TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112789/11278900.072

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 109 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."