Agent Provocateur
This Boston literary powerhouse has a new book coming later this year. Could Letter From Kabul be her most important project yet?
Helen Rees has a great view. From her 26th-floor waterfront condo, she sees the Zakim Bunker Hill bridge, Old North Church, and Boston Harbor. "Someone visiting here said to me, 'Helen, you are a high priestess,' " she says, looking out. "I like that image."
This sky perch is her unofficial office, where she meets with the friends who become clients - and vice versa. Rees, 69, has been successfully scanning the landscape for literary lights for a quarter century. She is generally credited with opening the first national book agency in town and has managed to keep plenty of household names from running off to agents in the book capital of New York.
Over the years, the Helen Rees Literary Agency has established itself as a broker for the brainiacs, business people, and sometimes the bad boys that make this city hum. Her client list has included Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz and Senator John Kerry - as well as former
Rees combines remarkable aplomb - she has, over salads, listened to Weeks hold forth on his literally gory details - with an outsized passion for books. She is constantly on the hunt for ideas. Sometimes, moving through her vast social network, she runs right into a book waiting to be written. That's what happened when Karzai gave the commencement address at Boston University last spring. His visit had been arranged by Nick Mills, an associate professor of journalism at BU. At a dinner the night before Karzai's speech, Rees introduced herself to Mills and persuaded him to pitch her idea to the president - that he should write a book for an American audience. "She just grabs you by the lapels," says Mills, "and gets right up in your face: 'Let's do a book.' She's terrific. It's like asking you to dance." Karzai's Letter From Kabul is expected later this year.
She met her husband, David Shaw, 60, an environmental chemist now semi-retired, in a comparatively roundabout fashion. A friend said she should put a personal ad in Harvard magazine. Rees at first scoffed, but "then, when she bet me $250, I was in." Rees paid off the wager about a month into her relationship with Shaw, who retired early from his job as a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to be with Rees in Boston.
Rees grew up in Washington, D.C., where her father owned a car dealership. Her mother, who played the violin and piano, died when Rees was 17. After majoring in history at George Washington University, Rees volunteered as an antiwar activist. In Brookline, she narrowly lost a bid for state representative, and in 1977, she was named director of the Office of Cultural Affairs in Mayor Kevin White's administration. Rees left the job in 1980 after being accused of misusing funds. Though an investigation cleared her, Rees decided she had had enough of public life.
Not long after, by then a divorced mother of four boys and in her 40s, she launched the agency that bears her name. She had no background in books, but a friend had told her she would be good at the business. Rees recalls working hard to woo Dershowitz, who didn't think he needed an agent. "The difference between Helen Rees and a Rottweiler," Dershowitz says now, "is that eventually a Rottweiler will let go."
Stylish in dress and warm in personality, Rees seems to have breezed through her every encounter - until she describes lunch with Weeks, a former mobster who is also her client. During their meeting, he was keenly focused on setting the record straight on "the specifics," she says, which "had to do with whether or not this person had been killed a certain way as opposed to another way." Though this was not her first mob tell-all title - Edward J. MacKenzie Jr.'s Street Soldier came out in 2003 amid questions about his trustworthiness - she was taken aback by how casually Weeks discussed all manner of mayhem, with the same tone she might use "calling one of my friends to check whether I should wear high heels or flats to the opera."
Weeks's book, Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob, was published last month. In it, he describes 25 years with Bulger, or "Jimmy," as he calls him, whom he claims he has seen five times since Bulger went into hiding years ago.
To those in her business around here, Rees is known best not for a particular client - eminent or notorious - but for paving the way for other agents. "Helen really was the first one to come in [and] make it a business, make it serious," says literary agent Doe Coover, whose office is in Winchester. She also credits Rees with being one of the first agents in Boston to specialize. In Rees's case, in business-oriented books.
Rees still relishes giving the dinner parties for which she is famous. She seated Dershowitz and Jack Welch together at one; the two became fast friends. An opera fan, she serves on the board of the Boston Lyric Opera. She is not even thinking of slowing down. She'd miss the view too much. "As for retirement - no, that word actually troubles me," she says. "Each day I learn and meet wonderful people, not just those who have accomplished a great deal, but those with energy and skills and ideas that matter. I cannot imagine walking away from that any time soon."
Lisa Kocian is a Boston Globe reporter. E-mail her at lkocian@globe.com 