On March 18, Sydney Ladensohn Stern delivered the 2024 Dorothy O. Helly Works in Progress Lecture presented by the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar and sponsored by the City University of New York Graduate Center. Stern discussed her current project, a biography of Irene Mayer Selznick, a member of Hollywood royalty and a Broadway producer in her own right, most famously of A Streetcar Named Desire and Bell, Book and Candle.  

Stern said the first major challenge of writing this biography is figuring out how much exposition to provide. She has wrestled with questions like: “How much Hollywood history to give people? How much theater history? How much British theater history?” She contrasted the process of trying to understand the audience for this biography with her former work as an editor at Fortune, where the audience for writing was more clearly defined. 

However, the lack of certainty about the target audience was perhaps a boon. Early in the process, Stern realized that her entire conception of the book needed to change, and she felt free to make adjustments in service of the story. She said, “My original idea was that [the biography] was going to be a star-studded story of . . . a Zelig-like character. She’d been everywhere, knew everyone.” As the daughter of M-G-M film boss of Louis B. Mayer, she went to the White House and the Oscars. And A-listers like Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, and Katherine Hepburn came to her father’s palatial estate. Later, as the wife of producer David O. Selznick, the trend continued. However, “somewhere along the way” in the research process, Stern revealed, “my priorities shifted . . . it wasn’t a Zelig story at all. The character became more important than the plot . . . I realized that what is really important here is making this character come to life. That became my pride. That has become a primary goal, and it’s a challenge in a work of nonfiction.”  

The other great challenge, she said, is selecting a structure for a biography. She elaborated, “For this book, I feel the main structural issue I have is that the first two parts are ‘Irene as daughter to the interesting, powerful man’ and ‘Irene as wife to the interesting, powerful man.’” It’s in the metaphorical Third Act of Irene’s life, which contains her divorce from Selznick and her career as a Broadway producer, that she assumes center stage. Stern discussed using flashbacks to keep her subject centered in the other two sections of the book but said, “The chronology really is important, and it’s important to see her being formed.” Stern said that her hope is while shaping and revising the writing, “Irene will emerge.” 

Stern said that Selznick left behind troves of memos in her archives that were related to her various Broadway shows. These have helped her understand Selznick’s frame of mind and how she conducted her work. While Stern said these will help  reveal Selznick’s true nature, they also pose a problem. She said she comes across “really interesting and very wise” writing from Irene, but “I just don’t think I want to quote big blocks, so I might have to create scenes” to avoid publishing long quotes.  

That is one small aspect of what Stern described as the “joy and terror of writing a book”: the many choices that are the biographer’s alone to make. In closing, she said: “I always say biography is as much about the biographer as it is about our subjects. So, we write our books, and we send them out into the world, and we make ourselves vulnerable. And it’s exhilarating.  I sometimes wonder, am I going to be wrong? Did I make a major mistake? But who’s to judge at this point? It’s my book. It’s exhilarating. And I found it well worth the risk.” 

 

Sydney Ladensohn Stern is the author of The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics (University Press of Mississippi, 2019) and Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystiques (Birch Lane Press, 1997). Learn more about her here.

Editor’s Note: With the 2024 BIO Conference just weeks away, The Biographer’s Craft reached out to some of this year’s moderators to get a sense of how they are preparing for their panels and what attendees can expect. Their insights are below.

This panel, on the Craft track, will feature Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024); Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); and Jessica Max Stein, author of Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography (Rutgers University Press).

“I’m hoping we’ll be able to discuss how some of the opportunities and challenges posed by the genre of biography in general are amplified and/or unfold differently in a queer context,” Boggs said. He provided the example of how “the specters of anachronism and presentism hover over all biographies” but manifest in unique ways for queer biographies. “Terms like ‘cisgender’ and ‘nonbinary’ did not exist [around the time of Stonewall], and even ‘queer’ meant something different,” he said.

Boggs said, “All three subjects are not only legible under the LGBTQ+ banner, but they are also all performers. So, I’ll be interested to hear these three writers talk about the different ways that impacted their research and writing process. I mean, Muppets, rock stars, and Warhol Superstars, what more can one panel really ask for?”

“Attendees will learn if there are specific qualifications necessary to write a biography on subjects who work in the arts, with our discussion ranging from playwright August Wilson to hip-hop producer J Dilla to artist Keith Haring to Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Janis Joplin. We’ll discuss our various approaches when writing such biographies and how our professional lives led us to our subjects,” said George-Warren of her panel.

