Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  “Not enough,” I told Flip.

  Long pause. “Really? Is something else going on?” Flip was both a great negotiator and a wise observer of human nature. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to,” she said. “But you need to be honest with me and with yourself.”

  “I don’t know. I do want to do this. I’m just . . .”

  Flip got them up to an even higher fee, more than any I had landed so far. In the end, I accepted the job because it was a lot of money, too much money for a freelance writer to turn down. And having this on my résumé would elevate me into the first tier of ghostwriters, enabling me to permanently up my rates.

  The other reason I took it was that nearly everyone around me said I’d be crazy not to. When I think back to that moment, I’m reminded of John Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl. Based on a Mexican folktale, it’s the story of a poor pearl diver in Mexico who finds an enormous pearl, “perfect as the moon,” and the cascading disasters that happen in his life after he finds it. Like the difficulties of some modern-day lottery winners, his own actions as well as those of others who prey upon him make him wish he had never found the pearl.

  I just couldn’t shake the bad feeling that started in my gut and settled in my chest, somewhere between anxiety and dread. I’m not saying that I foresaw that this project would become my own “pearl,” but just that I felt uneasy. Am I confusing hindsight with sensing regret? Or do I wish I had never gone down the ghostwriting path at all? I thought it was a practical application of my love of writing. When I graduated from Berkeley, I thought I was going to be a writer. As a “writer” I pictured myself writing novels in a garret and somehow magically that garret’s rent would take care of itself.

  My father, who wanted me to follow my siblings to law school, warned early and often that I would struggle to make a living as a writer. He had grown up during the Depression and, though I didn’t find this out until years after I graduated from college, he wanted to be a journalist or an English professor but instead he became a salesman and eventually founded his own small company. His concern for me pursuing a career as a writer was really just his own fear projected.

  When I told him the First Lady had chosen me (!) to write her book, I knew I was putting a period at the end of any sentence about law school or bad choices forevermore. He was in kvelling overdrive, bragging to everyone he met between Chicago and Miami.

  During the past twenty-four years, I have counseled hundreds of students whose hearts were pulling them toward newsrooms or publishing houses and their parents were tugging them toward law school. Go to law school if you yearn to be a lawyer. Become a writer if you yearn to write. Note that the last sentence lacks parallelism. I said if you “yearn to write” not “yearn to become a writer.” There’s a difference.

  If the romance of “being a writer” is what draws you, forget about it. Not to be a buzzkill but “being a writer” is as much about estimated taxes, paying your own health insurance, and getting rejected on a regular basis as it is about adoring audiences, bylines, and book tours. The students who have a compulsion to write are the ones who will figure out how to make a living doing it. So, yes, go try the writing thing, I tell the obsessed ones. With one caveat: Be a writer but marry a lawyer.

  My students who are now successful writers and journalists thank me for that advice more than for anything else I’ve tried to impart in the classroom or during office hours. And I’ve had a few who have become lawyers or consultants and confided in me that they wished they had listened to me.

  I knew right away that I would have to move back to the city. I needed to be available on the spur of the moment to work with the First Lady, and I also needed the resources of a big library. This was pre-Google so whatever I couldn’t find in the files supplied by the White House, I would need to track down through LexisNexis or some other database.

  I rented an apartment in Dupont Circle, around the corner from the Washington Hilton, where President Reagan had been shot, near shops and restaurants, just a mile and a half from the White House. My agent handled the details of my book contract, including when I would be paid and by whom, what expenses would be covered, and how I would be acknowledged in the book. The contract included a confidentiality clause.

  I was quickly consumed by the task at hand: to make something out of nothing. There wasn’t even a working title, much less an idea. The editor I would be working with was someone I didn’t know, but we spoke on the phone and she sounded lovely. Shortly after that she came down from New York, and we had a few meetings at the White House with the First Lady to figure out a plan.

  The book would showcase Mrs. Clinton’s work on behalf of children and her commitment to various issues and policies concerning women and children. Her staff gave me copies of her speeches and other public documents so I could learn what the First Lady’s position was on various issues, and I began poring over hundreds of pages. This was all helpful, but the book’s shape, its narrative arc, and its overarching point—all that was still unresolved. We would figure all this out by my interviewing the First Lady about relevant topics—mainly what she had learned through the years in her various advocacy roles on behalf of policies related to children. I was to take what she told me, along with what I could find in her files of speeches and other written material, and cobble together first drafts. She would use those as a starting point to make it her own and then it would come back to me and then I would send it on to our editor.

  I was reassured that her scheduler understood that this project was a priority and would try to fit me in accordingly so that we could make our deadline. It was February and Simon & Schuster wanted a completed manuscript by the end of the summer, if possible. Every book has its own way of coming into being and this one did not seem unusual except for the high-profile nature of its author. I knew that I needed to get down to business and not allow myself to become preoccupied by gossip and rumors.

