The Celebs' Golden Mouthpiece

By Martha Smilgis

What do you say to an offer to ghostwrite Nancy Reagan's autobiography? "Just say yes," advised William Novak's wife Linda when Random House approached him a year-and-a-half ago. Today My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan has made headlines, sold some 400,000 copies and soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Yet if Novak went with a winner, so did Reagan. Novak, 41, came to the collaboration with credentials of his own. He is the golden mouthpiece of the nation's celebrities, a literary John Alden who can consistently woo -- and win -- the public in their behalf. In 1984 Iacocca, Novak's collaboration with auto executive Lee Iacocca, jolted the publishing world by selling 2.7 million copies. He followed that up with best sellers on Tip O'Neill and Sydney Biddle Barrows, the deb-styled Mayflower Madam. Paid a paltry $80,000 for the Iacocca book (which made $10 million to $15 million for its subject), Novak has since been rewarded with a much healthier cut of the profits he helps generate. For My Turn, he received a six-figure advance plus a percentage of the royalties.

Novak was prepared to dislike Reagan, assuming she was cold, authoritarian, power hungry. Yet, he says, "I never encountered that 'off with your head' woman I heard about. She's not Imelda Marcos, Leona Helmsley or Marie Antoinette, and some people still don't understand that." Over eight months, Novak taped 250 hours of conversation at the White House, in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, at the Reagan ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., and, of course, over the phone. Reagan offered candid recollections of the day her husband was shot, her hospitalization for cancer and her mother's death.

At first she tried to dodge prickly questions about her reliance on astrology, her feuds with White House chief of staff Donald Regan and her troubled relations with her children. "When she'd say, 'Now Bill, you're not going to talk about this,' I'd use the editors: 'But the editors insist on these subjects,' " says Novak. "The fact is, if you ask readers to pay $22 for a book, you have to reveal new material. Ironically, the better known the person the more they must reveal." Recalls Reagan: "There were tough, difficult times and good times. But I wanted it honest and personal."

Novak is able to elicit such responses because he is a most unassuming, amiable sort who leaves his ego at the door. He fits his approach to his subject. With the brusque, no-nonsense Iacocca, he conducted interviews in offices and conference rooms, never sharing a meal with him. With O'Neill, he took drives around Cape Cod in the former Speaker's beat-up Chrysler and listened to endless anecdotes over tuna sandwiches. "I worried that these were only a wall of stories," he says. "I came to realize that Tip's opinions were expressed through his stories." He arrived at the White House carrying a bag of Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies, Nancy Reagan's favorite. When he met her at the Reagan ranch, where she is known to favor jeans, he showed up in jeans. "Bill's like a great character actor," says Peter Osnos, his editor at Random House. "His self-effacing quality allows his subjects their own expression. An extraordinary quality of intimacy with the person is conveyed."

After doing exhaustive library research on a subject, Novak typically talks to dozens of family members and friends to build up lists of questions for his interviews. No muckraker, he uses challenging or contradictory material only to try to jog his subject's memory or trigger fresh stories. "I push as far as I can go," he says. "I'm not trying to change a person's version of himself." Novak works from transcriptions of his interviews, occasionally going back to the tapes to capture the subject's voice -- one of his strengths, he believes. A couple of months into a collaboration, he begins showing the subject drafts of chapters. The subject usually offers changes and comments ("Bill, this stinks!" scrawled Iacocca). Novak tries to incorporate the lively ones and drop the dull.

Toronto-born, Novak graduated from local York University intending to be a writer ("No kid goes to bed at night dreaming he'll be a ghostwriter"). After earning an M.A. in contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis, he spent ten years editing scholarly magazines and writing a string of financially unsuccessful books (among them: High Culture, about marijuana use, The Great American Man Shortage and a compendium of Jewish humor). Just as he resigned himself to "finding a real job," an editor friend at Bantam suggested Lee Iacocca. "Great! My kind of guy," said Novak, who had never heard of Iacocca.

His success as a collaborator has brought him a comfortable life in an affluent suburb of Boston that enables him, as he says, "to buy raspberries instead of apples." He is currently compiling an anthology of American humor and mulling future celebrity subjects. He muses about Mikhail Gorbachev ("but somehow I think he's busy right now"), and, as a music lover who has recently resumed piano lessons, he thinks about Paul McCartney or Barbra Streisand. "Or Elvis, if he can find him," wisecracks Ben, 10, one of the Novaks' two sons. As for a return to the solo byline of William Novak, he says it's not soon likely. "I get far more ego gratification and attention from these books than I ever did from my own." But aren't the celebrity books his own too? No. This John Alden, unlike the original, shrinks from speaking for himself. "I don't fool myself into thinking that my books are best sellers," he says. "The celebrities are the selling point."

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