He bristles at the word obsessive, his eyes flashing through his thick, dark glasses. “That implies it’s something strange,” he says. “This is reporting. This is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to turn every page.”
Like the occasion when Caro learned that a college classmate of Johnson’s named Vernon Whiteside was living in a trailer in Florida, but Caro’s source for that information could remember only that Whiteside was living in a town with beach in its name. He and Ina began going through Florida phone directories together, calling every trailer park in every damn Florida town with beach in its name: Boynton Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Walton Beach…. It was Ina who made the call that found Whiteside, in Highland Beach, and she can still hear the confirmation in her ear. Caro flew to Florida unannounced—“It’s harder to say no to a man’s face,” he says—and knocked on the door. Soon Caro found himself inside, filling notepads with scribbled secrets about Johnson’s cruel collegiate rise, then returned to his hotel to type up another transcript to slip into another file to slip into another drawer.
Each of the files is labeled in blood-red ink—Busby, Horace; Jenkins, Walter; The Gulf of Tonkin—and given a code. (A particular file on the assassination of John F. Kennedy is labeled ASS. 107X, for instance.) Caro’s outline contains hundreds of these codes, leading him directly to the file he will need when he is writing that particular section. “I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter,” he says, “and I don’t want to interrupt it, searching through my files.”
So many of the names on the files are of people who have died, most of them long gone, in fact. But in this room, inside those folders, it’s as though they’re still alive. (“It’s not in a strange way,” Caro says. “It’s in a real way.”) Many of the interviews remain vivid memories. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s late former speech-writer and confidant, also lived on Central Park West, and Caro would sometimes stop in on his way home, after another day at the office. Sorensen had gone blind, and he and Caro would sit in his living room, talking, one of them ignoring that the sun had set, the other unaware. “We’d be sitting there in the dark,” Caro says, now finding Sorensen’s folder, and there the departed man is again, with so many of his quotes marked with that familiar red ink, cross-referenced to that finished outline.
Only after he has filled and annotated those notebooks does Caro begin to write, three or four drafts in longhand, on pads of legal paper. With each pass, muscle is added to the frame. Finally, Caro feels prepared to give his fingers wings. “There just comes a point you feel it’s time to go to the typewriter,” he says. He does write quickly; the math dictates that he must. When he finished The Power Broker, it was thirty-three hundred typewritten pages, more than one million words. (Gottlieb cut three hundred thousand: three normal-size books.) Caro’s sentences are long, fluid, intricate. (A single sentence in The Passage of Power contains a parenthetical, an em dash, a colon, a comma, another two commas, a semicolon, two more commas, and a period.) There are stretches in each of his books that feel as though they rolled out of him in flurries, and they feel that way because they did. Three or four more drafts will appear out of that battered Smith-Corona Electra 210, each one hundreds of thousands of words, until he has his final draft.
Even then, Caro is far from finished, crossing out lines and rewriting them, often tearing out paragraphs along the edge of a ruler and taping them into a different place on a different page. There are single pages in his final draft that are three feet long.
“When I’m doing this, I can feel it,” Caro says. “There’s a feeling about it. You feel almost like a cabinetmaker, laying planks. There’s a real feeling when you know you’re getting it right. It’s a physical feeling.”
That hammered and glued final draft is delivered to a typist, Carol Shookhoff, who lives on Central Park West and has typed the last three of Caro’s manuscripts. In her office, the book will become electronic for the first time. It will become a virtual rather than a physical thing, and soon it will be delivered, through the air, to that black glass tower on Broadway. There, it’s turned back into something tangible, into clean white pages to be fought over for months, and finally into galleys, and those galleys are returned to an office on the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building, where Caro now sits, refusing to turn the page until he feels in his body that it is right.
IV. The Apartment
When he is done for the night and turns off his ancient bronze lamp, Caro walks home, fifteen minutes, the same walk he makes every day, past Dino’s Shoe Repair, where his autographed picture hangs on the wall, and through Columbus Circle, to the apartment he and Ina have shared since 1972 or so. (He can’t remember exactly.) The apartment, near the top of an old gray stone co-op building on Central Park West, is expansive by today’s standards, grand and formal, paneled with dark wood. There are many shelves lined with many books, and they open, like doors, to reveal more shelves with more books. There are also photographs. One, black-and-white, is a photo taken of Robert and Ina on the night they met. She was just sixteen; he was nineteen, a young student at Princeton. He is wearing a tuxedo, no glasses yet, his thick hair cut short; she’s wearing a pretty dress. They are standing close to each other, smiling—his smile is wide; hers is shy. They had talked about books that night. “He wants his books to last because he had studied those books that had lasted,” Ina says. They have been together since.
