It is as a great songwriter that Kris Kristofferson will be best remembered but for me his death recalled the time his lawyers attempted to stop a biography of him that I had commissioned for Omnibus Press.
It was 2008. Stephen Miller had already written a very good Johnny Cash book for Omnibus which I commissioned about a year before Cash died in 2003. The book came out shortly afterwards, which led to accusations that it was written hurriedly to capitalise on this. The accusers clearly had no grasp of the realities of the time it takes to write and publish 150,000+ word book. Stephen, a retired solicitor, would also write a well-received biography of Dolly Parton and a book about the Million Dollar Quartet – Elvis, Jerry Lee, Cash and Carl Perkins.
But back to Kris Kristofferson. Stephen Miller approached me with the proposal and I went for it. When he delivered his book, our sales department announced its publication date on Amazon, standard practice these days, where it was seen by Kristofferson’s lawyers who lost no time in writing to us demanding that we abandon the book for fear of reprisals. Their letter included a harsh warning about the perils of libelling their client. We decided to ignore them but at the same time I was advised by our legal department that our book should be read for libel and any breaches of copyright.
It’s no secret that Kris Kristofferson did not live a saintly life. Like many in his line of work he was promiscuous, took drugs and liked a drink. This sort of behaviour was detailed in the book that Stephen Miller delivered but our libel lawyers, who always erred on the side of caution, advised us to remove all references to Kristofferson’s wayward tendencies. I argued that they were well known, that Kristofferson had spoken candidly about these aspects of his life in interviews and that to ignore them was to misrepresent the man. I even found a TV interview on YouTube in which Kristofferson spoke freely about his had habits. In the end we came to some sort of compromise and the references to his womanising, drug use and boozing were watered down.
The book, titled The Wild American, came out. We heard nothing from Kristofferson’s lawyers. About six months later it was announced that Kristofferson was writing his own book about his life and would not shy away from writing about personal issues that he later came to regret, the inference being his torrid love life, drugs and the bottle. “Ho hum,” I thought. “Looks like another ‘My Drug Hell’.” The real reason why his lawyers threatened me, of course, was because our book would compete with Kristofferson’s own, and they wanted a clear field, or – at the very least – his own book to to be published before ours.
I don’t even know now whether or not Kristofferson’s own book was ever published. I can’t find it on Amazon, which suggests it never happened or has gone out of print. But not long after we learned about it I recall asking our lawyer a hypothetical question: “If we had published our book as it stood, without watering down the material about his womanising, drugs and alcohol, and Kristofferson’s lawyers has sued us for libel and won – and then he’d published his own book including all the same sordid details, what wold have happened?”
Our lawyer told me that if he – Kristofferson – had been awarded damages he’d have had to give whatever the sum was back to us, plus costs.
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not Kris Kristofferson even knew about what was going on behind the scenes with regard to our book. I suspect he didn’t and that his lawyers were operating on behalf of Kristofferson’s advisors without his knowledge. Still, it was interesting to learn that celebrities who try to stop publishers from putting out ‘unauthorised’ books by threatening libel proceedings over hedonistic behaviour can come a cropper when they write their own memoirs that sensationally admit their own debauched tendencies.
None of which takes away from the fact that Kris Kristofferson, the composer of ‘Me And Bobby McGee’, ‘For The Good Times’, ‘Help Me Make It Through The night’ and many more, was a great songwriter.
