LOS ANGELES  Now it can be told.

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 that western novel by Charles Portis. Both the 1969 “True Grit,” directed by Henry Hathaway, and the new version with the same title, by Joel and Ethan Coen, are based on that book, also called “True Grit.”

The producer Hal B. Wallis bought rights to the Portis novel before it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1968. A slightly different version had been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post.

The underlying story, about young Mattie Ross’s pursuit of the man who shot her father, certainly had fans. 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.