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Seeing Ghosts, by David Boyne
copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

A review of
Every Midget Has An Uncle Sam Costume:
Writing For A Living
by Donald Bain
Visit Don Bain's website—www.DonaldBain.com

There are two joys to not watching much television. The first: not watching much television. The second: watching 15 minutes of television amazes me, astounds me, and tells me everything I need to know about the nature of American Civilization.

Case in point: last week I watched the final segment of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. (The only difference between so called Public Television and Corporate Television is that one pretends it’s not the other.) It was an interview with David Rockefeller—born a billionaire into a family of billionaires—about his recently published memoirs.

We call this "news" because we are told that it is. But was not this "news", in fact, nothing more than David Rockefeller successfully using national television to promote sales of his book? (I certainly don't fault him for that: Any writer of books would kill for such a chance, yes? After all, very few people buy books, and even fewer read them; it’s tough for writers of books to make enough money to support their day jobs at Kinkos and Country Buffet—or in David Rockefeller’s case, as President of Chase Manhattan Bank.)

Another nice thing about television is that I get to study, to stare at, people’s faces as much as I want, without having my own face punched or slapped for the impertinence. So I stared at David Rockefeller’s wide, well-groomed, wall of face as he stared at (off camera) the face of his interviewer—and had a revelation: David Rockefeller did not write the book he was talking about.

I could probably prove this, were I inclined to spend an hour of my life researching Publisher’s Weekly or making a few phone calls, but I’ve never been one to let facts dull the excitement of revelation.

No, I suspect that Rockefeller did not write his own memoirs, and given his lifeless, tired responses to the questions posed to him, I suspect he didn’t even read his own memoirs, and begin to wonder if he even lived his own life, or hired others to handle that job. The only question that seemed to perk Rockefeller up was the standard, "Why did you write your book?" His answer? He had seen the popularity of a celebrity friend’s recently published memoirs, and he thought, gee, why not have a book of his own, too?

Alas, all those dollars and still envy doth motivate him to seek praise, to appease his hunger for acknowledgment of his own worth. (Hey. Take away the dollars and Rockefeller is starting to sound like he does have, after all, something in common with the average writer!)

Okay, if that’s the why of books like David Rockefeller’s memoirs—what's the how? How do they come to be written, published—and promoted on national television?

It starts with a ghostwriter.

If you’re a carpenter, and you get paid to build a house for someone—do they then have the right to claim that they built their own house? Is it acceptable for them to go on Oprah and tell the world, in detail, of the sweat and struggle, the hammered fingers and lonely heroism, and implicitly, their creative brilliance, of the work of building their house?

That would be a patent fraud. Because no one has yet invented the job of ghostcarpenter. Once they do...

When I was a less than upright citizen of eleven or twelve, I stole a book from the pharmacy in my hometown. (Sometime between the age of 11 and 14, I discovered reading; which is amazing, as I grew up in a family of television watchers, or more accurately, people who fell asleep in front of blaring televisions. Sure, I could scrape together enough to purchase an issue of Mad Magazine, but a book? Beyond my means. I still have a forest green hardcover edition of Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience rambles, and a battered blood-red hardcover edition of Crime And Punishment, both stolen from local libraries... Interesting reading for anyone entering adolescence...)

Back to the book I stole from the pharmacy: It was, Coffee, Tea or Me? and it was written by two women, airline stewardesses—or so I, and millions of other readers, believed. After all, their names were right there on the front cover, under the cartoonish, slightly lascivious color drawings of two buxom women in tight-fitting stewardess uniforms. (I suspect it was the cover "art" that compelled my horny pre-adolescent theft, as much as a nascent love for reading.)

Cut to three decades later... writersmonthly.com receives a postcard promoting some author’s new book, his memoirs in fact. How brave, I thought. But something caught my eye: the postcard had a picture of the author surrounded by books—lots of books—and the cover art on one of those books was unmistakable: It was Coffee, Tea or Me?

