems in the literary annual. They were brilliant, I said. Their quality would only enhance the issue. I didn't say this to him, but my career goal at the time was to be known for being an editor responsible for a true "literary find".

"No poetry!" Gill snarled. I have to tell you at this point that in its submission guidelines his magazine expressly solicits poetry.

I decided to play my last card. Knowing Gill loved to fawn over the famous and influential (he was a well-known figure in the Long Island artsy set), I told him, "He's a big Hollywood director, you know. His kids are movie stars and his wife got an Oscar nomination for one of her screenplays."

"What's the name again?" said Gill. I told him. "Well, find out if this Gyllen-whatever has any more poems. Maybe you could publish ‘em in a collection."

And that's pretty much how my small press started. I filed the papers later that month and by September Cantarabooks was a business entity.

* * *

It was around that time in late August Stephen called me from Vancouver. "I can't talk long. I'm in the middle of shooting a TV movie." I asked him what it was about. "Oh, it's silly." (I found out later it was a terrorist thriller called "Time Bomb" starring David Arquette.)

"How's your paper on Socrates going?" I asked.

"Oh, that. No time anymore. I'm concentrating on my poetry now." Then he asked me about his submission. I told him that, unfortunately, Gill was going through an anti-poetry phase. But on the bright side, I said that I was starting up my own imprint and might be interested in seeing more of his work. If he had, say, a dozen poems, we might publish them as a little chapbook.

"Well, that sounds intriguing. Why don't we — " And here he paused to listen to a distant voice. "Look, they're calling me back to the set. Why don't you email my assistant at Rollercoaster. Have you got the email address?" I told him I did. "Great. We can talk — " He paused again. "Nope. Gotta go." We said our goodbyes and I promptly began to compose my request.

In my email I explained that Cantarabooks was a brand-new imprint that planned to bring out limited runs of poetry and literary fiction by emerging and under-exposed writers. We were a shoestring operation but could pay our authors a nominal advance plus royalties. Realistically, though, dealing as we were with poetry and literary fiction, none of us stood to make a fortune. And because I wanted time for Cantarabooks to sign and develop other authors, we probably wouldn't be able to bring out his chapbook until the following June.

When I reread my email I saw what a dismal proposition it would probably look like to a major Hollywood player like Stephen Gyllenhaal. I pressed the send button and never expected to hear from him again.

A week later a thick manuscript arrived.

Michael, of course, was eager to read it but decided to wait until the weekend to be able to focus his concentration on it. So the following Saturday I left him for the afternoon while I went out to do some chores. When I came back that evening we had dinner, and he then sat me down for a talk.

"There are about thirty-nine poems he sent us," he said. "A few are just okay, three-quarters are publishable just as they are, but there are a couple I want you to sit down and read with your entire focus. I haven't read anything as good as them in a long time. He has some trouble with line breaks, and some of his phrasing is just a little too ambiguous, but on the whole it's brilliant. I would really love to work with him."

"I don't even know if he really wants this," I said. "He could've just sent us these poems out of some sort of mid-life crisis or something."

"I don't know anything about that. You've talked to him, I haven't."

"He's from Hollywood," I protested. "His whole family's from Hollywood. He's got a production company and probably a big staff. And they've probably got a publicist working for them too. If we do this book I'm afraid his people will turn it into a freak show. You know, turn him into a ‘celebrity poet', like Jimmy Stewart on ‘The Tonight Show' reciting verses about his dog."

Michael looked at me square in the face and said the most serious thing he'd said to me in years. "You can't use who he is as an excuse either to publish or not publish his work. This is good literature and it deserves to be read. If we don't take this manuscript, we have no right to call ourselves literary publishers. But it's up to you."

The next day, Sunday, I took the manuscript into the bedroom and began to read it for the first time.

Two

The poems didn't hit me all at once. Some of them, like Michael said, were just passable. A couple were only aphorisms. A handful were short and very clever comments about the state of the world, the kind of poems that would easily find acceptance in the better literary quarterlies. A quick look at the cover letter confirmed that these particular poems had, in fact, been previously published.

But interspersed in the manuscript were other poems, still unpublished. Poems of confident style and immense feeling about his family, his father and mother, his son and daughter, his wife. The ones about his wife were the most emotionally complex, mixing as they did tenderness and fleeting joy with bitterness, loss, regret. They were poems dedicated to a stronger spouse by a weaker one, and they spoke to me at the deepest level.

