The Curtis Brown literary agency was founded in 1899 and when Geller joined it in 1994 it would have been inconceivable that a huge global talent agency would take any interest in acquiring it. The staff are preparing for an imminent move to new and, it is hoped, air con-fitted premises. The atmosphere at the Curtis Brown office reflects the boss’s style: busy but calm, the place a hive of activity – in an undemonstrative way – despite the record-nudging heat on the day I visit. These personal clients of Geller’s range from William Boyd, Howard Jacobson, Monica Ali and David Nicholls to Mel Brooks, Russell Brand, Nigella Lawson and Alastair Campbell at the moment he’s preparing for the publication of Bono’s autobiography in November. Nevertheless, quite a few writers I know – like the one who told me that it was difficult to tell his agent apart from a basking sloth – look on in furious envy at those authors who get the benefit of Geller’s energy and drive. He isn’t a flamboyant party animal like Ed Victor (whose agency Curtis Brown took over after his death in 2017) and he doesn’t ham up his own ruthlessness like Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie (famous for poaching other agents’ clients – not Geller’s style). Unlike some of the legendary super-agents who have preceded him, he comes across as equable and well-adjusted. Not that Geller seems especially annoyed, or annoyable. It’s slightly frustrating that agenting has never had its due.” But if you were to ask the average person, ‘what is an agent?’, they’d say, isn’t that some middleman who takes a cut. I’m not saying there aren’t lots of not very good agents who don’t do any of that, but that is the model of what agenting should be, that’s what we do here. “Agents, we’re basically a troubleshooter, a fixer, a dealmaker, a psychologist, an editor, and a consigliere, and we’re also there in the publishing process, we help pick the covers, influence the blurb, the marketing. “I’ve always hated it because I just don’t think it’s the right word, I don’t think it’s what we do,” he tells me in his office at Curtis Brown’s HQ near Trafalgar Square.
#ROSS GELLER IM FINE FULL#
Not that he cares for the term super-agent – or indeed the term “agent” full stop. At 54, Jonny Geller, CEO of Curtis Brown, is the first super-agent of his generation – a status cemented by the recent acquisition of Curtis Brown by one of the world’s most powerful entertainment agencies: the Beverly Hills-based United Talent Agency (UTA). Every now and then a literary agent proves to be so successful, standing out from the pack to an almost Bradman-esque degree, that they start to be referred to by their peers and in the press as a “super-agent”.
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