Source: The Washington Post, 7 May 1993, pA01

"If I couldn't create," said horror novelist Virginia C. Andrews in 1981, "I think I might want to die."

The opposite happened. The best-selling Virginia Beach author died in 1986 but has kept right on writing. Darkest Hour will be released next month, her 16th overall and the ninth book to be issued since she succumbed to breast cancer. She's been more prolific dead than alive.

Andrews, who published under the gender-neutral initials "V.C.," is not communicating from the grave. The books now being issued under her name were written by another horror writer, Andrew Neiderman. He used a computer in his effort to capture Andrews's style, carefully analyzing her plots, characters and vocabulary.

Neiderman's mimicking has been remarkably successful, as if Andrews herself were helping him. "Don't make this sound weird," he said, "but sometimes I do feel possessed."

His first ghost-written books were presented by Simon and Schuster as the work of Andrews herself. It wasn't until the fifth book that a prefatory note was added, saying that a "carefully selected writer" had been chosen to "organize and complete Virginia's stories." This writer, who was not named, would also be "creating additional novels inspired by her wonderful storytelling genius." Yet the books continued to appear under the Andrews name.

The ghost has done his work so perfectly, and his role has been so well hidden, that everyone has profited handsomely. The Andrews family, Simon and Schuster, Neiderman, the agent who handled both Neiderman and Andrews: They've all made pots of money by allowing it to appear that Andrews was either still scribbling away or, if you knew she was dead, had left trunks of manuscripts behind.

It wasn't quite like that, as a lawsuit filed in Norfolk reveals.

Brought by the Andrews estate to challenge a highly unusual tax assessment, the suit grew out of a chance encounter in a bookstore four years ago. At that time, the IRS auditor in charge of Andrews's estate came across a selection of the writer's work and wondered why one of the titles was unfamiliar.

The auditor, Janna Levinstein, investigated. She ultimately decided that the ghost-written novels were planned by the publisher, agent and estate executors at the time of Andrews's death, and that consequently the writer's name was a taxable asset of the estate, to the tune of $1,244,910.84.

Usually, a writer's name is not considered a piece of property that can be taxed upon her death. But Levinstein, in what the judge said has produced "maybe a new genre of case," based the value of Andrews's name on the estate's ability to stick the label "By V.C. Andrews" on ghost-written manuscripts and watch them sell millions of copies.

The estate says it merely got extremely lucky. None of the success of the nine post-death books could have been foreseen at the time of death, it argues, so the value of the name (and the corresponding tax) should be at most a tenth of what the government claims. It is suing in U.S. District Court in Norfolk for a refund of nearly $1 million. A decision is due shortly.

Even Andrews, who said her dreams could predict the future, didn't anticipate this bizarre sequence of events. A painter turned novelist, she believed she had been reincarnated, boasted she had written her first novel in one night, and said right before her death at age 63 that she was thinking of giving up the horror fiction that made her a millionaire. But, she said, her publisher was discouraging her from anything but her special brand of horror.

"I am supposed to stay in this niche, whatever it is, because there is so much money in it," she said in an interview with Washington writer Douglas Winter that proved to be her last. "I mean, I have tapped a gold mine and they don't want to let go of it."

This became doubly true after her death.

It All Started With Flowers

Virginia C. Andrews had a brief but meteoric career. She received a $7,500 advance for Flowers in the Attic, her first novel. Published in 1979, the book quickly became a sensation, spending 14 weeks on the paperback bestseller list. Like all her subsequent books -- both the ones she wrote and those that merely have her name on the cover -- it is still in print and selling impressively. As of March 1992, royalty payments for Flowers alone exceeded $1.4 million.

Designed for sale in supermarkets and chain bookstores rather than upscale literary emporiums, Andrews's modern-day Gothic romances rarely were reviewed. Instead, their primary audience of teenage girls and young women discovered them by word of mouth, reveling in Andrews's nightmarish plots of children in jeopardy. Including the ghost-written titles, 50 million copies of her books are in print.

