Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  If the prognosticators were right and the modern world really did come to a standstill at Y2K, we wouldn’t even notice as we were surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. The world could sort out its technological issues while we drank the local Chianti and hunted for black truffles.

  The first night we ate dinner at Marcelo’s parents’ table, my bad Italian serving as the only means of communication between our hosts and us. The second day Marcelo’s mother brought us an armful of leeks and taught Dennis, through pantomime, how to make leek risotto, a recipe he has made countless times over the last sixteen years for friends and family. The third day I asked for directions to the local butcher because I wanted to buy a chicken (mainly because it’s one of the few things I could remember how to say: Per favore, vorrei comprare un pollo.)

  Instead of directions, Marcelo’s mother briefly disappeared and then presented us with a chicken she had just slaughtered, just for us. I’ll leave out the details here. It tasted great but nearly rendered me a vegetarian.

  It was here, without the Internet or a television or even a radio, that I was finally alone with my thoughts. I would look out the window of our rustic cottage, an old barn converted for the modern comforts that tourists expected, and see nothing but vineyards for miles and miles. Dennis would take Sasha out to give me some space, accompanying Marcelo’s father as he hunted boar (okay, just pretending with a two-year-old along) or observed a herd of goats in the road and had a tour of the vineyards and learned about harvesting grapes. Dennis speaks no Italian, and Marcelo’s father no English so, again, pantomime was the primary mode of communication.

  One morning, coffee cup in hand, I sat at the desk in front of the window, gazing at the rows of grapevines. It felt like something was waiting to be written. I didn’t know what. Out poured a several-thousand-word piece on ghostwriting in which I reflected on it as both a craft and a commercial endeavor. It also took shape as a declaration to give up the ghost. But first I had to explore why I had stuck with it for so many years.

  If it was a detour, why hadn’t I renavigated by now? What was the appeal of ghostwriting? I asked myself. Why had I been drawn to it, or at least not recoiled from it when I fell into it accidentally? It was alluring because it allowed me into worlds I wouldn’t gain entry to otherwise. But that access did not give me the license to use what I observed, unlike a reporter’s ability to use most of the material he or she gathers. So the trouble I was having was reconciling the tension between access and authority.

  Also the proximity to power was fun. Being needed by someone who has a story the world wants to hear can be irresistible. But with that proximity comes dependency, sometimes in the form of codependency. Take for example one of my favorite ghostwriter stories of all time, that of baseball great Ty Cobb, who employed a journalist named Al Stump to write his autobiography. Things went bad quickly, mainly because Cobb was reportedly a miserable human being who made everyone in his orbit miserable. According to author Ben Yagoda, “Stump quit the project twice and was fired once. But he always came back. He was living out a ghostwriter’s weird version of Stockholm syndrome.”

  Stockholm syndrome! Brilliant. It sounds hyperbolic, but any writer who has spent a lot of time with her subject can relate. Whether the subject is someone you’ve met or a fictional or historical character, research breeds a psychological intimacy. I can understand how it happens. The techniques of ghostwriting or character development foster sympathy that inevitably grows into empathy. To evoke characters—whether they are fictional or real—you first have to understand them before you share them. What are their motivations? Can you, the writer, find something in your own interior life that helps you empathize with your character’s inner life?

  No trait is more important for a ghost than empathy, something that is typically encouraged more in girls than in boys. As a ghost I had to convince myself that I was, for a time, another person. There were tangible things I did to achieve this: study the rhythm and cadence of the other’s speech patterns and vocabulary preferences, writing style, politics, sensibilities, and philosophies. I looked at family photo albums, reviewed footage of TV appearances and other available material.

  One of the things that helped me most in constructing a voice was employing my version of the Stanislavski method, a “grammar of acting,” which instructs an actor through a series of techniques involving the concept of emotional memory, the internal triggering of emotions to become one with a character. Whether you’re up on a stage or in front of a keyboard, you connect with your own memories to express someone else’s feelings. I may not have cheated on my wife, but I can dig into the reservoir of crappy things I’ve done and come up with something to feel bad about.

  I may not know what it’s like to live in the shadow of a famous relative, but I have certainly felt jealousy about others who are more talented and successful. And a funny thing happens when you not only walk in someone else’s shoes but also actually take up residence in their past: you blur the line between their lives and yours. Not in any sort of real or psycho way, but in a more deeply personal interior way.

  Besides trying to get inside someone else’s skin emotionally, I also needed to sound like my subject, or at least sound the way I think others would expect the person to sound. This takes what Vassar professor Donald Foster calls “literary forensics.” If Foster’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was plucked from Ivy Tower obscurity when a novel called Primary Colors, based on Bill Clinton’s first presidential primary, identified its author as “anonymous,” setting off a flurry of speculation as to who really wrote the roman à clef. Finally, New York magazine cracked the case when they consulted with Professor Foster, an expert in authenticating Shakespeare manuscripts. He ran Primary Colors through his computer software, studying all sorts of language markers such as sentence and paragraph length, vocabulary and punctuation patterns. Voilà! He determined that Joe Klein was the author.

