Making True Grit a Bestseller

The New York Times takes note of how True Grit became a 1968 bestseller.

From the piece...

Chatting recently about his adventures as a Paramount publicity executive assigned to “True Grit” — the old one, with John Wayne — Bob Rehme, the longtime film executive and producer, discussed some machinations that helped make a Hollywood hit of the novel by Charles Portis. Both “True Grit” and the new version of the same name, by Ethan and Joel Coen, are based.

The producer Hal B. Wallis bought rights to the Portis book before it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1968. The underlying story, about young Mattie Ross’s pursuit of the man who shot her father, certainly had fans. Even before the book appeared, a slightly different version was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post.

But Mr. Rehme recalls that Paramount, which collaborated with Mr. Wallis on the film, had an interest in seeing that the book lived up to its reputation as a best seller.

So Mr. Rehme, by his own recollection, did what any really enterprising publicity executive of the era would have done: he set out to rig the game.