George-Warren, the former director of Rolling Stone’s book division, will be in conversation with panelists Dan Charnas, author of Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (Swift Press, 2022); Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper, 2024); and Patti Hartigan, author of August Wilson: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

All three authors’ subjects are deceased, so George-Warren plans to ask each about their legacy and whether they met their subjects. George-Warren said the panelists will be asked to share their most surprising discoveries about them, and she believes the conversation will produce “a lot of behind-the-scenes intel from my fellow panelists.”

Leepson told The Biographer’s Craft that the panelists—Barrye Brown, the curator of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and Abigail Malangone, archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—will “bring attendees up to date on every important aspect involved in navigating archival collections” and that “there will be time during the session and afterward for attendees to ask questions to help their own research.”

Having published ten nonfiction books, including Saving Monticello: The Levy Family’s Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built (Free Press, 2001), Leepson has spent decades researching in various archives and will use that experience to guide the conversation. He plans to ask the panelists to describe what’s new at their collections, what advice they would give to new and experienced biographers, what pitfalls to avoid, and to guide more focused conversation about “many other specific aspects involved in archival research.”

These panels and more will take place on Friday, May 17, during the 2024 BIO Conference in New York City. Learn more about the conference, the presenters, and the panels here. 

Who is your favorite biographer, or what is your favorite biography?

Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009) is a watershed jazz biography, giving us a riveting portrait of the genius pianist and composer who co-created bebop, wrote some of the most enduring compositions, and was always irrepressibly himself. Monk was a mentor to Sonny Rollins, who thought of him as his “guru.” After I devoured this book, it convinced me that for a cultural figure like Rollins, who played such a pivotal role in shaping jazz history, a long biography was necessary to illuminate the complex relationship between the music and American culture, politics, and economics. As a historian, Dr. Kelley is truly beyond category, giving us wide-ranging works that are crucial to understanding American history, as well as global solidarity and decolonization movements: Hammer and Hoe, Freedom Dreams, and Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times. The Monk biography is beyond category as well. Of course, there are many other biographies and biographers who continue to inspire me.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

I love immersing myself in the archive. It’s a portal to another world; opening each archival box gives the same thrill of discovery as unearthing a long-buried time capsule. You never know what you might find. For example, when I was doing research at the National Library of Norway in Oslo, I found a trove of letters Sonny Rollins wrote to Norwegian jazz presenter and journalist Randi Hultin over a period of decades. In one, written shortly after the death of Louis Armstrong, Rollins attests to the importance of Armstrong to his musical development and to American culture in general, during a time when this view was not so widely accepted. Time would prove him right, of course. There were many other moments of epiphany in the archive, like when I found the letter Charles Mingus sent to Rollins to convince him to return to public performance after his legendary two-year sabbatical on the Williamsburg Bridge. The archive brings history to life with an immediacy and intimacy that nothing else can equal, but I find for contemporary biographical subjects, interviews are equally important.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

I spent months completing the notes for the Rollins book, working ten to twelve hours a day exclusively on citation. There are thousands of entries, so many that the publisher had to put the notes section online. I felt it was important to document every source for future researchers and for anyone who wants to find out the origin of a surprising detail. It was a grueling process. Though I devised an effective system to keep track of references as I wrote without breaking the writing flow, I plan to use citation management software on future projects.

One research/marketing/attitudinal tip to share?

Back up your files! I had a near-catastrophic data loss when an external hard drive crashed out of nowhere, but successfully recovered everything. It was not cheap.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I find that many biographers have, at one point, considered a career in their subjects’ field. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I pursued music full-time. I have always loved writing and music, and I still play the saxophone, mostly baritone, but perhaps ironically, the Rollins book caused music to take a back seat to my writing projects. Listening to Sonny Rollins for thousands of hours made me keenly aware of just how impossibly high the standard is, yet it also inspired me to want to perform again. Or at least get back to a steady practice routine!

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure, and who are some of your favorite writers?

I read a lot of fiction. I love Ann Petry’s The Street, the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies. Anything by Faulkner. A recent nonfiction book I read that reads like a novel is Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Currently on the nightstand: S. A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed, James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal, and Percival Everett’s James.

 

Aidan Levy is the author, most recently, of Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (Hachette Books, 2022). Learn more about Levy here.