McGinniss regales with scissors, glue
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
Listen up, folks. Have I got a hot tip for you. Forget about those lottery tickets. Forget about Suffolk Downs. You want to strike it rich? Here's how.
Go to the library, borrow "Gone With the Wind" or "The Firm" - pick a book, any book you choose, but make sure it's popular - copy the words in a notebook and then move them around a little. Change a verb here, a noun there, embellish, enhance. Invert a couple sentences, but don't deviate too much. You don't want to mess with a winner.
And you don't have to. Plagiarism isn't a bad word anymore. It's a way to fame and fortune.
Case in point: Joe McGinniss' soon to be published book "The Last Brother." The book's supposed to be a biography of Ted Kennedy. McGinniss, however, takes liberties with facts by putting thoughts into the senator's head, thoughts that only the senator would know if he entertained. Since Kennedy never spoke to McGinniss, never mind confided in him, one might wonder how McGinniss could possibly know what Kennedy was thinking.
But this is America, you see, the land where invention, even in biography, as well as plagiarism, are now allowed. How else to explain this sequence in which McGinniss presumes to know Kennedy's thoughts as he is walking along a beach with his sister Eunice after his brother Jack's assassination:
Suppose - not that there is any evidence he considered this - he suddenly just veered left, away from his sister, and plunged, fully clothed, into the roiling, frigid waters of Nantucket Bay? Just swam out into the mist until exhausted?
McGinniss must be a mind reader. What he surely is, is a thief.
William Manchester, a renowned biographer, wrote "The Death of a President" in 1967, the definitive work on the Kennedy assassination. McGinniss admits that he used Manchester's book when writing his own. And use it he did, for the first 11 chapters, in some places practically verbatim.
Example: Caroline Kennedy was being driven to a friend's when word came of her father's death. A Secret Service agent following behind them stopped the car in which she was riding.
Manchester, reporting this, wrote:
Stepping past (the friend's mother), he put his head in the station wagon and said, "Caroline, you have to go back to your house. You better bring your overnight bag. Maybe you can come out a little later."...Caroline shrank back. She said, "I don't want to go."...Hugging the bear and fighting back tears, she climbed over the seat toward him;"...A quarter-mile south of Chevy Chase Circle, Caroline looked up at him. "Why do we have to go home?" she asked. Before Wells could reply, she said again, "Never mind. I know."...In taking Caroline from Liz Pozen he had inherited the obligation to keep his commercial radio silent.
McGinniss telling the same story used most of the same words:
He stuck his head inside the station wagon and said, "Caroline, you have to go back to your house. You better bring your overnight bag with you. Maybe you can go out again a little later." "I don't want to go," she said, sinking down in her seat...Hugging her teddy bear and choking back tears, Caroline climbed out of the station wagon and into Wells's car. After they'd driven for a quarter mile in silence, Caroline spoke. "Why do we have to go home?" she asked. Wells pondered what sort of answer to give. But before he could say anything, she said, "Never mind. I knowThe car was silent...By having taken charge of Caroline, he'd cut himself off from any further news. With the little girl sitting next to him he didn't dare turn on his car radio.
Not a bad way to make a living, recycling somebody else's words. Simon & Schuster paid McGinniss $1 million for being a human Xerox machine. Vanity Fair is excerpting chapters from the book. NBC is making it into a mini-series. There's a lesson in this for all of us, you know, and it's not that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. It's that imitation is lucrative.
I'm going to model my best-seller after Robert James Waller's "Bridges of Madison County." This is his beginning:
There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.
This is my beginning:
There are ballads that come easy from the deep-mouthed field, from the grit of a thousand rural farms. This is only one.
So what do you think? Should I order my BMW? My yacht? Make reservations for a round-the-world cruise? Get ready for the talk show circuit?
Scissors, paste, a good thesaurus and a book of acclaim are all you need to be an overpaid author in America today.