She is a writer, too—her fixation is France—and she has been the only research assistant Caro has ever had. In her high school yearbook, which she pulls off the shelf, she painted her dream life under her portrait: “research worker.” She has lived her dream life: She has labored over boxes of documents, tracked down sources, made countless phone calls to places like Highland Beach to find men like Vernon Whiteside. She was her husband’s emissary when they traveled into the Texas Hill Country, trying to sift Johnson’s childhood out of the dust and the old women who lived there and remembered him as the man who brought them electric light. She even sold that pretty little house in Roslyn, unannounced, when they could no longer afford it, after Caro had spent so many moneyless years on The Power Broker, long having burned through his small advance. With their young son, they moved to an apartment in the Bronx. “We were broke,” Caro says. “It was a horrible, horrible time.” That’s when he worked out of the library, when his key to the Allen Room, a shelter for homeless writers, “was my most prized possession.” He can remember how much their rent was exactly, $362.73, because it was a figure that filled him with fear.
When Caro had signed on to write The Power Broker, in 1966, he thought it would take him a year. After four years, he had written 500,000 words and wasn’t half done. Caro’s original contract was with Simon & Schuster, which was headed by a young editor in chief named Robert Gottlieb. (“I couldn’t think of anything more boring,” Gottlieb says today, “but I said okay.”) Caro sent his mountain of paper to his editor, a former classmate of his named Richard Kluger. He also made an appeal for more money so that his family didn’t starve while he finished his work. Kluger invited Caro for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side, where he delivered his answer: Simon & Schuster wasn’t going to give him any more money. In fact, it didn’t see much potential in this book that was so long and so many years late. It didn’t even like the title.
Caro left the restaurant bone numb. Back out on the street, he pointed himself north, toward that cursed apartment in the Bronx. He began to walk. “I walked the length of Broadway,” he says, “and back then, that wasn’t something you really did.” Block after block he walked, past 96th Street, 110th, 126th, 168th. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had he written a bad book? Caro felt trapped: in too deep to abandon his book, too far away from finishing it to continue. Ina remembers receiving her husband that night, ruined. Her anger is still in her voice today: “I was livid,” she says. “I just thought they’d treated him miserably.” They sat down and talked into the night. “He’s such a beaut
iful writer,” she says. “I just always felt everything would work out.”
There was a single line in his contract that changed Caro’s fate. If his editor left Simon & Schuster, he could leave, too. And not long after that night, Kluger left for a rival publisher, Atheneum, and Caro took his pile of paper to the open market.
A friend gave him a list of four agents; he met with each of them. “Three of them were men who looked like me,” he says—dark-rimmed glasses, jackets with elbow patches. The fourth was a petite young woman from Dundee, Illinois, named Lynn Nesbit. She had, by then, a burgeoning Manhattan career (for reasons that still remain unclear to her, Tom Wolfe had agreed to become one of her early clients); the agency she helped start would become, in time, International Creative Management. But Caro didn’t choose her because of that. He chose her because she wasn’t him.
Nesbit, today one of the principals of Janklow & Nesbit, sits in her sunlit office, and the iconic names of her clients jump out from the shelves: Michael Crichton, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides. But she can still remember sitting down to read those first 500,000 words of Robert Caro’s.
“I thought, Who’s Robert Moses?” she says. “I was young and hadn’t been in New York City that many years. I didn’t really know who he was. And then I started reading the manuscript, this incredibly compelling narrative about this man I knew nothing about. He came alive.”
She turned the last page and made two phone calls. The first was to Caro. He remembers it as one of the great moments of his life. “I know you’ve been worried,” she said. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”
Soon Nesbit made her second phone call. She had known immediately the man she hoped would buy The Power Broker: Gottlieb, now the editor in chief at Knopf. “I didn’t know what we had,” Gottlieb says today of his brush with Caro at Simon & Schuster. “It was just a wonderful book.” Gottlieb gave Caro enough money to finish his book, and to write a second, and to move to Central Park West.
After The Power Broker had become a giant success, winning the Pulitzer and selling hundreds of thousands of copies, Caro visited Gottlieb. The next book was supposed to be a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, but privately, each man had been having his doubts. Caro wanted to write about power, and he had written already about urban power, about the shaping of cities and streets. He wanted to do something bigger. Gottlieb had found his mind equally untied, and now he thought for a few seconds.
“You have to understand,” Gottlieb says today, “I have a megalomaniac’s confidence in my instincts. You decide this, and you make the best of it. If you make the wrong decision, tough shit.”
Gottlieb looked up at Caro and said, “How about Johnson?”
V. The Coliseum
For years, it loomed over Columbus Circle, on the southwest corner of Central Park. If Robert Caro stood in the second of his two office windows, he could look up Eighth Avenue and see the New York Coliseum’s white-brick facade and the four cast-aluminum medallions that decorated it. Three of the medallions—each eleven feet square and weighing twelve hundred pounds—depicted the federal, state, and city seals. The fourth represented the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which, under the chairmanship of Robert Moses, had built the Coliseum in 1956.
Moses had named it the Coliseum because he thought the exhibition hall, and its adjacent twenty-story office block, would rival Rome’s for longevity. He had always believed that through his buildings he would live forever. (The authority’s emblem included a bridge that Moses had built, the Bronx-Whitestone, and a tunnel that he had built, the Brooklyn-Battery.) “He used to ask me about The Power Broker, ‘How long will it last?’” Caro says, looking out that same window today. “‘In a short while, it will be yesterday’s news.’ That’s what he would say to me.” Moses had good reason to believe in his own work: The Coliseum’s soaring ceiling was supported by seven massive steel trusses, each two stories high and 120 feet long. Almost from the beginning of its life, the Coliseum was regarded as an architectural blight, a cold and faceless divide between midtown and the Upper West Side. But structurally, it was faultless.
