Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [270]
As it turned out, the person who objected most strongly to this arrangement was Kelley, not the Reagans, who took the whole thing in stride once it hit the papers. I could have understood the Reagans’ objection to being published by the same house or having the same editor as Kelley; it was harder to understand why Kelley was so upset. Much to my dismay, she was moved to Alice Mayhew to solve the problem. I entered on the job of being Reagan’s editor, therefore, in a glum and slightly resentful frame of mind, since it had cost me a major author and, for a time, a good friend. Such regrets as I had, however, were soon assuaged by Reagan himself, who was charm personified.
In the meantime, we moved forward to select a writer to work with the president and eventually settled on Robert Lindsey, one of Alice Mayhew’s authors, a former journalist of some distinction, and the author of The Falcon and the Snowman. Lindsey was a Californian, which made it easier for him to spend time with Reagan, and, like everyone else, he succumbed quickly to the president’s charm, although he noted with some concern that “Reagan is not a very introspective man and thus not easy to interview.” (This turned out to be an understatement.) Alice Mayhew and I drafted a proposed outline of the book, in which we recommended, rather hopefully, that it should begin with a memorable opening line, like Nixon’s (“I was born in a house my father built.”), stress his humble origins, and achieve so far as possible the simplicity and dignity of Grant’s prose.
The publication of the president’s collected speeches took place rather quickly and caused a small tremor of alarm. Beautifully packaged, they failed to sell, despite a lavish marketing campaign that involved Charlton Heston as the spokesman. Of course it is a well-known fact that nobody wants to read speeches—I had only to recall Jimmy Carter’s to remind me of that—but Reagan’s popularity was so great that we assumed his speeches would be an exception to the rule, that his supporters would have to buy them, out of sheer loyalty. When they did not, a certain panic set in regarding the memoirs.
It had been supposed that since he was the most loved and admired president since FDR, his memoirs would sell like hotcakes, whatever was in them. They might not be read by large numbers of people, but they would be bought in vast quantities. Now that this could no longer be depended upon, the quality of the memoirs became an urgent concern, so my associate editor, Chuck Adams, and I went to California in haste to review the text and—frankly—urge the president to greater candor.
THUS, CHUCK and I found ourselves early one afternoon in 1990 in Beverly Hills, paying a visit to the president in his office in Century City, the vast, monumental neo-Egyptian real-estate development whose owner, Marvin Davis, has his office in the same building. I had visited Davis’s office once, to have coffee with him—Irving Lazar had been trying to sell me his book, but it turned out, as was so often the case, that poor Davis had no intention of writing one and didn’t have the slightest idea of who I was or why I had come to see him. Davis’s office was in keeping with his size—he is a man of enormous height and girth.
Reagan’s surroundings, by contrast, were restrained and modest, designed in the Williamsburg colonial style and staffed by clean-limbed, smiling young women and good-looking young men in suits. Both genders presented a perfect picture of wholesomeness. They all had perfect teeth. Many of the men wore red-white-and-blue patterned ties, while most of the women wore red-white-and-blue scarves. It wasn’t exactly a uniform, but almost.
The waiting room contained a long, glassed-in cabinet, built against one wall, containing all the saddles with which Reagan had been presented during the years of his presidency, many of the Western ones