by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

Stepping in for scheduled moderator Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, BIO president Steve Paul opened the panel by reminding the audience of Ernest Hemingway’s advice to writers interested in scooping up some of that Hollywood gold: Drive up to the California border, throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell the other way.

For the most part, the panelists confirmed that experience. Even with works of nonfiction, adaptations often play fast and loose with meticulously researched material. The money and the exposure can be terrific—but get a good lawyer. Or a performing rights agent. And a performing rights attorney.

Kai Bird’s reaction to the adaptation of his American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005, coauthored with Martin J. Sherwin) into Oppenheimer could be characterized as “better than my wildest dreams.” A’Lelia Bundles’s response to Self-Made, the 2020 Netflix series based on her biography On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner, 2001) was: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Jack El-Hai, just back from Budapest, where he watched Russell Crowe and Rami Malek star in Nuremberg, a film based on his biography The Nazi and The Psychiatrist (MJF Books, 2013), about Hermann Göring and U.S. military psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas M. Kelley, reported: “It was the most fun work trip I’ve ever done.”

As a former journalist, executive, and television news producer, A’Lelia Bundles had years of experience and high hopes for Netflix’s adaptation of her much-praised biography of her great-great grandmother, especially with Octavia Spencer in the starring role and Black women as writers, show runners, directors, director of photography, and production manager. Instead, the program was filled with anachronisms, as well as manufactured cat fights and colorism: “I wanted Hidden Figures. I got Real Housewives,” said Bundles. Keep the rights to your characters, she counseled, and grant limited-time options and get script review in your contract. Script approval is probably not possible, said Bundles, but “script review” at least meant that they were required to let her “read and review,” even though it did not obligate them to make all the changes she requested or suggested. The silver lining was that her great-great grandmother did become better known.

Kai Bird pointed out that his 2005 book went through many options. Sam Mendes was first and gave up after four years. Another four-year option followed, resulting in a slightly better script, but that attracted no stars and no studios. When another party optioned it in 2015, that script was so terrible that Bird and his late coauthor, Martin J. Sherwin, sent back a list of 108 historical inaccuracies. If that had been produced, their only option would have been to take their name off the film. Of course, Bird’s story has a happy ending. He found film director Christopher Nolan “brilliant.” And, “He really cared,” said Bird. “I realized we are the luckiest biography people on the planet, and it’ll never happen again.” Bird’s advice for getting work optioned is: “You need to find someone passionately and personally committed to the story.”

Jack El-Hai also had his 2005 book The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (John Wiley & Sons) used as the basis for a PBS documentary, and it is under further option as a feature film.  As for the liberties taken in Nuremberg, he is philosophical. “I’ve had my chance with history in the Nuremberg book and no adaptation is going to change that. When and how they want to pull apart or fictionalize it is okay with me.”

Despite the cautionary tales, audience members wondered what they could do to attract possible adapters. Bundles suggested podcasts and promotional trailers, as well as continuing to push one’s agent. El-Hai suggested thinking about adaptation while writing the original: “Biographies are often chronicles. That’s fine, but not for other media. I construct my books around a set of questions. And you need conflict. It can be between characters or even an internal conflict, as long as it can be visually expressed.”

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). She is at work on a biography of Irene Meyer Selznick forthcoming from the University of California Press.  Learn more about her here.

 

By Judi Freeman

Three veteran biographers of American political officials engaged in a rich discussion on writing about figures confronting challenging moments in U.S. history. In a discussion moderated by Brown University professor Marion Orr, author of a forthcoming biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., these three writers illustrated how their research addressed their subjects’ willingness to navigate moral minefields.

“We’re hearing about threats to democracy quite a bit,” Orr noted, framing the session through the lens of how biographers consider leadership during difficult times. Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (Knopf, 2023), examined how Grant crushed the Ku Klux Klan during his 1869–1877 presidency. His book documents how the Klan metastasized at breakneck speed, terrorizing Black Americans and destroying the progressive Republican Party. Concurrently, there was significant growth in the number of Black figures entering public life at all levels of government.