Flowers in the Attic is about the beautiful blond Dollanganger children, who are locked away in an attic by their mother. As you might guess, this rather warps the kids. For instance, Cathy marries her brother after she gets out of the attic and later gets locked in a cellar by her son.

The author's own life, she maintained in her rare interviews, was nothing like that. Born in Portsmouth, Va., the daughter of a tool-and-die maker, Andrews said she was a child prodigy in art but otherwise a happy, adjusted, ordinary kid until she fell down the stairs in her late teens. One thing led to another: Damage to her hip resulted in bone spurs, which in turn caused arthritis. That, plus some complications from a botched operation, meant she was forced to rely on a wheelchair.

Her traumatizing disability, she told Douglas Winter, meant she was not in control anymore. "You are made helpless by circumstances that you don't have any say about. ... I always felt that if I had done some terrible thing, this would be a punishment; but I hadn't done anything yet."

The books reflected this helplessness, describing the travails of innocent children against wicked, or at least mysterious, adults. They touched a chord, and the writer's popularity escalated.

So did the minimum amount of money she was guaranteed for each book. For her second novel, Petals on the Wind, the figure was $35,000; for If There Be Thorns, $75,000. By the time a contract was drawn up for the sixth and seventh novels, the advances were $1.5 million each.

Then, on Dec. 19, 1986, she died. That same day, Jack Romanos, then head of Simon and Schuster's mass market division, held a meeting. "We were sitting around and it occurred to me that it was possible if we could find a writer ... who could mimic Virginia's style, that we might be able to continue to publish," Romanos testified in the court case in January.

Anita Diamant, Andrews's agent, independently had the same idea. It helped, Diamant said, that "she never was a celebrity in this country, which made it easier for people to forget she was dead. It would be very difficult to do this with Danielle Steel."

It is not uncommon for dead authors' characters to continue their exploits in later books. Several James Bond books have appeared since Ian Fleming died, but they carry the byline of the writer John Gardner. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe lives on in Robert Goldsborough's prose, but it's Goldsborough who gets star billing. In Andrews's case, however, Neiderman's name is never mentioned.

Four days after Andrews's death, a memo was prepared for Simon and Schuster's staff stating that "V.C. was writing right up until the time of her death and there are a number of novels remaining to be published, including the prequel to Flowers in the Attic, which Pocket Books will release in the late fall of 1987."

In fact, Andrews had only written about 100 pages of a prequel. There were some other manuscripts as well, but they had already been rejected by Simon and Schuster and all remain unpublished, according to Romanos's trial testimony.

What everyone did have were hopes. Romanos testified at trial that Ann Patty, the editor who discovered Andrews and worked very closely with her, took a shot at ghost-writing a novel. When she proved unequal to the task, Diamant brought in one of her clients, Andrew Neiderman. Now 52, Neiderman spent more than two decades teaching high school in Upstate New York. He had written some horror novels himself, although much less successfully than Andrews.

Neiderman took his work seriously. "I had to research every single book that V.C. Andrews had written," he said in his deposition, "and I had to go through and study their syntax, vocabulary, phraseology, the concepts. ... In other words I had to become someone else in the writing process. And that's something."

It took a lot more effort than merely writing books under his own name, he pointed out. Of course, he explained, he got paid a lot more too -- more than five times his usual advance of $50,000 just for the first ghost-written book.

That was Garden of Shadows, the last book in the Dollanganger series. It appeared in the fall of 1987, just as Simon and Schuster had said. It also sold just as well as any of the books Andrews herself had written, which ensured the project would continue. As Romanos testified: "It was our intention to carry the publishing project out for as long as we could."

Neiderman soon began to appreciate his unique value. Papers filed by the government show his increasing rewards. For his first ghost-written book, Simon and Schuster paid the estate $1.5 million in advances. Neiderman got $250,000 of this.