So dear reader, here it is, the first irony in this story: I began to fall in love with Stephen Gyllenhaal through the poems he had written to his wife Naomi.

That afternoon I finished the manuscript and, handing it back to Michael, said something like, wow. He gave me a look of satisfaction at our shared discovery. "You see?"

"What I can't understand," I said, "is why these poems haven't been collected into a volume before. I mean, look at all his resources. Almost every article I've read about him and his family brings up the famous artists and writers they know, all those political progressives, all those high-culture people they entertain at their house. With all those connections, you'd think they could get a friend to publish his work."

Michael thought for a moment. "That doesn't mean he was ever encouraged. Or let's say encouraged on that path. Because it can happen, you know."

"I like to think if you have a talent, it's always going to be encouraged."

"You should know better than that," said Michael.

The next day I wrote a letter of acceptance and sent it snail-mail to Stephen. A week later, he called.

For the first time, there was hesitation in his voice. "Um…it seems I got this letter, allegedly from you, that says you want to publish my book."

I said, yes, that's right. "To tell the truth, we weren't prepared for such a large collection. But your poetry is so good, and there's so much of it, we're going to have to devote more time than we originally planned. But that's okay, I know we can do it."

"Well, it's an intriguing thought, and I'm extremely honored and flattered. But tell me, how did you get the idea to publish my book?"

"Um…you sent us the manuscript...?"

"Oh yeah, that's right!" he laughed nervously. That was the first of his nervous laughs and there would be many, many more to come. "So, you think you can publish it?" I reassured him yes, and repeated the information I'd sent him in our acceptance letter. "Okay, so what do I have to do now?" Nothing much more, I explained, except for him to read the contract I'd be sending him, sign it and return it to us. "Well, I'd like to have my lawyer take a look at it first."

"Yes, please!" This was a unique chance to see if our newly-composed Cantarabooks contract — I'd composed it myself — would stand up to the scrutiny of a high-powered entertainment attorney. I told Stephen I was eager for his lawyer's input.

"Anything else?" he asked.

This is where I explained the division of labor at Cantarabooks. "From here on end if you want to talk about your poetry, talk to Michael," I told him. "He's the senior editor. I know poetry, but Michael really knows poetry. And he's got a real feeling for your work. So you talk to him about literary stuff. Anything about publishing and promoting your book, talk to me."

"Well, that's great! Sounds like I've got a whole staff there working for me. So when's a good time to call?"

"Anytime," I said. "Anytime at all."

I didn't know I'd be opening the floodgates with that invitation.

* * *

From September until the end of November Stephen called us both numerous times during the day and night and sent us both numerous emails on matters both literary and promotional. He was filled with ideas of where to read his work. He knew people at the Getty Museum in LA. Of course he'd get to read there. And Columbia University. His wife had graduated from Columbia and they had friends on the faculty. Of course he'd get to read there too. Naomi, he assured me, was "100 percent" behind the publication of his book. And so were Jake and Maggie. 100 percent. He assured me of this several times.

The only thing he hadn't done yet was send us back his contract, which he insisted he'd never received.

After the second time I sent it and was told by him he hadn't gotten it I suggested, "Maybe it's still in the mail room of your office building. Your assistant ought to go down there and ask about it."

"No, that wouldn't work. My assistant is very organized," he assured me. Much later I learned that the address he used for Rollercoaster was only a mail drop, nothing more.

I offered to send the contract a third time and, early in December, he called to say he received it. "I agree to everything except one or two changes," he told me.

"Shoot," I said.

"I want final say on exact wording of the poems and final say on the title."

"Not a problem," I said. The usual clause in our contract specifies that our press, through our senior editor, meaning Michael, has final say on text and title of the books we acquire. From the very beginning, we both wanted Cantarabooks to be a showcase for our editorial talents. But Stephen's insistence on having the last word made me finally believe that he was serious about his work. Up to then I hadn't been entirely certain that the whole enterprise wasn't just a lark to him, just a way for him to be known as a "celebrity poet".

"And," he went on, "I think I've got a great title." He laid it on me. ‘Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood'. What do you think?" I said it was catchy. "You like it? I think it's very theatrical," he said.

Michael wasn't too thrilled by the title but he said he'd let it pass. I hadn't seen him as intellectually stimulated as during that autumn when he and Stephen exchanged ideas by phone and email. It made my growing irritation with Stephen's calls to me and outrageous declarations ("This book will make us all rich and famous!" he exclaimed more than once) almost worth it.

