Another Life

by Michael Korda

  At that time, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace had not yet opened, but I should have been able to predict what it would be like, even then, right down to the mail-order catalog offering a T-shirt showing a nervously smiling Nixon shaking hands with a befuddled and stoned-looking Elvis Presley. In fact, Nixon was his own monument, a kind of living, breathing Mount Rushmore—the one American president of this century about whom it is absolutely impossible to be indifferent.

  I DOUBT whether any publisher has ever grown rich from books written by presidents. We did a good deal better with Nixon than we had done with Jimmy Carter, however, whose speeches I had published in a volume called A Government as Good as Its People. Patrick Anderson, a friend of Larry McMurtry’s, then speech writing for “the Governor,” as those who were close to Carter called him even in the White House, persuaded me to come down to Washington to discuss a book of Carter’s speeches. When I got there, I was mildly surprised to note that everybody had a glass bowl full of peanuts on his or her desk, including Anderson. Our discussion about the speeches was so quick that it was over before it started, which I didn’t mind a bit. What I did mind, as I told Anderson later, was that I never received a set of presidential cuff links.

  In the Nixon era it was impossible to get anywhere near the president without being presented with a pair of cuff links enameled with the presidential seal, and I had admired them on many people’s cuffs, including those of Henry Kissinger. Indeed, in Nixon’s time, a whole drawer of the president’s desk was reserved for such small mementos, and he passed them out to everybody who entered the Oval Office, as did his aides. Once, when a group of rabbis came by to ask for more support for Israel and were presented, each of them, with a box of cuff links, the last rabbi to leave the room, overcome by curiosity, opened his box and peeked inside, just before reaching the door. He stopped, turned around, and said to Nixon, “Mr. President, I hope your promises about Israel mean more than this present. My box is empty.”*

  When Anderson asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to the White House, I told him that I was disappointed not to have received the traditional cuff links. Anderson replied, with some embarrassment, that the president and Mrs. Carter felt that kind of gift giving had been overdone in previous administrations—in short, it was tacky.

  I thought that very strange. The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter?

  Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (“A Goverment as Good as it’s People”). I had it framed and treasured it for many years, until somebody stole it off my wall, together with an angry letter from Lyndon Johnson about a book I had published that was critical of him.

  I was therefore not as excited as Dick Snyder expected me to be when I heard that he was going after Ronald Reagan’s memoirs. As it turned out, the book was to usher in the era of huge advances for ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies that was to make Harry Evans famous at Random House and eventually help to bring his career there—as well as the era—to an end. Oddly enough, we at S&S learned our lesson sooner than anybody else, since even dedicated Republicans who had contributed hundred of thousands of dollars to the president’s campaign chests could not be persuaded to buy the signed edition of the speeches or the autobiography, and the general public, which had twice voted Reagan into office, completely ignored his books. In short, it was a disaster, which we attributed at the time to the fact that too much time had elapsed between his departure from office and the publication of the books. It can be explained more simply by the possibility that while the public had a good deal of affection for the president, they had no curiosity to know more about him and were smart enough to guess that they wouldn’t find out anything new from his book anyway.

  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 only too aware of the fact that things had not been fine between S&S and the Collins sisters, I wasn�
�t optimistic that they would be any better between S&S, the Reagans, and Kitty Kelley.

  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 gleaming with silver. (Interestingly enough, when actually on a horse, the president seemed to favor English saddles, field boots, and old-fashioned flared whipcord riding breeches.) After a short wait, I was taken into a small, handsome room, lined with bookshelves and carpeted in blue, where, from behind a large and perfectly clear desk, devoid of any sign of work, Reagan rose to greet me, his brow furrowed as if he had been deep in thought. He was dressed in a tan summer suit, and once he had me in view, he smiled as naturally as if we had been friends for life. He had the kind of suntan and presence that only movie stars possess, a bigger-than-life quality that is purely physical and that makes it hard to take your eyes off them even when they’re not doing anything. His head was big, majestic, deeply seamed, his hands big, gnarled, sinewy, well cared for, but still a workingman’s hands, the only part of him that seemed genuinely Lincolnesque.

