Ghost Stories : Author Finds Success by Getting Inside the Skin and Becoming the Voice of His Collaborators

David Fisher sold the idea of ghostwriting George Burns’ book about Gracie Allen on a two-liner: “For forty years, my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.” In 13 words, Fisher evoked Burns’ voice and vaudevillian’s timing. Burns loved it.

As he wrote “Gracie: A Love Story”--Burns’ gravel voice channeling through him--Fisher envisioned Burns sitting in a chair opposite him, puffing an El Producto cigar, telling tales of Gracie.

The toughest test of Fisher’s success in melding his style with the comedian’s singular voice came when he sat in Burns’ Hollywood office listening to the Burns’ secretary, Jack Langdon, read aloud from the manuscript. The nonagenarian Burns, his manager, Irving Fein and TV writer Hal Goldman suggested changes as they heard the Burns and Allen love affair rerun.

When Langdon neared the end, and, once more, Gracie’s heart weakened, he wept, unable to read the final pages. Fisher said he read to the end at a clip fast enough to keep himself from sobbing.

Thirty seconds of silence passed before anyone uttered a word. Burns then turned to Fisher and said, “We wrote a hell of a book, kid.”

Fisher and his subject had become one.

“You really believe George is telling the story and that nobody else wrote the book,” says Fein.

Burns and Fisher had so much fun and success with “Gracie” in 1988 that they followed it up with “All My Best Friends,” about Burns’ show-biz pals. They may combine again, for a tongue-in-cheek murder case solved by George and Gracie, or a reminiscence of Jack Benny.

Fisher, 44, is a busy, fast-working ghost. Most recently, he has been the written voice of the new owner of the Yankees (Sparky Lyle in “The Year I Owned the Yankees”). His past personae have been: a baseball umpire (Ron Luciano in “Remembrance of Swings Past”), a baseball manager (Tom Lasorda in “The Artful Dodger”), a football team owner (Gene Klein of the San Diego Chargers in “First Down and a Billion”), a hired killer (in “Hit 29”), a woman in the Witness Protection Program (“Louie’s Widow”) and a felon who logged the most time on the FBI’s Most Wanted List (“The Most Wanted Man In America”).

He is now collaborating on the memoirs of a major female television personality (his publisher, G.P. Putnam, won’t let him say who) for a low six-figure sum, and he may tell ex-Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s story. Over 20 years, Fisher has written or ghosted more than 40 books, including three novels. He is proudest of a book that is all his own, “What’s What,” a visual glossary of the physical world. It names the parts of everything from a tombstone to a mainframe computer and sprang from Fisher’s need to know the difference between a castle’s bastion and a parapet for a novel he was writing.

Ghosting was far from Fisher’s grand ambition. Fisher grew up on Long Island, rewriting newspaper stories and selling them to his parents for a dime. Later, he dreamed of writing a syndicated humor column and a Broadway play. After graduating from Syracuse University, he became a page at NBC, where he met Joan Rivers, for whom he wrote jokes for $7 apiece. She eventually hired him as a staff writer for a short-lived daytime program, “That Show.”

When he was a reporter for Life magazine he answered an agent’s ad seeking writers, which yielded his first ghostings: a children’s biography of Malcolm X, under the agent’s name, and a novel, under the pseudonym Ray Lilly.

Then came a call from the agent, saying he had a Mafia hit man who wanted to write a book. “Here was this guy,” says Fisher, “about 5-foot-1, 225 pounds of solid muscle, wearing a white T-shirt and pants. He waddled up to me, and said, ‘Hi kid, I hear we’re doing a book together.’ Once we sold (the idea to a publisher), he called and said, ‘You have reservations in this motel in Santa Monica. Be there on this date.’ I checked in and each morning he arrived in a big Cadillac.”

Fisher wrote “The Happy Hitman” and three other “Joey” books, but he never believed in the magnitude of the murderous career Joey claimed. After Joey was murdered, the FBI verified Joey’s hit list.

Collaborating is a kind of literary matchmaking service, where writer and celebrity/star/athlete/politician are joined in a variety of ways. For Fisher, as with many ghostwriters, the collaborations have come via original ideas, editors, friends and acquaintances and agents. Occasionally, a subject knows a writer personally or by reputation and requests that writer.

