GHOST WRITING:

...What happened...

...Probably when another writer is called in to save the manuscript...

...One of the latter category is Milton Viorst, who has had a newspaper column and has written a number of good political books of his own...

...That was certainly what did it with the Sheilah Graham book...

...White House Chef, by Francois Rysavy...

...My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, by Lillian Rogers Parks...

...I found that out for myself a couple of years ago...

...her subjects come to her: "If you have to beg them, then they won't give it the time that it requires to do the job...

...I have learned, for instance, that those readily identified by the formulae "as told to" and "with" are certainly not the only ones written with the aid of a collaborator...

...He needs help in dealing with publishers and agents, but beyond that, he needs the writer's skills-the vivid use of anecdote, and so on-to plead his case before the public...

...And if weeks on the best seller list are any indication, America is desperate to read them once they are written...

...It is simply the most engaging way to tell a story-to make it more personal...

...By God, I could say, they exist...

...Not only America, for if we are to judge by such titles as Ma Vie avec Jackie Kennedy, Mijn Leven met Jacqueline Ken-nedy, and Die Unvergesslichen Jahre mit Jackie im Weissen Haus, the whole world wants to know, too...

...They just can't write their own stuff...

...And its value...

...Although he hasn't published a collaborative effort since 1960, he probably did more than any other writer to awake in the public the hunger for first-person revelation that now rages so insatiably...

...If it hadn't been written, then history would have been deprived of this marginal addendum to the public record...

...I would go to other people who played roles in this drama of theirs-for instance, Sheilah told me that after a meeting with Nunnally Johnson, Fitzgerald threw himself into the ocean and tried to drown himself...

...Castaneda didn't seem to bother them much...

...The awful truth," he said, "is that the art of writing serviceable prose is now in very bad shape in the United States-very bad indeed...

...What resulted from their collaboration Viorst describes as "a kind of documented nostalgia...

...By now, this is a familiar story, for the important material given in this book by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank has been worked and re-worked by scholars, critics and biographers of Fitzgerald, often without much thanks to the source...

...The first of my misgivings about Mr...

...As I am writing now, there is no way of knowing exactly what the New York Times list will look like by the time you get around to reading this-though probably not too much different from what it was that week I was being sued by Simon and Schuster, and it suddenly looked to me as though nearly every book on it were likely the work of somebody besides the author-of-record...

...The collaborator conducts hours and hours of interviews with the author-of-record, taking the in-formation he gets, organizing it, and recasting it freely into readable first-person prose...

...they put themselves into their conversation, and you can get a sense of the right rhythm and style for the book...

...She didn't know what was said in that meeting...

...And I cannot help but respect those ghost writers who take their work seriously and have made of it, if not an art, then at least a craft of some utility...

...Where was he...

...actors feel he under* stands them...

...For along with an expectable minimum of purple-writing, and a certain amount of self-justification, there is in them a good deal of real drama, much honest pathos, and oc-casionally a touch of tragedy...

...In this case, Anderson, a veteran Washington novelist, political essayist, and a former presidential assistant during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, wielded considerable influence and pro-bably got Magruder to bring forth a more substantial book than he might otherwise have done...

...Still, as we grow older, we shed our prejudices one-by-one-or ought to, anyway...

...I thought it then, and I think it still...

...Frances Spaatz Leighton no longer has to plead...

...Nothing really...

...I asked her to show me where it hap-pened...

...Not the library kind, surely...

...She believed him...

...Oh, that, too...

...We have to be desperate to do it together...

...It all began when Pearson brought an outline to Doubleday of a novel with a central charac-ter obviously modeled after his old adversary, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut...

...But, he declares, he'll never do another: "No, I have my own books now...

...And if I am no closer now than before to generating any real enthusi-asm for the ghost-written book in the abstract, never-theless I have come to appreciate a couple of them in the particular...

...All this helps immeasurably in creating the reality of a moment...

...Research...

...I thought of them as biographies that I wrote with a great deal of help from the subject, an attempt to recreate a life, yet at the same time I was practically becoming the subject, too...

