Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [113]
In 1963 and 1964, I was sent off on a number of wild-goose chases to persuade various authors to surrender what they had written—if indeed they had written anything. This task was a kind of punishment, akin to bill collecting or process serving, and was invented for me by Henry Simon, who still smarted over what he saw as my defection, and was no doubt intended to strengthen my character. It reached its lowest point when I found myself sitting in a New Jersey roadhouse with the bandleader Paul Whiteman and his agent. Whiteman had been a big man in his heyday, broad shouldered, stout, and beaming as he stood in front of his band, but age had shrunk him, and his clothes—tailored in the garish colors and shiny fabrics that had once been the mark of success in the big-band era—hung off him loosely, like deflated balloons. He had sunk to the point where he was conducting a very much reduced version of his band in shady-looking nightclubs, to audiences whose grandparents had danced to his beat, playing medleys of Cole Porter for kids who really wanted to hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. He still had the pencil-thin mustache and the toothy, gleaming smile of the showbiz professional, but his eyes were resentful and at times bewildered. Once he had played for kings, queens, movie stars, and millionaires; now he was doing one-night stands on the outskirts of Paramus. My presence—reminding him that he had a contract to deliver a book—did nothing to improve his day. We sat at a table near the bar in the stygian gloom of the roadhouse—What, I asked myself, is more depressing than being in a nightclub at noon?—with a tray of stale Danish pastries and a thermos of coffee provided by the management in the person of a swarthy, blue-chinned gentleman who might as well have a sign pinned on him that read, “Member of an Organized-Crime Family.” Whiteman was determined to give me each and every one of the anecdotes with which he had sold Henry Simon on the idea of his writing an autobiography, while my instructions were to return with pages of manuscript.
I finally interrupted the flow and asked if I could see some of the book. No problem, Whiteman said. He nodded to his agent, who produced a stout briefcase, from which he took folder after folder. I leafed through them. They were all photographs, meticulously captioned, showing Whiteman in happier and more prosperous days, most of them with his arm around some celebrity. “These are just photographs,” I said. “What about the text?”
Whiteman sighed and stared into the middle distance, his eyes avoiding me.
“Paul doesn’t respond well to pressure,” the agent whispered to me.
“What pressure? He’s years late. Nobody’s bothered him until now.”
“We figured that was because you guys didn’t care.”
“Of course we care,” I objected.
Whiteman held his hand up for quiet. He gave me a smile. “Listen to me,” he said slowly, even impressively, enunciating every word carefully. “It’s written, don’t worry.” He tapped a finger against his bald head. “You go back and tell them that it’s all here, every word of it. The hard work has been done. Now it’s just a question of getting it all down on paper.”
Sidney Kingsley’s very words.
THE NUMBER of times I heard this, or some variation of it, is incalculable. I heard it from Orson Welles—his book was already written, within that massive head, just waiting to come pouring out onto paper any day now. I heard it from Irving Lazar for nearly thirty years on the subject of his autobiography, and I have heard it from a wide variety of people over the years, ranging from Cher to Ronald Reagan. For some reason, celebrity authors always assume that the hard part of writing is the thinking, whereas the truth, as every professional writer knows, is that the actual writing is what hurts—thinking comes easy, by comparison, and nothing exists until it has been put down on paper.
That period, 1963 to 1965, saw a lot of celebrity books, as well as an increasing sense that if you paid out money to an author, however famous he or she was, you ought to get something