  One of the first things I wanted to do was come up with a title. Since the book didn’t really have a direction or even a thesis, I thought that a title might help us get moving. Before I got this gig, I had begun some work on a magazine piece about successful businesswomen, and I had already scheduled an interview up in New York with the head of a record label. I didn’t want to cancel the interview, even though I wasn’t sure I was going to have time to bang out a feature piece while also writing a book. During my conversation with the recording executive, I asked her how she had been so successful professionally while dealing with a lot of personal challenges. “Well, you know there’s this old African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child . . .’”

  As soon as we finished the interview, I asked the record exec’s assistant if I could use a phone. I couldn’t wait to call the book editor. “I think I’ve got a great title,” I said softly into the phone. The right title, as most writers know, can be vexingly elusive. The right title can brand a book, but even more valuably, it can chart its direction and define its thesis or focus.

  I was anxious to get back to D.C. and go through Mrs. Clinton’s speeches. If I could find an occasion in which she had actually used the phrase, it would indicate that the title was a good fit, that it was organically suited for Mrs. Clinton’s book.

  After an hour or two combing through binders of her speeches, I found an instance where Mrs. Clinton had used the phrase. When I had called our editor and test-drove the title, she loved it, as did the First Lady. That set in motion all the things that come with a title: the book jacket’s design, promotional copy, and, most important, the book’s actual framework. Before long we were producing chapters that fit into the “village” theme. Sometimes a title can do that—help to frame and clarify a book’s overarching point. I felt like it was divine intervention—or desperation as the clock kept ticking: whatever it was, after we secured the title we were able to hammer out an outline and from there, we could figure out what direction our interviews and research should go in. Working on the
book turned out to have three phases that involved me.

  The first phase started in February, when I was hired, and lasted through May. During that time I would go over to the White House once or twice a week when the First Lady was in town. I would interview her for an hour or so, sometimes in the residence and sometimes in other areas of the White House, depending on what she was doing. After each interview, the tape was sent out to be transcribed and then I was given the transcript to flesh out early drafts of chapters.

  I spent a fair amount of time with her during those interviews. Watching her in action over those first several months, I became fixated on her nodding habit—the thing I had found so comforting in our initial meeting when she interviewed me. I was now beginning to nod very slowly and frequently myself, much like she did. I began to wonder, as I started doing it myself, if the nodding was a way of keeping people at bay, of not letting them into her thought process. If you are listening, it means you aren’t the one offering information. Again, a politician’s instincts for self-preservation were at odds with an author’s need to reveal. Though it was ostensibly a policy book, there were also expectations that there would be a through-line running directly from the First Lady’s heart to what appeared on the page.

  As I had on other book projects, I found the work to be alternatively stressful and isolating. The group of people whom a ghost has contact with is pretty limited: the subject, who is usually pretty busy and distracted with his or her own celebrity; the editor and her minions, who are usually overworked and hard to nail down; and whoever the ghost is tasked with interviewing or obtaining information from. So while this had sounded like a dream job to my friends and acquaintances, it was mostly like any other project, complete with deadlines and headaches.

  There were of course some perks, like stealing White House stationery or getting to ride on Air Force One (actually referred to as Executive One Foxtrot when the First Lady was flying without her husband) to accompany Mrs. Clinton to an appearance on Oprah’s show in Chicago on Tuesday, May 16, 1995, when she said that parents in particular, and society in general, needed to get more involved in child rearing.

  My father, who still lived in Chicago, had remarried and was living downtown. When he heard the First Lady would be appearing on Oprah, he called and asked if I was coming to town with her, and could he and my stepmother meet her. I knew she had been very gracious to her staffers’ families and so I asked if there was any possible way they could just stand outside the building and say hello as we were leaving the show. She said absolutely and stopped to meet them and take photographs with them. It was worth it to see my dad’s face, beaming, and know he would never, ever again question my decision to become a writer and not do something more practical with my life.

  A mosaic of memories is imprinted on my mind. It was such a busy, pressure cooker time in my life that much of it is a blur. But discrete moments stand out, like one that happened early on when our editor came down from New York to work on the book with us in the White House. Mrs. Clinton was busy with an event—her schedule was always jam-packed with what seemed like an endless parade of silly and time-wasting activities that were obligations hard to dodge.

  The editor and I sneaked out on a balcony where we plotted to steal a moment to smoke. Neither of us were big smokers, but circumstances made the allure of a nicotine break hard to resist. We lit up, inhaled, and just as we were blowing out smoke, we looked up to see a Secret Service sharpshooter above us, on the White House roof, checking us out. We put out our cigarettes and retreated inside, nervously giggling.

  The second phase of my work with the First Lady came toward the summer, when instead of going over to the White House just once or twice a week I went over several times a week. I worked in the first family’s residence, in Mrs. Clinton’s home office. I would start the day arriving in the ushers’ office and either an usher would escort me up to the residence or they would call Capricia Marshall, who was a special assistant to the First Lady, to come get me. I liked Capricia. She was pleasant and friendly and always made me feel at home. I could see she was under a lot of pressure, but she was the type who would smile through it all.

