The publishing world never anticipated the power that was packed in the novel Primary Colors. Klein's literary agent, Kathy Robbins, could only convince Random House to take a cheap flier on it for somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000. Hollywood was even chillier. Before the novel was published, Robbins sent the manuscript to her top Hollywood contact, Bob Bookman of Creative Artists Agency, the Dickensian-named agent known for getting top dollar for a novel's film rights. Because the novel had no cache then, Bookman didn't even bother to approach any studios. He needed some zip, so nine top filmmakers were given a sneak peak -- Mike Nichols, Barry Levinson, Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Danny DeVito, Jonathan Demme, Sydney Pollack, Scott Rudin, and the production team of Laura Ziskin and Kevin McCormick - along with HBO, thought to be a sure thing. Everyone said no. One development executive only half-kiddingly called the novel "a good vehicle for Jim Belushi."

Nichols, who remembers skimming the manuscript, didn't respond at all. To political neophytes, the novel seemed like just a humorous account of the primary season, not a savvy dissection of the players.

Hollywood may not know a good thing when it sees it, but it knows a good thing when it reads about it in the trades. Primary Colors was a case study in brilliant book marketing. The published novel was plopped into newsrooms in the midst of the dull '96 primary season. Clinton was unopposed for renomination, while Republican candidates Bob Dole, Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Lugar made for tepid copy about flannel shirts and the flat tax.

Primary Colors, on the other hand, contained all the unsubstantiated gossip about the first couple that reporters had been jawing about for the past four years but couldn't print for reasons of libel or propriety. Better still, the author was playing a coquettish hide-and-seek. The juiciest possibility -- and a real one because of the novel's scathing depiction of the press -- was that a Clinton insider had written it.