Biography Or Soap Opera?

By Paul Gray

When a book makes headlines months before its scheduled release, the publisher and author can normally uncross their fingers and alert their accountants. Is such euphoria warranted even when the headlines are rotten? That question concerns Simon & Schuster and Joe McGinniss, the best-selling writer (The Selling of the President, 1968; Fatal Vision) whose forthcoming biography of Edward M. Kennedy, The Last Brother, has been prompting a blizzard of bad news. Biographic License? headlined the Washington Post. The New York Times put the matter, bluntly, on its front page: Kennedy Quotes in New Book Are Invented.

The stir was triggered by 2,000 advance copies of the first 123 pages of McGinniss's book, which Simon & Schuster had been distributing to whet booksellers' interest. They contained a statement about McGinniss's extensive research, adding, "Some thoughts and dialogue attributed to figures in this narrative were created by the author, based on such research and his knowledge of the relevant people, places and events." When questioned, McGinniss admits that his subject granted him no interviews for the book; he also allows that he regularly inferred in his narrative what Kennedy might have been thinking. "I absolutely did that," he says. "It was necessary to achieve the purpose. My goal was to give readers an understanding they've never had before of what it must have been like to have lived the life of Teddy Kennedy."

There is a name for writers who claim privileged access to the inner workings of people they describe. The name is novelist. And it is impossible to read the released portion of McGinniss's book without feeling set adrift in a muddled and decidedly fictional realm. The introductory chunk purports to follow Ted Kennedy from the assassination of his brother John, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, through the President's funeral and burial the following Monday. The events of these four days were exhaustively rehearsed in William Manchester's The Death of a President (1967); McGinniss acknowledges his indebtedness to Manchester's work by quoting it six times.

But beyond draping his story across Manchester's framework, McGinniss poses as an all-knowing narrator who jumps in and out of people's heads -- usually, but not always, Teddy's -- according to his mood of the moment, and plausibility be damned. Here is the account of Teddy's thoughts as he meets young Caroline Kennedy in the White House on Friday afternoon: "She did not yet know that her Daddy was dead and that her mother, even then, was flying back to Washington wearing a dress still stained with his blood and with flecks of tissue from his brain." The trouble is that according to McGinniss's story, Teddy does not yet know most of these details either. All he has learned by now -- and McGinniss insists on Teddy's prolonged isolation from the events in Dallas -- is that J.F.K. has been killed and that his body and widow are en route to Washington. No other grim specifics. How then can McGinniss document Teddy's concern over Caroline's ignorance of facts he himself had not heard?

And here is Teddy on the day after the assassination, walking on a beach in Hyannis Port near the Kennedy compound with his sister Eunice Shriver: "Suppose -- not that there is any evidence he considered this -- he suddenly just veered left, away from his sister, and plunged, fully clothed, into the roiling, frigid waters of Nantucket Bay? Just swam out into the mist until exhausted?" It is difficult to know what to make of a suicide impulse that the author announces, while introducing it, is without any foundation in fact.

McGinniss's most useful character is Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, who suffered a stroke in 1961 that left him largely unable to communicate with those around him except through gestures and glares. Here is a mind that an inventive biographer can invade with impunity, since no first- person refutations are possible. Sure enough, McGinniss uses the elder Kennedy to insinuate a conspiracy theory of J.F.K.'s assassination. First the setup: "He knew that years earlier he'd made promises he hadn't kept. And that quite possibly, Jack had paid for these unkept promises with his life." Then the payoff: "The old man seemed beyond knowing, beyond caring. How much guilt was buried in his grief -- how aware he was of the extent to which he'd been responsible for Jack's fate -- no one would ever know." At this moment, McGinniss's excerpt makes a rare brush against something verifiable: no one would ever know.

In his free-floating impressions of authorial omniscience, McGinniss has, consciously or not, challenged most of the existing rules governing the writing of authentic biographies. And he has done so at a time when those rules were already teetering. Bottom-feeding biographies have existed as long as people have been able to write or run a printing press. But the slippery slope leading to the current McGinniss mess may have begun with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966). In calling his work about the 1959 murder of a family in Kansas a "nonfiction novel," Capote intentionally blurred the distinction between his years of research and reporting and his stylish, assured shaping of his raw materials. Capote's reputation -- and the runaway success of In Cold Blood -- left a vivid message for wannabe best-selling biographers: Real life is best presented with a heavy admixture of art.

That was dangerous advice for those who could not report or write as well as Capote. At the same time, other pressures raised the stakes determining which biographies would have a chance to be read and succeed. Under the relentless eye of television, celebrity began to outweigh genuine accomplishments, and signs of weakness or depravity came to be expected in accounts even of exemplary people. Reviewing a biography of the author Jean Stafford in 1988, Joyce Carol Oates applied the medical term pathography to life stories that "mercilessly expose their subjects" and "relentlessly catalog their most private, vulnerable and least illuminating moments."

And things have careered downhill since then. In the past few years, a steady succession of high-profile books about people living and dead have raised loud questions of propriety and taste: Kitty Kelley on Nancy Reagan, Anthony Summers on J. Edgar Hoover, numerous journalists on Princess Diana, Janet Malcolm on Jeffrey Masson, and now Joe McGinniss on Ted Kennedy. In May, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose many books include an account of J.F.K.'s Administration and a biography of Robert Kennedy, suggested in the New Republic that "something horrid has recently befallen the craft of biography." The Last Brother confirms his impression. How McGinniss has written about Teddy, says Schlesinger, is akin to "True Confessions. Soap opera." He goes on: "There's a certain arrogance on the part of people who assume that they really know what people are thinking if there's no evidence for it."

On the other hand, Princeton professor James M. McPherson, author of the best-selling Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom, thinks that the current flap over McGinniss's excerpt -- which he has not read -- could be a good thing. "I suspect, if anything, standards may be getting higher because there's more critical attention to biographies, more attempts to undercut or expose them."

That is a cheering assumption. But amid all the clamor, Simon & Schuster has pushed the publication date of The Last Brother up from October to August. An excerpt in Vanity Fair will hit newsstands in mid-August. A four-hour NBC mini-series is going into production and has been tentatively scheduled for the ratings-crucial sweeps period next February. Critical censure will not obstruct the commercial phenomenon that The Last Brother is becoming. It would be interesting to know -- but it is impossible to know for sure -- the private thoughts of Joe McGinniss and the responsible people at Simon & Schuster. Someday, perhaps, an eager biographer will make them up.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York