  The FBI then got the idea to use Foster for cases involving the written word such as the Unabomber’s manifesto and the JonBenét Ramsey kidnapping ransom note. Foster’s batting average turned out to be mixed but, for my purposes, there were techniques to be appropriated for my own work. Does your subject have favorite words? Phrases? Anecdotes? Themes? Does she speak and think in fully formed perfect paragraphs or does she interrupt herself a lot, digress? Does he use humor? Is he someone who pays attention to the details of language? Would he know how to properly use a semicolon? Is his style more folksy or wonky? If you’re using old speeches to refashion into autobiography, how does the language need to be massaged to work for the eye rather than the ear?

  Joe Queenan wrote a hilarious New York Times essay on ghostwriting gone wrong and noted what happens when you hew a bit too closely to your subject’s oratory: “Hillary Rodham Clinton put her name on a vast, unprecedentedly uninteresting autobiography, waiting until page 529 before disclosing that her speechwriter was responsible for many of the words in the book, which, coincidentally, read like the world’s longest speech.”

  Sometimes it’s not just typing, though you couldn’t tell that from the mail I get, often from people who want to become ghosts themselves: “I’m unpublished, uneducated, and inexperienced in the field . . . the idea of ghostwriting appealed to me . . . HOW does one become a ghostwriter? I can’t imagine I could put out an ad for politicians in hot water or aging Olympians.”

  I also get a lot of inquiries from strangers who want me to write their books on spec, meaning no money up front, but they are sure they have a bestseller on their hands and that the story will practically tell itself. These include associates of “celebrities” who want to tell the truth about Hollywood or Wall Street or an elite enclave, claiming that their story, if shared with the public, will blow the lid open on “wealthy industrialists” and “high-priced ruthless attorneys” and even “save lives.”

  Sometimes it’s their own life they want to save, writing from a correctional facility. One such
letter was from a convicted bank robber with multiple personalities. No thanks, I thought, it’s hard enough capturing one voice. Another from a misunderstood embezzler. Then there are those who appealed to my ego, one writer claiming that because I had been “denounced,” my “boldness” prompted her to want me as a collaborator.

  And, finally, I get a lot of inquiries from journalists writing about my experiences with Hillary Clinton: one noting “lots of inconsistent reporting about it floating around,” another asking about the role of ego in the process: “Does it ever creep up, when the praise is coming in and people are talking about the book you wrote but are not credited for publicly, do you ever mutter darkly into your whiskey ‘you jerks don’t even know’?”

  As vexing as I ultimately found the whole business of midwifing others’ books, it gave me the opportunity to go places emotionally that I never would have gone on my own. The fiction writer, the ghostwriter, and the thespian all get to test-drive personas in the safety of the creative process. Looking back, it unsettles me how seamlessly I took on the role of an emotional chameleon. I want to believe that the gravitational pull between me and ghosting was empathy, but it was more likely a defense mechanism. It was much less of a risk to work on other people’s books—or so I thought—than to pursue my own projects. This work was a safe haven from my own fear of failure. I didn’t articulate this to myself then, but I must have intuited it deep within.

  We returned to the villa in January and stayed there into the blissful spring, friends and family visiting us and accompanying us on weekend trips to Tuscan wineries and seaside villages. Another six months passed before we returned to Washington and another year before I tried to find a home for the article I wrote. I was ambivalent about lifting the veil (or the sheet; these ghost allusions are tedious but nearly automatic by now).

  Finally, I submitted it to the Association of Writing Programs’ magazine, the Writer’s Chronicle, a well-regarded literary and academic publication that was not on the radar of the Washington press. It was exactly the sort of low-key venue I was comfortable with. I still didn’t want to be noticed, but so much had been written about me without my input that I wanted to document a few basic facts about my work as a ghost.

  I had hoped this personal essay would put an end to this for me.

  Wishful thinking.

  Twelve

  Learning to Vanish

  I’m a beautician, not a magician.

  —Bumper sticker seen on the Pacific Coast Highway

  We bought a modest Cape Cod house on a tree-lined cul-de-sac in Arlington, Virginia, just off the George Washington Parkway, a stone’s throw from Key Bridge. Our neighborhood, Woodmont, was three miles from Georgetown’s main campus. A favorite selling point for local real estate agents was that Woodmont was “one stoplight from the District.”

  That was true: Dennis and I could walk or bike to work except during the worst days of the winter. Still our house felt far removed from the hustle and bustle of urban living and the craziness of political Washington. Here, I thought, we can raise our little girl in peace. From our quiet suburban neighborhood you could see Washington off in the distance—the best vantage point from which to admire its beauty.

  The harried pace of our Washington lives eclipsed our recent Italian bliss. We quickly settled into our new community and too easily slipped back into our teaching routines. The habit of leisurely pasta lunches, drinking Chianti in Chianti, and long afternoon naps receded, too soon becoming faraway and another-lifetime sort of memories.

  Our daughter made friends with children in the neighborhood, and we with their parents, hanging out at the bus stop or on the playground, chatting about our kids, our jobs, and our plans. When asked, I told people I was a journalism professor. Unless someone did some online sleuthing, my adventures in ghostwriting didn’t come up.

