KEY POINTS:
Former "magazine queen" Wendyl Nissen is enormously grateful that New Zealand lost the World Cup Rugby. The All Blacks' loss means the bitch is back - Nissen in full flight in her once-cancelled, tell-all book, Bitch and Famous.
A hurried redesign and reprint to catch the Christmas market was made possible by a gap in booked print schedules left by one of the triumphant rugby books cancelled after the World Cup loss.
Bitch and Famous, due out tomorrow, was pulled in September in a blaze of publicity after publisher HarperCollins had second thoughts about some of its contents. The book had already been printed and invitations sent out to a lavish launch party.
Sydney-based publishing director Shona Martyn flew to Auckland with a lawyer to ask Nissen to make a series of changes, one of which involved a reference to Auckland writer and producer Colin Hogg. No way, Nissen said, and asked for the rights to the manuscript back.
Wounded by what she describes as a "devastating" experience, Nissen stuck the unpublished book in a drawer and went on holiday in the family caravan to lick her wounds. No sooner was she back when rival publisher Penguin came knocking on her door - with flowers.
As a result, Bitch and Famous has been reprinted - in a bigger, and slightly more expensive, format. And Hogg is furious. He told the Herald on Sunday that as long as "a certain line comes out" Nissen would not have "any trouble". The line refers to Nissen and Hogg's involvement in a Greenstone-produced TV panel-advice show, How's Life. Nissen was hired as the show's producer and Colin Hogg, with people like Marcus Lush, Christine Rankin, Kerre Woodham and Jude Dobson, were the "talent".
Told the offending line had survived the Penguin version, Hogg said: "Well that's ridiculous because I'll probably take her to court, and with Greenstone. I mean, they are livid too."
Hogg said he didn't care about the "personal stuff" scattered throughout the book. "It was just a single professional thing that she wrote that is a lie and a provable lie."
Hogg said he and Greenstone wrote to HarperCollins asking either for a correction or for the line to be removed. HarperCollins had told him, "Tough titty, we're still publishing", but the Sydney office became involved. "Two weeks later they pulled the book."
With Bitch and Famous due out tomorrow, Hogg said he thought Nissen was "in for a really interesting learning curve here, legally speaking, and I'm not talking about myself. I don't want to get into accusations but I just can't have something like that which is a provable untruth."
Nissen said Penguin's lawyers went through the manuscript again and suggested some changes - "nothing that was attracting legal problems ... more of a tidying up". She was happy to make those changes.
Nissen said she took out none of the references to Colin Hogg. "So the sentence in question that started the whole thing is still in there, and happily so because it's true."
Nissen said she was amazed that Louise Nicholas' book, My Story, which came out the same week her original book was due to be published, survived when hers didn't.
"Hers is an incredibly serious, hard-hitting book that every New Zealander I think should read and seriously points the finger at quite a few people, yet mine was the one that wasn't published. I find that just incredible. Maybe that's an indication of what we care about in society and maybe there's more celebrities and non celebrities out there more worried about their reputation than people in government and police."
- Chequebook journalism - the tactics and big bucks behind the celebrity stories. Insight, P27-29
