They're just like any other first-time authors: anxious to see how their new book is received, thrilled at the prospect of people picking up their Washington mystery and reading it. "It's amazing to see people on airplanes carrying our book," one of them says in the hotel room, and there is wonder in her voice.
Typical rookie writers, Marilyn Quayle and her sister Nancy Northcott are -- except for those two grim-looking Secret Service agents with walkie-talkies who are standing in the hall.
For when your name is Marilyn Quayle, and your husband is the vice president of the United States, you do not enter the publishing world quietly. When you meet the press to discuss "Embrace the Serpent," the thriller that you co-wrote with an older sister, there are unsmiling guys in dark suits with American flag pins on their lapels who stand guard outside. Visitors are screened with chilling precision -- will they know if I ever wrote a rubber check? -- before being admitted into the plush suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.
This is not exactly like arguing 20th century American fiction with Norman Mailer over a beer and a corned beef sandwich at an East Side deli.
What it is, though, is intriguing. There's something quite irresistible about the notion that the person married to the No. 2 politician in the United States -- Mrs. Heartbeat-Away, if you will -- has co-written a political thriller in which Fidel Castro dies on the first page.
And there's a lot more: Cuba is thrown into turmoil, as long-suffering anti-Castro rebels vie for power with Russian-backed Cuban officials; Russia, itself in disarray, tries to enlarge a toehold in Cuba into a stranglehold.
Meanwhile, a weak U.S. president and gullible senators -- Democrats, of course -- observe all this without having a clue of what to do ("This Democratic President, as was true of the Democratic Congress, had little understanding of either defense security"). The liberal press likewise is mushy-minded and uncomprehending. But a brave black senator from Georgia, who just happens to be conservative and Republican, works with the anti-Castro rebels to forestall certain political disaster in Cuba.
As for the motivation for writing "Embrace the Serpent," Ms. Quayle talks not of literary pretensions, but of an aspiration that sounds more like one drawn from the Andy Rooney/Judy Garland movies -- "Hey, kids, let's put on a show."
"We've read a lot over the years, and we'd always say to each other, 'We can do this,' " says Ms. Quayle, dressed in a spectacularly bright green dress that would accommodate any St. Patrick's Day obligations for years to come. "We always shared books back and forth, and about 10 years ago we said, 'We ought to sit down and write a book together.' So right after the [presidential] inauguration [in January 1989], Nancy said, 'It's now or never.'
Writing the book took some chutzpah. Not only is Ms. Quayle's husband in a highly sensitive position, but she had never written fiction before -- "just law briefs and a lot of speeches." And whether "Embrace the Serpent" will make Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy look for other work is questionable, although Mr. Clancy, a fellow Republican, wrote a very nice blurb ("Superb pacing. Snappy writing. One hell of a good thriller").
Crown Publishers thinks enough of the book to give it a respectable first printing of 75,000, and now Ms. Quayle and Nancy Northcott, who at 47 is five years older than her more famous sister, are beginning a 10-city publicity tour.
They'll be doing the biggies, of course -- the "Today" show (WMAR Channel 2) tomorrow morning, the "Morning Show" on CBS (WBAL Channel 11) and the "Larry King Show" on CNN Friday -- but also will be giving newspaper interviews and appearing at book signings. It's a way to show that "Embrace the Serpent" is not a dilatory exercise -- that, as Ms. Northcott says, "This is a profession for us at this point. We view this as something we'd like to continue doing."
Indeed, says Ms. Quayle, sitting with her sister on a love seat in their hotel suite, their agent specified to all publishers who read the manuscript that "they could not exploit me. They had to understand that this was a serious effort, and they had to approach the book as if I were a regular author. Crown was amenable to that, and our relationship has been totally professional and away from political wifedom."
They are already working on a sequel to "Embrace the Serpent," although Ms. Quayle, alluding to the upcoming presidential campaign, says dryly, "I'll be pretty busy in the next several months."
(Richard Marek, Crown's editor in chief, concurs: "Both she and Nancy are dead serious about this as a career." And though Ms. Quayle's name is prominently displayed at the top of the book, her biographical information on the dust jacket reads, with slight preciousness, "Marilyn T. Quayle lives in the Vice-President's House in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three children.")
As they talk about the book, Ms. Quayle and Ms. Northcott indeed look and sound just like sisters. They are well coiffed and well dressed. Their speech, in accent and inflection, is amazingly similar; it reflects their Indianapolis roots -- pure, flat Midwest tones -- although Ms. Quayle has lived in Washington for many years and her sister in Tullahoma, Tenn. They interrupt each other's sentences frequently with embellishments and kidding; one will look knowingly at the other before answering a question.
Ms. Quayle is known as potentially a tough interview; on this morning, she is often chatty and forthcoming, unless the topic moves to an area that might be sensitive. What about the shots the book takes at Democrats, she is asked. Will "Embrace the Serpent" be seen as a partisan document?
She eyes her questioner coolly. "Did they take Robert Ludlum as partisan?" she asks.
But Robert Ludlum is not married to the vice president of the United States, it's pointed out.
She pauses a moment, then answers with a quick laugh, "This is real life. This is the way it is."
They wrote the book over a two-year period, sometimes together when Ms. Northcott would visit her sister for a week at a time, but more often hundreds of miles apart. Thanks to computers, they would work on the book independently, sending by modem to the other what had been written. "It took us a while to get our styles together, to figure out the logistics and how to work together," says Ms. Northcott, an English major and former high school English teacher.
When the book was finished, Ms. Quayle says, "We had people in Washington who I trust -- who are also readers and know the book business and know Washington, too -- and essentially review it for us and say whether or not it was good enough to stand on its own without my name on it. They read it and gave it incredible encouragement."
Some publishers did pass on the manuscript, though Ms. Quayle would not say who they were: "I don't think it's fair to say. We had some political rejections, actually, which was something I expected."
That was no surprise as well to their agent, Bob Barnett, who, in thechummy circle of Washington politics, had represented such disparate types as Bob Woodward, Robert Bork, George Will, Geraldine Ferraro and Kitty Dukakis. "I often encountered this from publishers: 'What qualifies them to write a book like this?' " he says. "My response is always 'Read it, and make your own judgment.' "
Mr. Marek, the editor at Crown, did just that. "I liked the pace, most of all," says Mr. Marek, who would not disclose the advance the authors were paid. "And it had a shape that was very appealing. There were some plot points that needed elucidation, but the book did what it does now. Right from my first reading, I thought it was astonishing."
But not really true-to-life, the authors caution. It's to be expected that some readers will devour "Embrace the Serpent" to discern if any characters are modeled on real Washington characters, but Ms. Northcott says, "Interestingly enough, a lot of characters were drawn from people we knew in Indianapolis."
Ms. Quayle adds with a slight smile, "We didn't want anybody to be able to say, 'This is so-and-so.' But with Washington being the way it is, people are trying to figure them out. It's unbelievable the names people have come up with."