  Our commute was the most relaxing part of the day. I never grew tired of walking across Key Bridge, which connects northern Virginia to Georgetown. To the east lay the Kennedy Center, Roosevelt Island, the Watergate, and the Washington Monument and to the west, the beautiful banks of the Potomac and the trio of tiny islands called the Three Sisters. I love the myth of how this island cluster got its name: three young Algonquian sisters drowned during an attempt to rescue their brothers, who had been kidnapped by a rival tribe. The girls then turned into islands.

  Some people say the islands emit a slow chiming, moaning sound when another victim is about to lose his or her life to the river’s dangerous undercurrent. I’m not alone in finding the Three Sisters a compelling topic. They appear in a handful of novels, including Breena Clarke’s River, Cross My Heart, in which the narrator ominously noted: “Legends abound that the Potomac River is a widowmaker, a childtaker, and a woman-swallower. According to the most famous tale, the river has already swallowed three sisters, three Catholic nuns. Yet it did not swallow them, only drowned them and belched them back up in the form of three small islands . . . Nobody in his right mind goes swimming near the Three Sisters. The river has hands for sure at this spot. Maybe even the three nuns themselves, beneath the water’s surface, are grabbing at ankles to pull down some company.”

  The weird mythology around the Three Sisters feeds this town’s appetite for both conspiracy theories and for the supernatural. Moaning apparitions, revengeful spirits—as much as I tried, I couldn’t get away from all things ghostly. Not only are they in abundance in this town, they feed into my belief that there is more here than meets the eye.

  Regardless of whether three women actually died in the Potomac, the cluster of islands is more than just a source of mythmaking. There is a long history of people and organizations that have tried to incorporate a bridge involving the Three Sisters into a greater transportation project. Grandiose plans involving the Three Sisters began with Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, the architect charged by President Washington with laying our “Federal City,” and more recently in the 1960s, those plans were revisited when a freeway and six-lane bridge were proposed by a group of legislators until the Foxhall Community Association, on the D.C. side, among others, killed the project. That particular plan had the Three Sisters Bridge ending just at Spout Run Parkway, the exit on George Washington Parkway that leads right to Woodmont.

  The bridge separated us from the city, and though it was easy to cross, it provided a comforting psychological barrier. It not only separated suburb from city, but me from my past. After my ghost essay was published in 2002, I retreated into teaching. The essay had been my Dear John letter, and with its publication I vowed to turn down all ghostwriting offers, no matter how lucrative. It was just too draining, emotionally and mentally, both on the page and in the flesh. I wanted to live my own life, and I wanted that life to be calm, even placid.

  I lulled myself into believing that bad memories and the aspects of the city associated with them were far away. But now and then I still ran headfirst into my past.

  One of those times was on a snowy day in 2005, as my sister and I were making our way to our car in a synagogue parking lot. We had just attended a friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. A man approached us and said his battery was dead and that AAA said it would take hours to come help. Did we happen to have jumper cables?

  We did, we said, and readily agreed to help. As I retrieved the cables from the trunk, I remarked that he looked awfully familiar but that I couldn’t place him. “I think I’ve seen you on TV,” I said, a common enough statement in Washington. He smiled and replied, “For a time I was on TV quite often. I was Mrs. Clinton’s attorney.” He held out his hand, and I took it. My face flushed as I realized who he was.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Kendall. We’re actually old friends,” I joked. “I’m Barbara Feinman.”

  “Only in Washington,” I muttered to my sister as I got back in the car. She couldn’t hear me over the sound of her own laughter.

  Teaching proved to be a much better complement to family life than ghostwriting, though it came with its own set
of frustrations. Georgetown didn’t have any other full-time journalism professors, or even a formal journalism program, and I don’t have a Ph.D., so there was no precedent for an outsider like me securing tenure. With no hope of attaining this academic rite of passage, I was rendered invisible.

  In a system preoccupied with rank and tenure, being an adjunct, a lecturer, an instructor, or even a “visiting professor” (faculty are known to “visit” campuses for a decade or more) was tantamount to being a stowaway on an ocean liner. As long as you stayed belowdecks and out of sight, they usually wouldn’t throw you overboard.

  But Georgetown does have another class of adjuncts. While they enter the university as academic outsiders, they are instantly considered insiders because of their capital city brand of celebrity. Membership in Official Washington trumps any sort of academia insiderness. So though they may not have the academic credentials their scholarly colleagues do, Big Names instantly get fancy titles and red carpet treatment.

  Another way to move from outsider to insider at Georgetown is to closely identify with one’s Catholic roots. As a secular Jew, that was obviously a nonstarter for me at a Jesuit university. Nonetheless, I did truly come to love the Jesuit mission, and I unabashedly believed our own promotional material. I would find myself occasionally talking to prospective students about cura personalis, the Jesuit ideal of caring for the whole person, and when someone would shoot me that Wait, aren’t you Jewish? look, I would stumble through my self-deprecating comedy act about being the honorary head of Jews for Jesuits.