DANIELLE Steel has written more than 70 best-selling romantic potboilers during her illustrious 35-year career - but one of her upcoming projects may be a sizzling roman żż clef on a more serious subject: her ex-husband’s conviction on manslaughter charges.
In his upcoming memoir, “Valley Boy,” out this fall from Gotham Books, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who was briefly married to Steel, says she told him she plans to base on a novel on the bizarre crime he was charged with in France in 1998.
“I was arrested and tried in a foreign court in a language you don’t understand, by judges indifferent - or worse - to justice, represented by an inappropriate lawyer with the negative outcome preordained,” Perkins writes in his memoir.
In 1996, Perkins was racing his yacht off the French coast when he accidentally capsized a smaller craft, killing a doctor on board. Back in port, he writes, “I was met by armed members of the Coast Guard and I was arrested . . . The next morning someone showed me the front page of one of the Paris tabloids. The headline said: ‘Monster American Yacht Kills French Doctor!’ ”
He writes that Steel sat in court with him in the “backwater” French town of Draguignan and helped him translate the trial. Perkins says that, despite proof his investigators gathered that the capsized boat was “in violation of every safety, yachting and common-sense rule,” he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, along with his skipper. He was fined $10,000 but spared jail.
Perkins writes that Steel, to whom he was married for 17 months before divorcing in 1999, “says [the ordeal] has a great plot line.” He adds, “I don’t think I’ll read it. I lived it.”
Steel’s agent, Mort Janklow, could not be reached for comment.
Perkins is also well known on the business front. As a board member at Hewlett-Packard, he blew the whistle on the company’s employee-spying scandal. He also was one of the founders of leading venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
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