TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112789/11278900.072

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 6KB | 100 lines

BOOKS, Page 82

The Celebs' Golden Mouthpiece

William Novak spins best sellers out of other people's stories

By Martha Smilgis


    What do you say to an offer to ghostwrite Nancy Reagan's
autobiography? "Just say yes," advised William Novak's wife Linda
when Random House approached him a year-and-a-half ago. Today My
Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan has made headlines, sold some
400,000 copies and soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Yet
if Novak went with a winner, so did Reagan. Novak, 41, came to the
collaboration with credentials of his own. He is the golden
mouthpiece of the nation's celebrities, a literary John Alden who
can consistently woo -- and win -- the public in their behalf. In
1984 Iacocca, Novak's collaboration with auto executive Lee
Iacocca, jolted the publishing world by selling 2.7 million copies.
He followed that up with best sellers on Tip O'Neill and Sydney
Biddle Barrows, the deb-styled Mayflower Madam. Paid a paltry
$80,000 for the Iacocca book (which made $10 million to $15 million
for its subject), Novak has since been rewarded with a much
healthier cut of the profits he helps generate. For My Turn, he
received a six-figure advance plus a percentage of the royalties.

    Novak was prepared to dislike Reagan, assuming she was cold,
authoritarian, power hungry. Yet, he says, "I never encountered
that `off with your head' woman I heard about. She's not Imelda
Marcos, Leona Helmsley or Marie Antoinette, and some people still
don't understand that." Over eight months, Novak taped 250 hours
of conversation at the White House, in the Carlyle Hotel in New
York City, at the Reagan ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., and, of
course, over the phone. Reagan offered candid recollections of the
day her husband was shot, her hospitalization for cancer and her
mother's death.

    At first she tried to dodge prickly questions about her
reliance on astrology, her feuds with White House chief of staff
Donald Regan and her troubled relations with her children. "When
she'd say, `Now Bill, you're not going to talk about this,' I'd use
the editors: `But the editors insist on these subjects,'" says
Novak. "The fact is, if you ask readers to pay $22 for a book, you
have to reveal new material. Ironically, the better known the
person the more they must reveal." Recalls Reagan: "There were
tough, difficult times and good times. But I wanted it honest and
personal."

    Novak is able to elicit such responses because he is a most
unassuming, amiable sort who leaves his ego at the door. He fits
his approach to his subject. With the brusque, no-nonsense Iacocca,
he conducted interviews in offices and conference rooms, never
sharing a meal with him. With O'Neill, he took drives around Cape
Cod in the former Speaker's beat-up Chrysler and listened to
endless anecdotes over tuna sandwiches. "I worried that these were
only a wall of stories," he says. "I came to realize that Tip's
opinions were expressed through his stories." He arrived at the
White House carrying a bag of Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies,
Nancy Reagan's favorite. When he met her at the Reagan ranch, where
she is known to favor jeans, he showed up in jeans. "Bill's like
a great character actor," says Peter Osnos, his editor at Random
House. "His self-effacing quality allows his subjects their own
expression. An extraordinary quality of intimacy with the person
is conveyed."

    After doing exhaustive library research on a subject, Novak
typically talks to dozens of family members and friends to build
up lists of questions for his interviews. No muckraker, he uses
challenging or contradictory material only to try to jog his
subject's memory or trigger fresh stories. "I push as far as I can
go," he says. "I'm not trying to change a person's version of
himself." Novak works from transcriptions of his interviews,
occasionally going back to the tapes to capture the subject's voice
-- one of his strengths, he believes. A couple of months into a
collaboration, he begins showing the subject drafts of chapters.
The subject usually offers changes and comments ("Bill, this
stinks!" scrawled Iacocca). Novak tries to incorporate the lively
ones and drop the dull.

    Toronto-born, Novak graduated from local York University
intending to be a writer ("No kid goes to bed at night dreaming
he'll be a ghostwriter"). After earning an M.A. in contemporary
Jewish studies at Brandeis, he spent ten years editing scholarly
magazines and writing a string of financially unsuccessful books
(among them: High Culture, about marijuana use, The Great American
Man Shortage and a compendium of Jewish humor). Just as he resigned
himself to "finding a real job," an editor friend at Bantam
suggested Lee Iacocca. "Great! My kind of guy," said Novak, who had
never heard of Iacocca.

    His success as a collaborator has brought him a comfortable
life in an affluent suburb of Boston that enables him, as he says,
"to buy raspberries instead of apples."  He is currently compiling
an anthology of American humor and mulling future celebrity
subjects. He muses about Mikhail Gorbachev ("but somehow I think
he's busy right now"), and, as a music lover who has recently
resumed piano lessons, he thinks about Paul McCartney or Barbra
Streisand. "Or Elvis, if he can find him," wisecracks Ben, 10, one
of the Novaks' two sons. As for a return to the solo byline of
William Novak, he says it's not soon likely. "I get far more ego
gratification and attention from these books than I ever did from
my own." But aren't the celebrity books his own too? No. This John
Alden, unlike the original, shrinks from speaking for himself. "I
don't fool myself into thinking that my books are best sellers,"
he says. "The celebrities are the selling point."