Bordewich traced Grant’s views on post-enslavement from his abolitionist father to his West Point education to his decision to free the one enslaved person he owned (gifted by his in-laws) to his welcoming recruited Black troops during the Civil War. Mining the numerous letters received by President Grant, Bordewich identified Grant’s response: He embraced the 14th Amendment, supported the 15th Amendment, and issued legislation to combat threats to Black Americans’ rights. Bordewich found Grant’s military background shaped his moral backbone and grit. Grant succeeded in breaking the Klan, with thousands turning themselves in to authorities.

Former New York Times columnist and author Samuel G. Freedman embarked on a book on Hubert Humphrey in 2015, toward the end of Barack Obama’s second term. It seemed an apt moment to reflect on 1968, a moment when Vice President Humphrey unexpectedly became the Democratic presidential nominee. Humphrey’s speech at the 1968 convention heralded the “politics of joy.”

Freedman considered where Humphrey’s ideology originated and explored his early career in his book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Oxford University Press, 2023). The volume documented the context for Humphrey’s views as he emerged as a political figure in Minnesota, exploring civil rights history in the 1940s, and the realities faced by Black GIs as they confronted winning a victory over fascism abroad and returning to Jim Crow at home. Freedman offered a deep dive into the 1948 Democratic Convention, sifting through battles against white supremacy and the America First movement. He centered his look at Humphrey’s tenure as mayor of Minneapolis in the years before 1948. Minneapolis was a city that welcomed the “Silver Shirts” and white nationalists led by Gerald L. K. Smith, characterized by Freedman as the “Donald Trump of his time.” He argued there was a moral myopia among the members of the left in Minnesota who, for instance, celebrated the end of an epic truckers’ strike at a segregated hotel in Minneapolis.

Freedman examined the ways in which Humphrey battled right-wing and left-wing forces in the city. A decisive year in Humphrey’s life—the period he spent at Louisiana State University in 1940—influenced his passionate support for civil rights. Humphrey witnessed Jim Crow and was offended. He made Jewish friends for the first time in his life. He took courses in how democratic societies embraced authoritarianism and the role complacency played in its success. He recognized the “plight of Jews in Germany is the plight of Blacks in the South.” Returning to Minneapolis, Humphrey took on the city’s racism. As mayor, he combatted bigotry, bringing Charles Johnson, a Black sociologist from Fisk University, to confront hatred in the city. This was not without risk. One night when returning home, Humphrey was confronted by a would-be assassin who took three shots and missed. Undaunted, Humphrey put his life on the line to fight racism.

John A. Farrell, author of several biographies, including Ted Kennedy: A Life (Penguin Press, 2022) and Richard Nixon: A Life (Doubleday, 2017), centered his remarks on Nixon. He explored Nixon’s complexity—an early civil rights champion who later stepped back from the JFK and LBJ administrations’ support for the civil rights movement.

Farrell asserted that “much Trumpism goes back to Nixon.” Nixon learned that fear “was a great vote-getter.” This contradicted the values he espoused earlier in his career. Farrell explored Nixon’s relationship with his Quaker mother and the family’s support of Underground Railroad stations. His father’s family included Union veterans from Gettysburg. Nixon joined the NAACP in Los Angeles County while the Klan was burning crosses on California lawns. When Nixon ran for the Senate from California, Jackie Robinson hosted a Nixon victory party at his home. As a senator, Nixon voted to abolish the poll tax. Shocking southern senators, he lunched in the congressional dining room with the daughter of one of the few Black residents of his hometown of Whittier, California, who was a shoeshine man. After his 1952 vice-presidential nomination, Nixon invited Black journalists to his home for dinner. He endorsed the Eisenhower administration’s sending federal troops to Little Rock High School during efforts to desegregate it.

