Tags:
Journalism of Courage
As Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hits the shelves, there is one person who is saying nothing about it, though he is a master of words. His name is not on the cover of the book. It wasn’t on Andre Agassi’s brutal and vivid masterpiece, Open, either. The writing in both books is by JR Moehringer, one of the finest ghost-writers in the world. The New York Times calls him, “perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft”. Here’s a look at Moehringer and the world of conflicted stars.
Born in New York in 1964, Moehringer was brought up by his loving single mother in his grandfather’s house. He went to Yale University on scholarship, and has worked as a journalist and writer for newspapers such as The New York Times, Rocky Mountain News and Los Angeles Times in positions ranging from news assistant to bureau chief. It was for the Los Angeles Times that he wrote a feature, titled ‘Crossing Over’, about racial discrimination in the US, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.
It is this ability that Moehringer has to draw out layers of a person’s soul that has made him famous for telling the stories of people. Apart from the books on Agassi and Harry, Moehringer has ghost-written the autobiography of Nike founder Phil Knight, titled Shoe Dog. He has also written his own coming-of-age memoir, The Tender Bar, and a novel, Sutton, about Willie Sutton, America’s most successful bank robber.
In The Tender Bar, Moehringer writes about being obsessed with a voice in his childhood. It was the voice of his father, a DJ in New York City, who had abandoned the family before Moehringer could speak his first word. “Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, JR would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though JR’s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice,” says the book.
Does this make Moehringer an expert in people who have faced problems with parents? It appears so, as this passage from Agassi’s Open suggests. “I’m seven-years-old talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me. Under my breath I whisper: Just quit, Andre, just give up. Put down your racket and walk off this court, right now. Go into the house and get something good to eat. Play with Rita, Philly, or Tami. Sit with Mom while she knits or does her jigsaw puzzle. Doesn’t that sound nice? Wouldn’t that feel like heaven, Andre? To just quit? To never play tennis again”.
Moehringer is said to have intense work ethics. He reportedly immerses himself in his projects, which includes moving house to be near his subjects and having long and deep conversations with them before he writes their story. Agassi has said that he pursued Moehringer to write his book after reading The Tender Bar slowly in order to savour it longer. George Clooney found Moehringer’s story fascinating enough to turn it into a film of the same name that starred Ben Affleck, among others.
The work of a ghost-writer has been little understood, though a number of books by stars are written in collaboration with them. A ghost-writer tells the story of their subjects in the latters’ voice, channeling their anguish and achievements in the first person. In this respect, they are different from biographers.
Being a ghost-writer requires skills ranging from patience and dedication to an ability to efface oneself. For instance, Moehringer has not given interviews or publicised his role in Spare. It is Harry who must be heard.
