Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [269]
ULYSSES S. GRANT was the last president in American history who actually sat down on his front porch with a pad of paper and wrote his own book—under difficult circumstances, too, since he was writing against the clock, dying of throat cancer and in great pain. Since then, however, books by presidents have been largely ghostwritten, sometimes completely, as in the cases of Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, sometimes with the more or less active participation of the president in the process. Nixon did a good deal of his writing himself but was aided by a staff of people who did research for him and drafted whole sections of manuscript that Nixon then rewrote and revised. This is a perfectly respectable approach to writing a memoir—Winston Churchill employed a large staff of people to feed him research and first drafts, but there is no question that the final draft sounded like Churchill, much as Nixon’s final drafts sounded a lot like Nixon (minus the profanity). Johnson’s prose, in contrast, had the unmistakable flatness of a ghosted product, and no president was ever more removed from his book than was Reagan.
The Reagan book had, as they say, a “history,” which partly explained how it came into our hands. In June 1977, Bill Adler, a book packager and agent who specialized in celebrity authors and who was briefly testing the limits of conflict of interest by working at S&S as an editor at the same time, had signed up Reagan to do a book on politics in Hollywood in the 1950s—the blacklisting and the witch-hunt in the movie business in the McCarthy years as seen from the side of one of the chief witch-hunters, so to speak. Adler’s enthusiasm was not contagious. Most of the staff of S&S thought of Reagan as a West Coast right-wing extremist, and dreaded having to publish the book. This, as it turned out, need have concerned no one, since it was never written. The advance was modest, but so long as S&S refused to accept the money back, Reagan owed S&S a book, which he cheerfully acknowledged. At one point, in 1987, Irving Lazar, who as an old friend and neighbor of the Reagans considered himself entitled to be the president’s agent, wrote to Nancy Reagan offering to sell the president’s memoirs to S&S, despite the fact that to all intents we already owned them, and had his knuckles firmly rapped by her—she not only said no, she told him to refrain from even discussing the possibility with S&S or anyone else.
Thus Dick Snyder was in the position of having an option on the president’s memoirs, as Reagan’s second term drew to an end, and made a deal that satisfied everybody. Reagan was to receive, after he left office, what was certainly the largest advance ever paid to an author to date, and S&S was to get what Dick would call in his press release announcing the deal, “the book of the century.”
Dick was jubilant at this coup, which was to be kept secret until the president had left the White House, lest he be accused of making a record-breaking book deal while still in office. The president had been affable, charming, totally forthcoming, everything he was reputed to be, Dick said, and confided one thing more: He had promised Reagan that I would be his editor. The president and Mrs. Reagan had been delighted to hear that, and looked forward to meeting me.
There was, however, one small fly in the ointment. I brought up the fact that I was already Kitty Kelley’s editor (I had published her biography of Elizabeth Taylor), who was then working on what was supposed to be a sensational, unauthorized kiss-and-tell biography of Nancy Reagan. Mrs. Reagan was known to be furiously apprehensive about the book. “I hope she gets hit by a truck,” Mrs. Reagan was reported to have said about Kelley. How would the Reagans feel when they found out that I was Kelley’s editor? I asked. And how would she feel when she learned that her editor was working with the Reagans?
All I had to do was to handle things firmly and everything would be fine, Dick replied. If necessary he would step in personally and help. Since I was