Pretty lies for an audience of one: life as a biographer for hire

Out of sight of the reading public, unbeknown to bibliophiles, unsuspected by the churners-through of this year’s Top 10 Must Read lists, ignored by the bookshops and poo-poohed by publishers, biographies and histories are being penned for sums of money so large their authors are J.K. Rowling in money.

Almost every big man sitting, Mojito in hand, beside his own swimming pool outside his beach house in Byron eventually begins to worry that his extraordinary life will disappear, unrecorded, uncelebrated. It’s a galling realisation when, Lord knows, a quest as righteous as his has been might be used to instruct his grandchildren, currently mewling, unenlightened, in their $5000 Danish bassinets.

Their thoughts go something like this: “My glory years controlling the firm must be captured for posterity. For the sake of the family – an important history recording the brave battles I fought and won, allowing us to dominate markets where lesser men and firms foundered.” Next thing, these poolside giants are looking for an amanuensis.

A friend of mine hires himself out to write self-published biographies for ex-CEOs and other assorted big men, histories of famous families and renowned Australian companies. No surprise it’s generally men who recognise their lives must be mythologised or the world be poorer.

The trick, if you want to write a biography of an emeritus CEO, is to find a big-swinging dick who isn’t a dick. But it’s more likely you’ll write a biography for a yeti than that. Your client will be difficult – bordering on Stalinesque. These self-funded wannabe biographees have run worlds without recourse to manners, laws or morals.

When you sign on to write a biography of Clarence Dinklinker AC you better realise he wants a story in which he is Galahad. Don’t be a fool and let your journalistic ethics, historian’s integrity, proven methodologies, or just plain old honesty lead you astray, towards objectivity and fact. You’re not writing this book for a readership – you’re writing it for a reader.

Dinklinker wants a hagiography, plain and simple. He wants to look like Steve McQueen with cojones like cantaloupes and a halo like a truck tyre. No one who’s spent a life befuddling the ATO and battling unions to make a fortune against the odds wants to be cynically celebrated in amber ambiguity like Serrano’s Piss Christ.

But… do you remember the first time you heard your recorded voice? It sounded like a stranger, didn’t it? You don’t sound like that. A biographee experiences a similar dissociation. Big, important fellows never recognise the self they know and idolise in the book they’ve paid someone to write about them. So writing a biography of a Dinklinker is as risky as being Pol Pot’s portraitist… “Are you suggesting, with your laboured draftsmanship, that my eyes are set so close together?”

I met my friend, the freelancing biographer, in a cafe last week. He was on brief furlough from a shitstorm – thin-faced and pale and his pinot gris a choppy puddle in a shaky hand. He currently has four books run aground on the reef-egos of big men. They don’t agree with what he’s written. They won’t pay for anything less than an anthem and he still has a homeopathic inkling of integrity that won’t let him deliver.

He’s entangled in a history of a canning business where the three brothers who founded the company all insist on being the hero and that the other two coat-tail-riding layabouts be given mere walk-on roles. Another of his bespoke mires is a history of a mining company in which he’s serving a dozen different masters, all ex-directors and CEOs, who have got up a riot of contradictory narcissistic fabrications and exculpatory balderdash. Not only have they conflicting “memories” of who sired the company, they’re willing to sue if their paternity is questioned in print.

There he sat in our little local cafe, the biographer for hire, cowed by the protagonists of his various works-in-progress, at war with balding gangs of once greatish men, holding on, trying to write something closer to true than they will swallow. I pitied him. He had mistresses to hide, bankruptcies to gloss over, prosecutions to de-emphasise, failed mergers to justify… It’s no easy thing writing history to order if you fancy yourself honest. Or once did. But the wealthy pay big for pretty lies, and a man’s got to eat.

On our second bottle he mumbled, “What a joy it would be to write of an utter nobody, like you do.”