With his second book, Neiderman demanded a raise, and got $400,000. For the third, fourth and fifth ghost-written books, the estate got a total of $4.5 million, for which Neiderman received $1.75 million. By comparison, he said in his deposition, the biggest advance he has ever received for a book published under his own name has been $70,000.

Still, he didn't think the estate was paying him enough. After all, his fifth ghost-written book, Dawn, didn't even use any characters created by V.C. Andrews. He was completely on his own now, writing a new series about a girl who was told she got her name because she was born at the break of day. "That was the first of a thousand lies Momma and Daddy would tell me," Dawn says, which means we're still in familiar "children in jeopardy" territory.

"I felt my value had grown considerably," the ghostwriter said in his deposition. "All the feedback I was getting was that the books I had been writing were selling better than the previous books. ... So I felt it was only fair."

The executors of the Andrews estate didn't agree. In a 1991 letter introduced by the government at the trial, executor Charles Payne chastised Neiderman for being greedy. Under the latest deal, Payne pointed out, Neiderman would get one-third of all advances and royalties received by the estate. The better the books did, the better he would do.

Neiderman, however, wanted to increase his compensation yet again. Payne refused. "I do not find any legal, moral or economic justification" for doing so, he wrote -- adding that if he did reopen the contract, he would want to discuss cutting the writer's percentage. (Neiderman says his compensation has now been once again improved.)

For a time, matters became acrimonious. Adding to the stress was the fact that it had now become public that the Andrews books were at least partially ghosted. Dawn was the first book to carry the note, opposite the copyright page, referring to "a carefully selected writer" who would be "creating additional novels."

In his deposition, Neiderman said, "In the beginning, I saw no unfinished manuscripts and I saw no other writing but the published writing." Later, he said, "I haven't used any of the stories" that Andrews left behind, although "I have extracted occasionally phraseology and vocabulary just to maintain what I call the V.C. Andrews feel."

In the interview he said that the notion Andrews had a hand in the posthumous books was mainly a poetic, spirtual one.

"It wouldn't be fair for the next book, Darkest Hour, to say 'By Andrew Neiderman,' " he said. "I'm writing it, but it's also by V.C. Andrews. It really is. ... It's as if there's a second presence, like a ghost, when I write her books. I guess I'm literally a ghostwriter."

Putting a Value on a Name

The judge's ruling in Estate of Virginia C. Andrews v. United States of America is expected within the next few months. It is likely to establish another precedent in a relatively uncharted area of the law called "the right of publicity."

Previously, many of these cases revolved around the right of such celebrities as Johnny Carson and Vanna White, as well as the estate of Elvis Presley, to stop entrepreneurs from using either their names or likenesses without permission. Carson's suit, for instance, was against a firm called Here's Johnny Portable Toilets Inc.

Courts have generally supported the celebrity in these cases. Which brings up the question: If a name is indeed an asset worth protecting when you're alive, might not some of that value linger after death?

Philip Walsh Moore of Seligman Valuations testified at the trial that he had appraised the name of fashion designer Perry Ellis after his death at "several million dollars." After performing a complex set of valuations based upon what a willing buyer would have paid for the rights to Andrews's name upon her death, Moore said it was worth at most $140,000.

In court papers, the estate executor and attorney don't even go that far, saying "any reputable, established publisher would have paid very little, if anything, to purchase the naked right" to use Andrews's name upon her death. The estate wants its $649,201.77 in taxes back, plus the quarter-million-plus dollars it had to pay in interest.

"I haven't heard of any case like this, but I think there would be a lot of celebrities who would have a marketable name at the date of death," said Ron Ross, professor of estate taxation at Georgetown University School of Business. "This does establish a new area that might be more closely looked at by the government for the purpose of raising revenue."

The only definite assumption in the Andrews case is that the name has indeed proved to be a financial bonanza. Diamant noted that a contract has just been signed for another three books -- No. 17, No. 18 and No. 19.

"As long as there's a market for a V.C. Andrews book, Andrew Neiderman will continue writing them," the agent said. "The readers don't care."

Full text © The Washington Post, 7 May 1993