Nixon, contended Farrell, reversed course when he realized that he could get votes from southern states with a different position. When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested, the Kennedy campaign spoke out. Nixon’s did not. Jackie Robinson was unable to persuade him to take a position on King. Although Nixon endorsed affirmative action, his pursuit of a “Southern strategy” became a campaign based in grievance and racial animosity.

The panel’s Q & A period revolved around connections between these events and today’s MAGA movement, racial issues, and the upending of political norms. Orr asked whether the leaders the panelists wrote about recognized the perils democracy faced in their times. Freedman cited Humphrey’s awareness of a “moral peril.” Bordewich noted Grant’s awareness of an “existential threat.” Nixon, in contrast, elevated the Cold War threat over any concern about civil rights, Farrell said.

Above all, the panelists emphasized the necessity for objectivity when writing about controversy. Furthermore, panelists agreed it was essential to “tell the truth, put the facts out, and let readers draw the conclusions.”

Historian/art historian Judi Freeman is at work on her first biography, on the American journalist/columnist Dorothy Thompson.

What person would you most like to write about?

I’m really intrigued by people’s history—more obscure folks rather than the more famous. I’m especially curious about stories that live in the shadows of more well-known stories, which is part of why I chose to write about Richard Hunt, a Muppet performer whose work is iconic but whose name is not.

What have been your most frustrating and/or satisfying moments as a biographer?

Choosing to write about more obscure folks, especially people with marginalized identities, means that their lives are often less documented—which necessitates a lot of legwork! I conducted nearly 100 interviews with Hunt’s family, lovers, friends, colleagues, classmates, and others. It was exciting because I was not just doing research, but collecting and preserving oral histories of eras such as The Muppets’ heyday and the AIDS epidemic. So, in the end, those interviews were also some of the most satisfying moments of the writing process.

One research/marketing/attitudinal tip to share?

I have two quotes above my desk. The first is what James Baldwin said when someone asked him what it takes to be a writer: “Discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.” I take this to mean that writing starts by putting your butt in the seat. If you don’t do that, none of the rest follows. The other quote is more self-explanatory, from Muppet writer Jerry Juhl: “Not writing is worse.”

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

I’ve been a writer since I was seven years old, when I came into the kitchen and solemnly announced to my mother that it was what I planned to do with my life. I’ve written nearly every day since. So, it’s fun to dream about what I might do with all that time if I didn’t spend it stringing sentences together. Being outdoors might be nice: I could fire watch in the desert, á la Edward Abbey; I could lead whale-watching tours off the Alaskan coast; I could be a park ranger, guiding goggle-eyed tourists deep into the redwoods. But alas, I’d probably just end up paying the bills in a writer-adjacent profession like English teacher (which I already am) or librarian.

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

I’m always impressed by people who can bring more marginal stories to a general audience, so I delighted in Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady (Knopf, 2016), which smartly capitalizes on the vast market for presidential biographies by narrating Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendship with Pauli Murray, a pioneering Black genderqueer lawyer and rabble-rouser. More recently, I dug Will Hermes’s Lou Reed: The King of New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), a queer take on the Velvet Underground frontman, and Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), which brings the trans Warhol ingenue her long-deserved 15 minutes of fame. The books were especially fun to read together, as their stories briefly intertwine. (Full disclosure: Hermes and Carr were my fellow panelists at this year’s BIO conference.)

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

I have a sweet tooth for romance novels. While I adore the genre’s classic proto-feminist origins like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, there’s a new generation of fantastic feminist, queer, and/or genderqueer authors such as TJ Alexander, Alison Cochrun, Talia Hibbert, Abby Jimenez, and Rachel Lynn Solomon who are gleefully updating the tropes. These books are joyfully modeling what healthy relationships can look like, showing readers how to work through your baggage to make your way to your bashert. And who doesn’t love a happy ending?

Jessica Max Stein is the author of Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography (Rutgers University Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for BIO’s 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize. She teaches writing and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.