  Reagan walked to the middle of the room, grabbed my hand, shook it heartily, then pulled me carefully into the position he wanted. “Smile!” he said, and an electronic flash went off. One of the pretty girls with the Betsy Ross scarves was taking our picture with a Polaroid. I looked down at the carpet and saw that there was a small, neat little cross on it, presumably duct tape. It was the president’s “mark,” the place every movie actor has to reach exactly in order to be in focus for a scene. The president had hit his mark like the pro that he was, then placed me at just the right angle for a handshake photo. At the end of our talk I was presented with the photo, in a special frame, and Reagan signed it for me.

  This, I realized, was not only routine for visitors; it was, in many cases, the only reason for the visit. People seemed to come to have their pictures taken with Reagan the way they might with Old Faithful or Mickey Mouse, as if he were a kind of tourist attraction. He didn’t seem to mind—on the contrary, he did it with genuine good nature.

  Once we sat down, the president seemed to lose interest in the proceedings. He had done his part; now, it was time for me to do my part, which was to say thank you and go. Since I had substantive questions to ask him, however, I stayed, rather to his surprise, and we chatted briefly, as a kind of warm-up to the big meeting tomorrow, when we would all get together, the president, me, Chuck, Bob Lindsey, and the president’s staff, to discuss the manuscript.

  I apologized for all the press about the Reagans and Kitty Kelley, and particularly for an ill-advised interview with me in the Los Angeles Times, in which I had been quoted as saying, “Let’s face it, Kitty Kelley’s book is not likely to be too flattering, if the past is any guide.” This comment had caused Mrs. Reagan great pain, and been reprinted all over the world, to the discomfort of Dick Snyder and Mort Janklow, the Reagans’ agent—so much so that I had promised not to give any more interviews, despite the fact that I was on tour for my new novel The Fortune, a copy of which I presented to Reagan.

  “Well,” Reagan said pleasantly, his big, rough-hewn hands on my book, “it worried Nancy more than it worried me.” These things happened, he said. He had worked for the big studios. You had commitments, and you had to fulfill them. You couldn’t just renege on them. He understood that.

  I told him that I had agreed to let Kitty Kelley go to another editor, so there would be no conflict of interest in having the same editor for both her book and his. He nodded, and thanked me. He would tell Nancy, and he was sure that it would please her. It would be a load off her mind. For himself, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. It would be hard to imagine a gentler, nicer, more natural, or more sincere person, now that he was no longer just a voice on the telephone—relaxed, easygoing, unhurried, although perhaps a shade remote, I thought, as if none of this really affected him at all. Lindsey’s warning about his coauthor’s lack of introspection had proven only too true. The president was genial, lavish with the anecdotes that were his familiar repertoire, and appeared never to have met a person he didn’t like.

  At one point, we had mapped out a beginning in which the president would relate his thoughts on leaving office, “perhaps what goes through his mind as he flies back across the country in Air Force One, after the inaugural of his successor, passing over this vast country, thinking about where he has come from, his roots, what he has achieved in these past eight years, what is ahead for those who lie sleeping or working
below … as the president of the United States returns to California a simple citizen again.” But no amount of prodding could get the president to reveal what his thoughts, if any, had been on that historic occasion or any other. Given that reticence, Lindsey had done a remarkable job, but there were areas where more was required, symbolized by the fact that Reagan had absolutely refused to even mention his first wife, Jane Wyman, in the book—an omission that I feared might make the reviewers question his willingness to face facts.

  Encouraged, I took up the question of Jane Wyman, and while Reagan’s benign expression didn’t change, his eyes looked a little frosty. Bob Lindsey had already brought that subject up, he said, and he’d thought it was settled. There was no point in going into all that stuff at this late stage. Why, he himself hardly remembered a thing about his marriage to Jane. It was all water under the bridge.

  But it wasn’t quite all water under the bridge, I thought—he had a daughter from that marriage, after all, so he could hardly have forgotten it completely. I pointed out that reviewers were likely to pick up on this, and use it as a stick with which to beat him over the head. If he left out of his book something as simple and well-known as his first marriage—didn’t even mention it!—they would conclude that he was leaving out even more important things.

  “I never pay much attention to critics,” Reagan said placidly. “Never have.” The world was divided between two kinds of people, he said: those who can and those who criticize. The president looked pleased with himself, as if he had just thought this up.

  Ignoring the critics was a sensible attitude, I agreed. I tried to pay no attention to them either, in my own small way. The problem was that what we had here was a big edifice, the integrity of which could be destroyed by concentrating on a single brick. Give the reviewers an excuse to dismiss the book, and they would. Why risk it? I wasn’t looking for a whole chapter about Jane Wyman, after all. A couple of lines would do.