...Writing about Mrs...

...Carl Bernstein's and Bob Woodward's All the President's Men begins with an acknowledgment of "ap-preciation and respect" to their editor, Alice Ellen May-hew, "whose thought and guidance are reflected on every page...

...I think of it as hating the sin but loving the sinner...

...He has also written-or collaborated on-Outsider in the Senate: Sen...

...The others included a diet book, books by a psychiatrist, a veterinarian, an attorney, and one by a couple of lesser satellites of the . Kennedy family-all of which, on principle, I held sus-pect...

...This was when Washington columnist Drew Pearson and novelist Gerald Green got together on the two big-selling novels-The Senator and The President-that were published as the sole work of Pearson...

...She described a kind of cathedral-like atmosphere when he spoke...

...Do I seem to be splitting hairs...

...Not at all...

...She took me there...

...After all, if Carlos Castaneda had been a sports figure, an actor, or a politician, they could hardly have shown the same indignation...

...All were written "with" or "as told to" Frances Spaatz Leighton, who specializes in collaborations with the little people who serve the great...

...He took the outline, and Drew Pearson threw open his file on Senator Dodd to him...

...There are even writers of some independent reputation who, out of esteem for their collaborators or a sense of an im-portant message to be communicated, will occasionally take on ghost-writing assignments...

...and the most famous and successful of all, My Life with Jac-queline Kennedy, by Marie Barelli Gallagher...

...Interestingly, his new biography of Judy Garland represents a partial return to the material and attitudes of the earlier books- though it is, of course, written in his own voice...

...Psychoanalyst, father confessor, make whatever analogy you wish, but with each of them I was finishing their sentences for them by the time our interviews were ended...

...Having had the chance to put some questions to him face-to-face some time before, I suggested rather timidly in my article that 1) Castaneda was not quite the man he said he was...

...Onassis, one is never really very far from show business...

...What sort...

...And what he does for F. Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel is, I think, worthy of the subject, which is saying quite a lot...

...So where does editing leave off and ghost writing begin...

...Sheilah told me about Scott swearing not long be-fore his death he would never drink again...

...There are speech writers who see their words gathered between hard covers as the collected papers of this distinguished senator or that...

...The spectacular, best-selling success of books as Lillian Roth's I'll Cry Tomorrow, Diana Barrymore's Too Much Too Soon and Sheilah Graham's Beloved Infidel, all written in collaboration with Frank, probably did more than any dozen others to create the vogue for sensational Hollywood confes-sions...

...The other reason...

...They are utterly ignorant of what makes a book, and none of them I've ever worked with could conceivably have done a book on their own...

...My publication printed no retraction, and Simon and Schuster did not sue...

...Well, they continually read over your copy and say, 'I didn't say that.' If you've got it on tape, you can play it back to them and prove they did...

...What is unusual here is that Pearson was at least nominally a writer, and it seems ironic that he should have required the help of a ghost...

...But then, so, perhaps, did Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward...

...Almost no books in America are published in exactly the shape they are in when the author turns in the manuscript...

...Some sample titles...

...If he has been especially active in this sort of writing, it is not because he has sought the work, he says, but just because he was there in Hollywood and available...

...For the books he has done since the good old days of as-told-to-The Deed, The Boston Strang-ler, and An American Death-have been very sub-stantial works of journalism...

...The result was a commercial novel that stayed many weeks on the best seller list...

...I found out why when Time came out a few weeks later with a cover story that not only cast doubt on his purported identity, but quoted Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, to the effect that Carlos was such a rogue you could never depend on anything he said...

...Ghost writing is a thriving little cottage industry in the nation's capital...

...In another Watergate book, Jeb Stuart Magruder's An American Life, a similar ack-nowledgment was made to Patrick Anderson ("I would also like to thank Patrick Anderson for his invaluable advice and assistance on this book...

...With actors and actresses it is absolutely essential to use tapes-for two reasons...