  The room I worked in was on the third floor of the residence. It was modest size with two desks and a sitting area. Sometimes Mrs. Clinton worked at the other desk, but often I was there alone. One evening when I was working late by myself, the phone rang.

  I didn’t usually answer it because no one would be calling me at the White House. In general, I tiptoed around the place, terrified of making a wrong move, committing some sort of a faux pas. But the phone kept ringing and ringing, and I thought I had better pick it up. I said hello, and the woman on the other end identified herself as a White House operator. She asked if I had seen the president.

  “Um, no, I haven’t,” I said, waiting to hear what she would say next.

  I remembered that when I first starting working at the White House, one of the young women on the First Lady’s staff had given me an informal tour and pointed out an electronic box that tracked the president’s movements by GPS. It struck me as a bit odd that the operator was trying to track him down the old-fashioned way.

  “You haven’t?” she said. Did she think I was harboring a sitting president?

  “No, really, I haven’t seen him,” I insisted, and then, to underscore my statement, I added, “Ever.”

  It was true. By this time, I had been working in the White House for four or five months and, much to my disappointment, I had never set eyes on him.

  I had begun to worry that I would come to the end of the book without having ever gotten to meet the president. I wanted to meet him because, well, he was the president, and I had voted for him and also I was just plain curious about what he was like in person.

  Soon after that exchange with the operator, I got my wish.

  Mrs. Clinton and I were working in her office, and it was coming up on the dinner hour. I heard someone at the door and looked up from my screen and saw President Clinton there, smiling. Mrs. Clinton introduced me, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then he said he’d see her at dinner and disappeared. A few minutes later, she got up from her desk.

  “Do you want to join us?” she asked.

  “Join you?” Did she mean for dinner? And “us”—did she mean her and the president? Of the United States?

  “For dinner. Would you like to join us?”

  Dinner with the president of the United States and his wife. What an honor. And then I looked down and realized I was wearing sneakers. When we had first started working together, I had dressed up for the White House, but as the weeks wore on, I realized I was working mostly alone, and the days were long so I had begun to dress for comfort, seeing only an occasional aide or a researcher and the butlers who brought us lunch on a tray.

  There they were. My New Balance sneakers. And they weren’t that new. I couldn’t possibly eat dinner with the president of the United States.

  “I’m not really dressed for—”

  “It’s fine,” she said, smiling warmly. “Please join us.”

  A few minutes later, I found myself seated at a small table in the solarium with President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and Kaki Hockersmith, an interior designer friend from Little Rock who had done the Clinton White House private quarters redecoration in 1993. It reportedly cost close to four hundred thousand dollars. Like many White House decorating costs, it was criticized even though the funding had come from private sources.

  The president asked how the book was going and then asked some general questions about the state of the publishing industry. I managed to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. His responses seemed to indicate that I was making sense, but I can’t swear to that.

  Then Kaki presented the president with an early birthday present, a framed sketch of famous 1940s and 1950s Hollywood stars in silhouette all mingling around a pool. We spent some time trying to determine who was who. This triggered the president
to talk about his love for the movie High Noon.

  During all this, our food was served. Though usually I have a healthy appetite, I couldn’t possibly eat and instead pushed my food around the plate. When the butler was clearing our plates, as he took mine he winked at me.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so nervous.”

  He leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about it. Most people can’t eat around the president, at least not the first time.”

  Afterward we walked down the hall, and I stopped at Mrs. Clinton’s office, where I planned to keep working. The president said something about heading to the White House theater to watch a movie with “Steve.” My memory is that he indicated he meant Spielberg (!). I figured the famous director, who was a big Democratic donor, was a guest at the White House but had had a dinner engagement in the city. Maybe I would run into him getting a late-night snack.

  “Are you joining us?” President Clinton said politely as we approached the office.

  “I need to get back to work, but thank you,” I said quickly.

  The book was due to Simon & Schuster by summer’s end, and the pressure was mounting as our deadline approached because this was an incredibly tight production schedule, tighter than any I had ever been involved with. It looked like it was going to become necessary for me to accompany the Clintons on the seventeen-day family vacation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August.

  This sounds like a great trip, but I knew I would be stuck in some motel when I wasn’t working with the First Lady on the book. What followed would be the final phase of my work on the book. There would be little to no downtime, and I would be thousands of miles away from my friends and family. And that’s exactly what happened, and to make matters worse, I sprained my ankle a week before we were leaving. I was on crutches and not very adept at using them.

  Mrs. Clinton saw me struggling to get to and from the White House, and she suggested I stay in one of the spare bedrooms in the residence. I slept there for three nights, in a room just down the hall from Mrs. Clinton’s home office. It was very convenient, plus it gave me bragging rights.