Meanwhile I was making a fool of myself around New York bragging about our new author. "He's good, he's really good," I told anyone who would listen at Small Press Center, where I was a member. "He's gotten a late start writing poetry but he's just now finding his voice. He doesn't come out of an MFA program, he writes from his own experiences, his own feelings. He writes poetry the way people don't write poetry anymore. It's just so… Well, you've got to read it."

People would ask his name and I'd tell them. "You mean that ‘Jarhead' guy?" they would say. And I'd have to correct them, "No, that's his son Jake. Stephen's been a Hollywood director for over twenty years. He's won awards." They'd ask me to name some of his movies, then shrug at most of the titles until I got to ‘Losing Isaiah'. At that name they'd brighten. "Oh yeah, Jessica Lange and Halle Berry. My mother loved that movie." It seemed that ‘Losing Isaiah' was the one and only artistic endeavor that got Stephen any respect from the general audience.

Then in December 2005 the media storm began.

It was heralded by the photo of a cute, smiling, brown-eyed young man on the cover of Parade magazine which bore the title, "Who Is Jake Gyllenhaal?" We usually didn't pick up the Sunday paper but the moment I saw Jake's face we bought a copy. The article about him was the main article of the magazine, and it was a long one. It talked about ‘"Jarhead", of course, but also about his new upcoming film, "Brokeback Mountain", that was sure to put him once and for all in the public eye

I devoured the article even though it was filled with items I'd read before on the internet — Jake had been taught to drive by Paul Newman; Jamie Lee Curtis was his godmother; he had a friendly artistic rivalry with his older sister. But what interested me most was the tiny photo insert on the last page of the article, under which was the title "Team Gyllenhaal" and identified the figures with arms linked around each other as Stephen, Naomi, Jake and Maggie. It was the first time I saw what Stephen looked like.

He was handsome, sandy-haired, tall — about an inch taller than Jake — wearing a tight white T-shirt that showed off his athletic build, and he was grinning a dreamy, boyish grin. How do I explain this? I was a little disappointed. From what I knew about Coppola and Spielberg and all those distant mysterious types called Hollywood directors, I'd held an image in my mind that Stephen, as well, was a short, dark, balding, bearded middle-aged man who wore a baseball cap backwards. When he and I talked on the phone, that's what I imagined he looked like, and it made me enjoy being a little in love with him.

But when I looked at that photo I realized I'd gotten it wrong. Here was not some camera-shy, introspective artist. Here was a worldly husband and father, a proud multi-talented member of a proud, close, talented and very photogenic family. The media was a mere plaything for Team Gyllenhaal.

And for the first time since I'd known Stephen, I was cowed. I couldn't have been more cowed if you had told me the Royal Family had deigned to confer their notice on my little literary press.

* * *

From the holidays through most of February 2006 we didn't hear from Stephen, but he told us to expect this as he would be busy working on various projects. Actually it was a nice break which Michael and I needed. We were still being employed by Gill to edit his literary annual and were working on the new issue, not to mention I was also trying to get his novel into publishable form, while Michael was finishing up his own book.

Michael and I aren't in the habit of watching the Oscars, but we did that year. We were rooting particularly for two young people that night, the daughter of a friend and fellow publisher, whose documentary "Murderball" had been nominated, and for Stephen's son Jake. "Brokeback Mountain" had been a controversial but phenomenal hit that winter and almost everyone predicted it would win not only win awards for the two leads but for the director, the screenplay, and for best picture. It was certainly far and away the most beautiful and artistically ambitious film in the running.

But you know what happened because it's history now. "Brokeback" lost the best picture award, and its defeat was experienced as a slap in the face by a good number of people.

A few days after the Oscar awards, we got another manuscript in the mail — seven more poems from Stephen.

Michael took them into the kitchen to read and when he came out again he was very grave. "I told you before that Stephen's a good poet. He's not. He is a great poet. I haven't encountered a poet with his vision in thirty years, not since — "

"Sylvia Plath?" I offered. "Anne Sexton?"

"Yes, Anne Sexton. Exactly." Michael understood why I had brought up her name — one of Stephen's poems from the earlier batch was called "Having Anne Sexton for Dinner".

"So it's confessional poetry. That's going to be a hard sell," I said. "Confessional poetry makes people uncomfortable. I think we should concentrate on his political poems. It would be a lot easier."

