Agent Toby Eady remembered at pre-LBF memorial

Friends, family and clients gathered at the Royal Over-Seas League in St James’s yesterday (Monday 9th April) to pay tribute to agent Toby Eady, who died on 24th December aged 76.

Anthony Goff, m.d. of David Higham Associates, welcomed guests, regretting that  although Toby Eady Associates was acquired by Higham in June 2015 and had bedded in well there had sadly been “no time for a formal handover”. He noted, as did most of the speakers, that Eady did things his way, and that “his way” was quite unlike anyone else’s. “Toby was special.”

The six tributes that followed were well paced and, amusingly, included one would-be author (Dave Norwood) who never did make the cut but became lifelong friends with the agent anyway – a not untypical outcome, it appeared. They were bookended by Susan Watt, a friend since 1975 when she and Eady, both just starting out on their careers, met in New York, and Bernard Cornwell, one of the agent’s best-selling authors, whom Watt published for many years.

There were common themes: everyone agreed that Eady was the greatest user of silence as a negotiating tool and that “no one put the phone down quite like Toby”. He saw the potential in everyone and helped develop it. Another remembered how he’d waxed lyrical about the project he was poised to sell: appetite whetted, the publisher prepared to bid – only to be informed in peremptory fashion that he wasn’t on the submissions list!

Marco Vigevani, the Milanese agent, recalled his first encounter with Eady when he was working as a publisher with whom Eady was not pleased and he spoke “without sugar-coating”. There were problems – Vigevani, “a small cog”, was tasked with resolving them and he was anxious. But once the two men met and established personal connections they were easily resolved. Conversations inevitably began with, “how are you my friend?”, which was always more than a polite question. He was sensitive yet could be “as moody as a thoroughbred”.

Cornwell alone, closing the tributes, chose to speak about Eady’s dysfunctional childhood – his mother, of course, was the author Mary Wesley. He read passages from Wild Mary, the biography by Patrick Marnham (an Eady client), which was written on the strict understanding that it be published only after her death. Among the fragments: her admission that while Cornish people supposedly had a particular fondness for children, she wasn’t among them: “I haven’t got what it takes to be a parent”. Another observed that the teenaged Toby “grunts and stalks about very aloof” – traits he never outgrew.

Eady was urbane, bohemian, and a great host, whether at pre-match picnics at Twickenham or at Stourhead; he was multicultural long before the term became a buzz-word; and he was international, opening the eyes of the publishing world to China.

Among those gathered for the occasion were former Penguin m.d. Helen Fraser, Jonathan Cape's Dan Franklin, writers Sebastian Faulks and John Carey, Profile's Andrew Franklin and Carol O’Brien, who acquired Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, the book with which Eady will forever be associated.