...But people in public life here just aren't able to write well, or even serviceably...

...Yes," says Longstreet, "I understand them, all right...

...This is about as much as any writer ever hopes to get from his work-a sense of actuality, a lease on permanence...

...Well, the public does want these stories by public people," Richardson said...

...At issue was an article I had written for the National Observer not long after the publication of Carlos Cas-taneda's Journey to Ixtlan...

...Probably the top Hollywood ghost-or one who is at least an erstwhile ghost-is Gerold Frank...

...Viorst defends his work eloquently: "In a case like this, the ghost writer-collaborator becomes a lot like a lawyer...

...The collaborator may even have come up with the idea for the book himself...

...and 2) he had had the help of a collaborator in writing his book-in other words, that he had used a ghost writer...

...some "creative" editors take a very active part in the process and like to be in on a book right from the planning stage...

...I, perhaps like most of you, long nur-tured a prejudice against the ghost-written works that crowd the best-seller list week in and week out...

...Ghost writer is more often quantitative than qualita-tive-a matter of how much, rather than whether it is done...

...In such cases, tape recorders are used more and more these days...

...We have come to accept it as a matter of course that such books are actually written by somebody else...

...And it makes a difference whether or not the author-of-record seems to be telling it himself...

...Although there are shocking revelations aplenty in them, his books are not merely sensational...

...What she offers the reading public in diem is a kind of backstage view of Presidents and first ladies which seems to assure those who need such assurances that people at the top are only human, too...

...I know they are about the silliest people in the world...

...And, oh yes...

...But those three-Lillian, Diana, and Sheilah-they were very important to me, as peo-ple, as books...

...He is also a proven commodity...

...Ostensibly the story of the sentimental education of Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham, the book becomes Fitzgerald's when the novelist, who was sur-viving as a screenwriter during the last few years of his life, became Miss Graham's lover, and in the literal sense, her teacher...

...Here was a man," Viorst said to me, "who had a distinguished career in politics...

...Philip Nobile said as much, in fact, in an article in New Times, and it was never exactly denied...

...Yet I had to plead with her to get her to cooperate...

...I was sufficiently struck by this to have since done a bit of desultory digging into the whole question of ghost writing...

...I see the need for ghost writers, though I deplore it...

...At the time he was a senator from New Mexico and had been a cabinet member in the Truman administration, but he simply had no talent for writing...

...Gerold Frank makes these women matter...

...You might think of it that way, too.You might think of it that way, too...

...I've known writers who boasted they ghosted books in two months...

...An odd phrase, "author-of-record...

...and general gossip in the publishing industry has it that her rewriting of their text was so extensive that, in effect, she served as their ghost writer...

...On its simplest level, you know, ghosting is a sus-pect craft...

...But why...

...Gerold Frank feels that the right sort of research is what goes to make a successful as-told-to book...

...As Richardson tells it, "We really liked Drew's outline, but then he tried a couple of chapters, and we more or less agreed that the writing of fiction was a special skill...

...who, it is said, actually did the writing...

...Why aren't more of these authors-of-record authors-in-fact...

...And then I feel that places are important in research, too...

...But I had to build up my knowledge of Hollywood at the time to know right questions to ask her-and I must have asked Sheilah herself about 3,000 questions in the course of our interviews...

...Sandy Richardson even told of one instance-and there have probably been many others-when a ghost writer was used on a work of fiction...

...Just as a man may have a case to present in court, yet lack the knowledge of the law he needs to do it, he may also have a case to present to the public, or a rontribution to make to the public record...

...Where were you...

...For money, of course...

...Politicians, Army men, even business executives over there seem to have a basic facility with the language- enough, anyway, to be able to write their own books...

...Her first effort was / Married the Veep, by Jane Barkley, who was then second lady of the United States, for which the only credit Miss Leighton received was pro forma thanks for help in preparing the manu-script...

...But ghost writers get a lot closer than that...

...Why I gave a minimum of two years to those books of mine...

...1 think it's real enough, though limited...