"I don't care about that," said Michael. "Listen. I see what he's doing, he's trying to put it all together. His past, his present. Everything's personal with him. Forget that political nonsense. That's nothing. It's the family. With Stephen, it's always going to come back to the family." He handed me one of the pages. "Read this."

I went over and sat in the corner chair and read it. It was a poem entitled "At 25".

When I was finished, I gave it back to Michael. He asked me how I liked it. I told him, "It's sort of awful because it's like reading someone's private letter. But it gives me an eerie feeling, like looking into a time machine. And it is beautiful. And it is sort of — all there."

"Yeah," said Michael quietly.

At this point, dear reader, I think I'm going to have to share with you one of Stephen's poems so you don't think Michael and I are complete lunatics.

At 25

a man now stand you
on roots no one can claim
as good as you
(pure born god-son
look at you anywhere
across the globe).

At birth you were blue
I witnessed you suck
that first breath in and turn
as white as snow on top
of Everest. Pure. Pure.
Goodness and Mercy.

Jumble of words my only
clue to give to you
for your mountain view

to burn the libraries
and burn us too
(all that's come
before you.)

Your (my side) grandfather's
head handed him
on a silver Salome platter (he knew
more than he could hold on to)
and your great grandfather
stumbled and I shamble
and out of the phoenix ash
of my/your ancestral men you flew
out of the John Baptist ash
you flew beyond the pebbles
in the Jordan where we, the men
before you wash our sad, sad feet

but not for naught — the truth
when sung soothes far beyond
all gold.

I remember your grandfather
(not sober) singing, weeping
in my high gliding stone dead
gothic church —

"A voice of one, crying
in the wilderness, prepare ye
the way of the Lord."

I remember holding you, screaming
with good rage in a Sea Ranch night.
Taking you outside under the moon
and the giant pines — screaming, screaming.
Holding you. I didn't know what else to do.
Kicking. Screaming with good rage
till you slowly trembled yourself into rest.

Forgive us, Lord, we know
not what we do.

Good rage. Burn us to the ground.
Good rage. So little good seems
to have come of John the Baptist
and what followed. Your grandfather
loved John the Baptist. Wept and sung
his words and went too easily
into their good night
which I won't do.

All these words and others too
are here for you, may they be true.

I hope you agree that this is a beautiful poem. But you see, it's also about Jake Gyllenhaal, and this was always going to be part of our problem.

From the beginning of our author-publisher relationship Stephen had blithely assured me that his family and friends were "100 percent" behind his book. The friends he rattled off were an impressive and varied lot: Alan Dershowitz — The Danson-Steenbergens — The Woodward-Newmans — William Styron — Michael Ondaatje — Graham Swift — Hugh Ogden.

Now, understand this. I'm a publisher. This is what that list of famous people above meant to me: Seven possible unit sales.

And wait a second. Who the hell was Hugh Ogden?

"My mentor, Hugh Ogden. He's an English professor and a poet," Stephen told me over the phone early in March. I had to confess that I hadn't heard of him. "We have to bring Hugh on board," he continued. "He helped me a lot when I was at college. He's excited to hear about the book." When I asked Stephen what he meant by bringing him "on board", he suggested that Ogden write the Introduction.

An old poet introducing a younger, emerging one in the younger one's first collection — that would be dignified and very traditional. I approved of this plan.

But Stephen for some reason could not stop pitching. "I can get you Graham Swift. I can get you Michael Ondaatje. Did you ever see ‘The English Patient'?" I told him I'd only read the book. (Eh). "Ondaatje's a good friend. He'll do it. And Graham owes me for ‘Waterland'." Graham Swift is the Booker Prize winner who wrote the novel "Waterland" (good novel) — Stephen directed the film version which starred Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke.

"Well, who do you want to write the introduction?" I asked.

"All of them!" he exclaimed.

We finally settled on Hugh Ogden to write the Foreword, while either Ondaatje or Swift would write the Introduction. In a spirit of un-cooperation, however, both refused. (It was Swift's refusal that prompted Stephen to blurt out, "Fuck him!" to me over the phone.)

In the end, actress and Gyllenhaal family friend Jamie Lee Curtis wrote the Introduction. She did it at Stephen's personal last-minute request, writing it in a few minutes and delivering it to me by email via Stephen the next morning. It's a generous, intelligent piece of writing and it sounds just like her. I'm still so glad to have it in the book.

