People who achieve fame of one sort or another often choose to write memoirs — as a commemoration of themselves; to claim or reclaim their life story; as a justification for their activities; or, in the case of politicians, to address constituencies directly or to justify their record.
Celebrity memoirs can also be lucrative. I have objected, without much impact, to the notion of political figures (Supreme Court justices or U.S. senators, for example) cashing in on their public roles while still serving in them.
Nonetheless, the list of celebrity memoirs I have published is lengthy and, in retrospect — even to me — astonishing in its range of notables. I shared many of those experiences in An Especially Good View, and so I will not recount them in detail here.
What I’ve learned from managing all those celebrities through the life stories they want to share may be useful for working with them. As an editor, you’ll need to develop a relationship of trust and authority. As a ghostwriter or collaborator, you’ll need to sublimate your ego. And if you are famous enough to deserve a memoir, it’s best to avoid excesses of self-congratulation.
I have always measured memoirs of any kind by their verisimilitude, “the appearance of being true or real.” Memoirists are entitled to render their account as they choose. The reader is equally entitled to believe that version, or not.
Celebrity memoirs that attract large publisher advances need to justify those dollar figures with revelations, personal or professional, that will attract readers and perhaps some controversy. My goal as the editor was to enable the author (and often the collaborator that was hired) to craft a story that would answer the questions that were on readers’ minds: Who are you, really? How did you get to be so famous? and What do you want me to know about you that will justify reading this book?
Here are examples from two particularly famous celebrity authors. In each case, I was the person at Random House primarily responsible for the book’s content and publication.
First is Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Published in 1987, the book was a sensation. It sold one million copies in the first three months and was a #1 bestseller in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Unquestionably the book raised the profile of a flamboyant New York real estate developer, the boost in fame that led him decades later to the presidency.
The coauthor of the book was Tony Schwartz, who had pitched the idea and the title that has entered the language as a caption of Trump’s life. Schwartz has publicly regretted his work on the book. The accepted view is that not only did Trump not write the book, but it essentially presented a false narrative of himself.
I disagree. In fact, Schwartz shaped Trump’s words, which he overheard or extracted, into coherence with flair. Reading the book so many years later, I found that the Trump in the White House is very much the grandiose and aggressive younger man in the book, writ large. Everything about him then is still what he is as president, on a vastly different scale.
Pundits, politicians, and historians grappling to explain Trump should definitely begin with and take seriously The Art of the Deal.
My second example is Counsel to the President by Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, which was published in 1991. Clifford was considered the epitome of a Washington wise man. His public career as counselor to presidents and esteemed adviser to the powerful and glamorous made his book worthy of the front cover of the New York Times Book Review and bestseller status.
Except that it was not a representation of Clifford’s life that emerged after the book was published.
In July 1992, Clifford was indicted on federal and state charges related to his role in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which used fraud and bribery to take control of First American Bankshares in Washington. Clifford had served as the bank’s chairman.
Because of his age he never went to trial. But he acknowledged that his predicament had become the choice of “either being stupid or venal.” On reflection, I realized that the book excluded most of Clifford’s work over the years as a power broker and effectively a lobbyist.
The indictment buried the book. And Clifford’s long-term reputation never recovered. I did not ask Holbrooke, Clifford’s coauthor, whom I knew well, why he had not found a way to accurately portray how Clifford had earned the stature he achieved. The book was not dishonest, but it was a failure of verisimilitude.
Memoirs by famous people usually carry a question that the public will want to have answered. Here are two examples of how the expert collaborator Bill Novak (with whom I published five books) and I handled them.
When Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s memoir was announced in 1985 — Random House had paid $1 million for the rights — the cynical question being asked by politicos and reporters was “How much will Tip say about JFK and women?” The rumors about President John F. Kennedy having strayed from his marriage, widely and often, were still mesmerizing the public, two decades after his death. The fact that O’Neill was an ultimate insider in Boston political lore was seen as a titillating measure of the book’s candor.
Tip made clear that he did not intend to share whatever he knew. “After all,” he said privately, “the widow and his children are alive.” Novak and I devised this sentence with Tip: “In recent years there have been plenty of stories about Jack’s fondness for women, both before and during the White House years, but I don’t want to get into that.”
Because the book, Man of the House, was so otherwise rich in Tip’s wisdom and wit, the issue of JFK’s private activities never came up. It was a major bestselling success.
When Nancy Reagan was writing her memoir, called My Turn, the question being asked was how she would characterize “Ronnie,” as she called him, whose seeming affability masked an aloofness and indifference toward many of the people he dealt with, including his family and many of his own appointees.
The wording Nancy accepted, after spending many hours with us discussing the matter, was: “Although he loves people, he often seems remote, and he doesn’t let anyone get too close. There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier. . . . Ronnie is an affable and gregarious man who enjoys other people, but unlike most of us, he doesn’t need them for companionship or approval.” This was an essential insight, with words that reflected her view, even if it was not as pithy a passage as she would have devised on her own.
The worst thing that can happen to a celebrity memoir is when the author disavows the book’s controversial content by saying that the words were the ghostwriter’s and not actually theirs. This renders the book dead on arrival. In a memoir, the author must be ready and willing to defend what he or she says in print.
Among all the memoirs I published, the most important was Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. He wrote it completely by himself as a young man, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School and an aspiring politician. The book was published in 1995. Almost a decade later, Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was hailed for its eloquence and elevated him to national prominence. The book then sold millions of copies and came to be considered a classic.
That young man’s book, the story before he became famous, resonated so strongly because of the quality of the writing and the verisimilitude of the story it told.
Is there a difference between books classified as memoirs and those called autobiographies? They have the same purpose and are essentially the same genre. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is said to be largest-selling modern autobiography because it was written as she lived it and was not therefore a memoir.
Memoir, generally, seems a more casual term than autobiography, which suggests factual precision, a detailed history of a person’s experiences rather than reflections on them.
Whatever they are called, they are life stories. Everyone has one to tell, and I believe they are worth telling in one form or another.
Lives are finite. A memoir, written and preserved, is everlasting.