...Why are so many of them ghosted, though...

...There is another, very different kind of Washington book that usually sells far more copies than senators' memoirs, the kind written by the lady they call "the Ghost of Washington...

...And why...

...The editor makes suggestions on cuts, rewrites, and restructuring...

...GHOST WRITING BRUCE COOK The haunting side of the best-seller list and other ghostly oddities As hanging for the condemned man, nothing concen-trates a writer's mind quite so wonderfully as the threat of lawsuit...

...Any pointed or profound ex-pression of thanks for "editorial assistance" is a tipoff that such assistance may well have gone above and be-yond...

...His publisher, Simon and Schuster, let out a great howl of rage in the form of a letter from their attorney threatening a libel suit unless a retraction was printed...

...I don't know why this should be exactly...

...Still, they had me going there for a while, I can tell you, and as it became clear that what had offended them most was my suggestion of an anonymous collaborator, I began to wonder just why that should have been...

...Clinton Anderson's Memoirs, "with Milton Viorst" (as the title page has it...

...I remember that one Sunday morning while still under the noose, I happened to look over the best seller list of the New York Times, and it came to me with a start that of all those listed under nonfiction, there was only one-David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest-that I would have sworn ab-solutely was the work of one man only whose name appeared as the author on the title page...

...Hollywood and New York have their own eminent specters, writers who know what collaboration with an actor or actress can entail-yet are willing to pay the price...

...In a town teeming with a-literate public men and well stocked with writers, marriages of necessity are in order-and they take place there every day...

...Gerold Frank is a writer from whom it is hard to withhold a degree of admiration-and make no mistake, he is the same writer now, with the same writer's con-science, as he was when he was a ghost haunting the best-seller list...

...They may describe his duties as heavy editing, or even call it rewriting, but his job is to do whatever needs to be done to make it publishable-even to throwing it out and starting all over...

...Now, speak the words as he spoke them...

...The book was my idea, too," she declares...

...Of them all, only Edmund Wilson properly acknowledged the real quality of the work itself...

...In this, Gerold Frank, the ghost writer, was certainly not much different from Gerold Frank, the journalist...

...I kept telling her it was for history...

...I had to know, so I went to Johnson...

...No, what angered them was my suggestion that he must have had a collaborator to help him produce the good narrative prose in which his books were written...

...First of all, they are used to projecting through speech...

...He has written a number of "autobiographies"- collaborating with such as Mae West, Hoagy Carmichael, and Pat O'Brien, among others -all done to support the novel-writing he considers his real vocation...

...He indicated to me that with so many books being written by "invisible ghosts"-those who receive no credit or acknowledgment for their efforts-the practice was probably far more prevalent than even I suspected...

...Except that they were novels, these two were essen-tially Washington books...

...Gerald Green, the author of The Last Angry Man and a number of other commercially successful novels, was called in...

...Stephen Longstreet is a case in point...

...The two deemed the collaboration so successful that they tried it all again with The President, not quite as suc-cessful, which was published shortly after Pearson's death in 1969...

...he provides them with an ultimate dignity that they were certainly entitled to, but without him would probably never have found...

...Among those on the list that week was one acknowledged collabora-tion (an "as told to"), another which the author had admitted was "tape-recorded...

...There are reporters who are known as fast workers who will turn out cam-paign "autobiographies" in a matter of weeks...

...And with everything so damned evanescent, they exist still...

...He needs a water-a collaborator-for that...

...More often today, however, a collaborator, or ghost writer will be in on the project from its inception- especially on a book which will appear as the work of a celebrity or public figure...

...I picked it up from Sandy Richardson, editor-in-chief at Doubleday, a publishing house that has put out more than its share of ghosted works during the past couple of decades...

...The Pat O'Brien book, Wind at My Back, wouldn't have been nearly as much like him if I hadn't used a tape recorder...

...I felt to do the book right I had to know Fitzgerald's work as a scholar would...

...It doesn't seem to be so with the English...

...When one of these books hits me, it just has to overwhelm me...