If you look at the front matter of "Claptrap" you'll notice there's an Editors' Preface as well. That, too, was a last-minute job. Thirty-six hours before we were to send the "Claptrap" file to our printers in Tennessee, Ogden's Foreword still hadn't been turned in, and we had to have it, or something similar. Jamie Lee's Introduction was wonderful but it was from a "celebrity". We had to have some words at the beginning of Stephen's book to establish it as a literary work.

An introduction from a genuine poet and professor of English would be best, as it would give the book the weight of seriousness. The editors' endorsement would be second-best. But I wrote it anyway because it looked like we were going to need it in place of Ogden. Of course almost the minute I was finished Michael got an email from Stephen — Ogden's copy. It was atrocious stuff, vague, rambling and incoherent, and Michael spent a couple of hours that night editing it until it was readable. We put Ogden's Foreword in the book so that he could remain, in Stephen's words, "on board with the project". But we decided to sandwich our Editors' Preface in between it and Jamie Lee's Introduction, just for good measure.

So that's how we ended up with a Foreword, Preface and Introduction to this slim little volume of poetry. I like to think that it adds to the off-kilter appeal of ‘Claptrap'.

* * *

As I said, from the beginning of our relationship Stephen had assured me that his "amazing" (his word) wife and kids were ready to help out with promoting his book. I wasn't so sure about the kids but he couldn't stop talking about them — announcing to me how he planned to read "Claptrap" in a national reading tour along with Jake and Maggie, for example. It would have been sublime, though with their movie-star schedules I strongly doubted that this would happen.

Still, as the mechanical aspects of getting "Claptrap" published, formatting its interior, creating the cover and so on, were taking up most of my time, I could see I was going to need help with the promotional aspects. I took it for granted that his amazing and accomplished wife (and fellow writer, I might add) would help out on that score, at the very least throw him a book launch party. In fact I began to get a little nervous that at some point she'd somehow try to take over the whole project.

But let's briefly cut away to a "Little Did I Realize Then" moment from my past. I was sixteen years old and a freshman in the music program at the University of Minnesota, a voice major with a pretty good coloratura. But the time being the early 70s, I preferred to hang out with my friends and smoke weed, and one thing we liked to do when we smoked weed was watch "The Electric Company". Remember "The Electric Company"? It was "Sesame Street" for slightly older children and had among its permanent cast Rita Moreno, Morgan Freeman, Paul Dooley, and Skip Hinnant. Hinnant was my favorite. He was in two recurring sketches, one a spoof of hard-boiled detective serials called "Fargo North, Decoder" the other a spoof of old-fashioned soap operas called "Love of Chair". "Love of Chair" I remember most vividly, it's the sketch that always ended that day's episode. The premise was simple: A boy, played by Hinnant, sat rocking in a rocking chair, pondering, and we were invited to watch him ponder. "His socks were missing," the narrator would intone. "Did he wash them? Did he wash them after he ate his peanut butter sandwich? Or before?" It would go on in this manner until the narrator ended by posing the traditional cliffhanger "questions" that used to conclude typical soaps: "Will the boy ever find his socks?" Sting. "Will the socks be brown, or blue?" Sting. "Should he have had grape jelly with his peanut butter sandwich?" Sting. "And —" Sting sting stinnnng — "What about Naomi?"

It was the "What about Naomi?" part we'd all say aloud before collapsing in a heap of brainless laughter. It was just a funny non sequitur line. Give us a break, we were stoned.

As I said, Little Did I Realize Then that Naomi of "The Electric Company" would turn out to be — you guessed it, Naomi Foner, who was at the time the show's producer.

Now to THE PHONE CALL.

The exchange of words that completely altered my plans and sent my life on this weird and wacky journey of discovery occurred on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 at about 12:30 pm New York time, nine-thirty on the Coast. An hour earlier, Stephen had called and failed to reach me (I'd stayed up late and was still in bed when Michael left for work), but he had left a message for me to call him back.

I supposed that he was calling to thank me for the announcement cards I'd sent him a few days earlier for his own mailing list of friends and colleagues. These were cards I'd gotten printed up for a few dollars that announced the title of the book and its release date, with a few words of copy I'd written: "Only Stephen Gyllenhaal can tell it best, what it's like to be citizen, artist, husband — and Jake and Maggie's dad — in the City of Illusions." I don't remember the exact wording but it was something like that. Originally I hadn't wanted to put in the reference to Jake and Maggie because I knew what Stephen knew — that at the moment his greatest claim to fame was that he was Jake and Maggie's dad. I wanted to try to separate him as a poet as much from that narrow identity as much as possible.

