The judge in Calvert County, where Clancy lives in a sprawling home overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, agreed with King and put her in charge of the partnership on all matters involving the Op-Center line. He ruled that Clancy not only violated the agreement creating the Jack Ryan partnership but also failed to live up to the terms of his 1998 marital separation agreement with King.
Clancy's lawyers will urge the Court of Appeals to overturn that decision, claiming in their petition that Clancy alone "controls the exploitation of the Op-Center property, including the use of his name."
But King's lawyers countered that under federal trademark law, Clancy gave up the rights to his name once the partnership acquired goodwill in its use. They cited a case in which Donald Trump tried but failed to take his name off the Trump Casino Hotel in Atlantic City over the objections of a partner.
In 1969, after his graduation from Loyola College in Baltimore, Clancy married Wanda Thomas. They had four children and remained married through the many years he spent in the insurance business before The Hunt for Red October was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1984.
The tightly plotted thriller about a renegade Soviet submarine captain's bold attempt to defect became a surprise best-seller. Besides making Clancy a well-known author, it introduced as its hero a clean-cut, amazingly competent Marine veteran, Naval Academy professor and intelligence whiz named Jack Ryan.
Ryan would appear again as the hero in many of Clancy's novels, but in 1992 he took on a new role as a limited partnership set up by Tom and Wanda Clancy. It was to the partnership that the Clancys decided to direct the profits of Op-Center, a failed television show concept that enjoyed more success as a line of faux Clancy "techno-thriller" paperback novels.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Clancy continued to churn out best-sellers - several of which became movies - and became wealthy enough to buy a share of the Baltimore Orioles.
Tom and Wanda Clancy's marriage of more than 25 years apparently began falling apart in 1995, when she filed for divorce charging that her husband had committed adultery with a New York woman nicknamed "Ping-Ping" whom he met over the Internet.
The couple briefly reconciled in 1996, but in 1997 Tom Clancy filed for a divorce that was made final in 1999. That same year, Clancy, then 52, married 32-year-old Alexandra Llewellyn. The former Wanda Clancy has since remarried as well.
In the Calvert County trial, Clancy claimed he wanted to take his name off the Op-Center novels for business reasons. Among other things, he claimed that the books were not making money and were hurting his "literary reputation."
But Pieczenik, Clancy's former collaborator and a partner in the joint venture that controls Op-Center, testified that rancor toward Clancy's ex-wife drove the author's decision.
Pieczenik quoted Clancy as vowing to kill the Op-Center series before he would give "another dollar" to King and describing her in terms that devoted family man Jack Ryan would never have uttered about the mother of his children.
Calls to Clancy's office and to his lawyer, Lowell R. Bowen of Miles and Stockbridge, were not returned. Jerrold Thrope, a lawyer for King from the Gordon, Feinblatt firm, declined to comment, because the case is pending.
michael.dresser@baltsun.com