Wait a second, here, bub! Are you telling me that some guy—this Don Bain guy—this thin, bald, pleasant-looking man whose photo is on the postcard—wrote Coffee, Tea or Me?—the same book that titillated my eleven-year-old streak of larceny and, after reading three times, made me impatient to reach adulthood, and Manhattan, and to fly the world in the company of attentive, voluptuous, fun-loving women?

Damn! I’d been duped! I fired off an email. I defiantly told Don Bain that I had stolen a copy of Coffee, Tea or Me? back in the day—and then I brazenly requested a copy—a free copy—of his memoirs.

Don Bain wrote back. He forgave me for my pre-adolescent theft that had prevented him from sending his kids to good colleges and driving around in a BMW. He said a copy of his latest book was on its way to me. I felt better. While Bain had fooled me for 30 years into believing that he was in fact, not one, but two gorgeous, vivacious airline stewardesses, I had evened the score. I’d gotten two of his books—without paying, without him having made a cent from so artfully duping me.

If you want to know what it’s like to be a wildly successful unknown writer, then buy (don't steal or beg) Donald Bain’s memoirs, Every Midget Has An Uncle Sam Costume: Writing For A Living.

You can be pretty darn sure that Bain, unlike Rockefeller, actually wrote his own memoirs, as Bain has also written—and had published—more than 80 other books. Some of these books do have his name on the cover; most do not.

Some people imagine the life of a writer to be romantic, glamorous, fun and fascinating. I think writers, real writers, spend an awful lot of time alone at their desks, either writing, or trying to write.

But Don Bain is one writer who has demonstrated a career-long genius for getting his work done—then having fun. Fun for Bain is anything from his semi-professional career as a jazz musician, his stints as a radio disc jockey, or his day job as a five-martini lunching public relations dare devil in Manhattan. He has even gone so far as to parley his hugely anonymous ghostwriting success into a steady gig aboard luxurious ocean-crossing cruise ships—getting paid to lecture on the toil and joys of writing memoirs, among other books, for the rich and famous.

Don Bain knows that writing is storytelling. Some writers —like their near kin, comedians—always have a few stories, instead of jokes, up their sleeves. If Don Bain were being interviewed on The News Hour, rather than David Rockefeller, viewers might have heard the one about escorting the bombshell actress Veronica Lake to various Manhattan publicity stops (Bain wrote her memoirs), with Lake in a perpetual drunken stupor, to the point where Bain wraps the nearly naked actress in a rain coat and hauls her into a taxi, with the raincoat (of course) failing in action at a critical moment before dazed onlookers. Or the one about hiring midgets to promote a new book. (No, not a book of short stories...) Or the one about...

You get the idea.

And then there are the tales that on a superficial reading, are fun, all PR flaks and larks and martinis—harmless Manhattan hijinks in the "innocent" 70s and 80s... But on deeper review, some of Bain’s stories about his ghostwriting career, especially the ones about his 'absentee' clients, and the sleazy publishers, and the hyper-active public relations henchmen, may explain the roots of our society accepting David Rockefeller as a writer, a memoirist, when it knows damn well, he ain’t. Ethics? Ethics never sold any books.

Consider the chapter from Bain’s book in which he tells how he, and others who had invested time and energy into creating the Coffee, Tea or Me? success, chose to promote one of its sequels.

They rented offices in the old Pan Am building. They hired a woman to pretend she was a pissed-off former stewardess who "wasn’t going to take it anymore". They created a bogus organization called the Stewardess Anti-Defamation Defense League (SADDL).

They put their bogus crusader in her bogus office and announced on bogus stationery a bogus press conference to denounce the new book as sexist, anti-female, anti-women’s liberation.

The press came, and they ate it up. And it wasn’t only the tabloids that chowed down at the trough, but the New York Times, too. The media, as they do, simply repackaged the "news" of the bogus press release that Bain had written. Bain and his cohorts had another bestseller.

Compared to that, David Rockefeller’s impersonation of a writer seems the stuff of amateurs.

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