But once when I asked him if he minded being known as the father of famous children, he said he was proud of his son and daughter, proud to be known as their father. To tell you the truth, he was always talking about his kids. Given the opportunity he would tell the funniest stories about his bemused parenthood that made me smile in sympathy.

And, of course, there were several poems about them in the book.

"Bring them in," he told me. "They're ready to help out."

I reassured him if I put that phrase in it would be for irony's sake — we'd quickly turn the whole idea that he was "just" Jake and Maggie's dad on its ear. So off it had gone, the announcement card, to the printers.

I dressed, put the sofa bed up, got some coffee and then pressed the callback button. After a couple of rings, a woman answered. I'd never heard her before but by the imperiousness of her voice I could tell it was Naomi.

"Ms. Foner?" I asked, ultra-politely. "This is Cantara from Cantarabooks."

A beat. Then, shocked, she asked, "How did you GET this number?"

Whoa. As obsequiously and apologetically as I could muster, I explained that Stephen had just called me from that number and I'd just pressed callback.

"This is our HOME!" she wailed. Once again, I apologized.

"Don't EVER call here again!" she continued, quite upset. I assured her I wouldn't, and she hung up.

I sat on the sofa bed for nearly an hour, not moving, utterly deflated, feeling like I'd been made a fool of. I even began to doubt my sanity. Did we really intend to publish a book? Did Stephen Gyllenhaal — famous husband of famous wife and famous father of famous children — really send us his poems to publish? Or was I just living in some pathetic fantasy world populated by the rich and celebrated to make myself feel important?

About two that afternoon Stephen called again, but this time I was around to answer the phone. "I tried to reach you this morning," he told me mournfully. "Look, something's come up. We, uh, we've just had a family conclave" — I swear he used the word conclave — "and we've come to a decision. We want you to remove all your references everywhere to Jake and Maggie."

A stony silence on my part, then, "O-kay..."

He pressed on. "The thing is, you don't realize what it's like for us here. It's insane! The kids can't go anywhere without being mobbed. It's like nothing we've ever seen before. Our friends, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, tell us it's like nothing they've ever seen before."

"It's cell phone cameras," I said. "It's the internet."

"No, it's not that," countered Stephen. "People are insane. When you've got people in this administration who can start an illegal war and rob the country of billions of dollars, you can see that everyone's gone insane. You know, right after the Oscars these people would come up to me and say things like, ‘Well, you've got it made now. Just put Jake in a movie and you can have any deal you want.' But you know what?" he paused, then intoned darkly and intensely, "I would rather starve in the streets than take that money! That's not my money. That's my children's money, and their children's children after them." He sighed and seemed to calm down. "So, the family just took a vote. I think I said something about that…?"

"I think so."

"We made a decision never to be photographed together in public ever again. The kids have got to be protected, you know."

Well, I did know two things. I knew that the "kids" were 25 and 28 years old, and that Maggie at the moment was in New York, as there was a paparazzo picture in one of the gossip websites that morning of her walking through Soho. I wondered if she had faxed her vote.

There was absolutely no need to, but I apologized to Stephen for the misunderstanding and assured him that it wouldn't happen again. He seemed to soften at this.

"Look, I'm going to be in New York in two weeks," he said. "Why don't we go out to dinner or something and strategize? I'm sure we can figure out other ways to get ‘Claptrap' out there." I told him to call when he got in and we'd set a time and place. "All right, my darling," he told me. "See you in two weeks."

That night after dinner I told Michael all about the phone calls as we were sitting watching TV. He looked thoughtful puffing on his cigarette, like Sherlock Holmes. Then he said, "Just as I suspected."

"What? What did you suspect?" He only repeated, "Just as I suspected," which only exasperated me more. I swatted him across the knee and told him to stop it.

He took another tack. "So. You're going to see your boyfriend in two weeks."

"He's not my boyfriend. He's a pain in the kiester. And you're coming too. In fact I think he'd rather see you than me."

"Ha!"

"You're his editor. You're giving him something he's never had before, a real dialogue about literature and writing."

Michael shrugged. "I just guide the way for him." He stubbed out his cigarette. "But that doesn't answer the question. Now that Naomi and the kids are out of the picture, what are you going to do about Stephen's book?"

"I haven't got a clue," I said.