In the fall of 1999, Caro watched when the four medallions were carefully removed from the building’s face and trucked away. And for much of the following year, he would get up from his desk and watch while the Coliseum was dismantled piece by piece, those seven steel trusses cut into sections, all those white bricks crumbled into piles. And then Caro would go back to his desk, working under the light of his lamp, and roll another clean sheet into his Smith-Corona.
“When they tore it down, I felt something about books,” Caro says. “When they tore it down, I felt something about books.”
The Power Broker, like all of Caro’s books, has never been out of print.
A sixty-one-year-old man named Andy Hughes has designed and built each of Caro’s books since The Path to Power. In one of those cosmic turns, Hughes was a child when Caro first entered his field of view: His father, also named Andy, was Caro’s libel lawyer, first at Newsday and then for all of his books. Andy Hughes, the son, then found his way to Knopf, where he has worked since 1979 and today is its chief of production and design. He is tall, lean, with a smoker’s voice and a deep understanding of the architecture of books. Typography, binding techniques, paper weights and measures—for Hughes, a book is the sum of its physical parts, of hinges and gutters and spines.
Like almost everyone else in Caro’s small publishing ecosystem, Hughes keeps the books within arm’s reach, and like the others, he’s almost compelled to touch them when he talks about them. One by one, he pulls them off the shelf. Running his long fingers over the first volume, he marvels. “How did we survive? How did we do this?” Caro has been at his work for so long, his books span the modern history of book making. The Path to Power, published in 1982, was printed using hot-metal typesetting, on a Linotype machine; its handsome cover lettering was drawn meticulously by hand. Means of Ascent, published in 1990, was part of the computer-mainframe generation. Master of the Senate, published in 2002, was the easiest to create, via desktop publishing. Still, even with newer digital technology at his disposal, Hughes is anxious about The Passage of Power. Not only are the galleys late—“It’s getting really tight,” he says—but time is falling away from Hughes in other ways.
It’s important to him that each of Caro’s books looks and feels the same as the previous one and the next. He wants them to be built to last. Unfortunately, book building is another dying art. Bindings are glued instead of stitched; most hardcovers are made from paper rather than cloth; hinges aren’t as sharp as they used to be and half rounds aren’t as tight. “These are just things that have been lost in the march of time,” Hughes says. Today, he looks at books and sees weakness as often as he sees beauty.
He sees it especially in something he calls “mousetrapping,” one of our invisible modern plagues. He opens the three Caro books to demonstrate: Each stays open on his desk. Each lies flat. Hughes then finds a more recent book, and no matter how much he cracks its spine, it wants to snap shut. “It’s like we’re asking readers to close them,” he says. The Passage of Power, Hughes says, will lie flat. He has a printer in Berryville, Virginia, that will make this book the way the others were made. It will be wrapped with the same thick black cloth, stamped with the same gold lettering, printed with the same pleasing wide gutter and colored endpaper. Hughes rises in his chair when he imagines it—he can picture himself opening those heavy cardboard boxes when they arrive from Virginia, hopefully sometime before May. “I’ll be absolutely thrilled. It’s pure joy for me, and it’s never gone away.”
But first, Robert Caro must finish with his galleys.
A few days later, back in the Fisk Building, he has finally beaten the fifth paragraph on page 452, and now he is tearing through the rest of his book. Now he has that physical feeling again. He is soaring.
VI. The Last Line
Caro recently extended his lease at the Fisk Bui
lding. He’s practically finished with this book, and then all he will have left are the notes and the index. Maybe another hundred pages. He’ll be done by early March, he says. And the fifth book, the last book, is all right here, waiting for him. After The Passage of Power comes out, he’s going to take Ina to France, but then he’ll be back here, back in his office, back at his work.
His research is finished, he says. “Mostly, anyway.” His outline is pinned up on the wall, and it will not change. He even has some sections of it written, first drafts—including the first of two chapters on Bill Moyers (“He wrote a lot of memos,” Caro says, “so I got him”)—and he knows what to do with the rest. Nobody believes it, but he writes very fast. “I think I can write the next book in two or three years,” he says. He tries not to think that people are waiting, the way he tries not to think about many things, but he knows that they—Mehta and Gottlieb and Hourigan, and Andy Hughes and Lynn Nesbit and Carol Shookhoff the typist, all the people who have touched his books from the beginning, who are touching this one now—are out there waiting all the same, just around the corner.
A few of them, like so many of the men and women frozen in Caro’s files, will not see how this story ends. Nina Bourne, Knopf’s legendary copywriter, died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three, having still come into the office until a few months before her death. Andy Hughes the libel lawyer is now eighty-nine and in an assisted-living facility in Florida.
The others? “Oh, I’ll still be here,” Andy Hughes the book builder says. “I want to see this through.”
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