Fisher’s agent suggested his latest ghost work, “The Year I Owned the Yankees,” a fantasy executed with retired Yankee relief pitcher Sparky Lyle. In it, a mysterious financier arranges for Lyle to buy the Yankees from George Steinbrenner.

The free-spirited Lyle of his Yankee days in the 1970s had a unique way of expressing himself: He was most renowned for sitting nude on clubhouse birthday cakes. “I’d never met David before and never thought about owning the Yankees,” says Lyle, who lives in New Jersey. “But he came to the house, we made a bunch of tapes and he understood me. He asked what would happen here or what would happen there. We let our imagination go. Then he went to work.”

Fisher’s subjects have well-evolved personalities, some known to the public, some not. His job is to draw on each one’s inherent character and give it a written voice. What emerges from 30 hours of talks with his subjects, more than old stories and background material, are clues to their personalities, thought processes, speech patterns and use of language.

“For Sparky the character was the fun-loving free spirit,” he says. “For Gene Klein it was ego, but he had to admit his mistakes. With Ron Luciano it’s the funny, self-effacing ex-umpire. When you work on George Burns, you can’t mess with the voice. The key is to hit it.”

But there is an essential dilemma in being a ghostwriter: No one rushed to buy “Iacocca” because William Novak wrote it or “Trump: The Art of the Deal” because Tony Schwartz was the unseen scribe. The job is a struggle with ego and fame--one Fisher has apparently settled. He knows his place.

“Doing what I do is not really a dilemma; it’s a reality,” says Fisher, who works in a cluttered office one floor above his apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. “Ron Luciano spent 12 years as an umpire establishing a character and doing a very good job. George Burns spent 70 years creating his character. They did the hard part.”

Fisher says he has resisted the impulse to step over the ego line, to think that he is the star of his ghostwritten books.

“A friend did a collaboration and was convinced that he was the person,” he says, “and that people were going to buy the book because he wrote it. The book became a best seller and it engendered great resentment within him because the subject got plenty of attention and he got nothing. He became embittered.”

Fisher wears his graying hair tied back in a small ponytail and dresses casually in faded jeans and a striped pullover. His unthreatening demeanor neatly suits the role of chameleon. Several hours with him reveal how he gains his subjects’ trust.

“I tell subjects that my job is to write the book they’d write if they were writers,” Fisher says. “Collaborating is a job. It’s how I earn my living. There’s no great satisfaction to it. But there are great opportunities. I’ve gotten to be so many people.”

Early in the questioning of a subject, he says, his transition into being the other person is usually complete, by dint of his prior research and his questions. As he writes, he envisions how they should sound on paper.

But when they resist--when they toss questions back at him--he knows they will falter. “Tommy Lasorda never got it,” he says. “He’s a terrific guy, but he was too nervous. There’s still a great book to be written with him.”

Ron Luciano, whose long major league umpiring career was followed by a brief stint as an NBC baseball announcer, was a quick convert to Fisher’s style. Why not? How many ex-umps become best-selling authors?

“David finds the nice thing about everybody,” says Luciano. “He doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body. He does not compete with anybody he writes with. He tells me when I go on radio, ‘Don’t even mention my name.’ ”

Fisher sensed that Luciano was ghost-worthy when he saw the former arbiter telling stories on TV. Their first book, “The Umpire Strikes Back,” generated four more, including the newest, “Baseball Lite,” a compilation of funny stories from the 1989 season. “He took my character, molded and polished me a little,” says Luciano. “He really created me.”

Fisher now gets several collaboration offers monthly and recently turned down an offer that came through his agent to write San Francisco 49er quarterback Joe Montana’s autobiography. Fisher wants to reduce his heavy workload and his focus on sports.

But Fisher can afford to be picky. He is well-paid and in demand. Generally, he is paid a 50-50 split of the advance and royalties with his subjects. But in the case of celebrities like Burns, where the advance and book sales are hefty, he gets a smaller cut, “which is more than enough to make me happy.”

In the case of the female TV star’s memoirs he is working on, he took a flat fee from the celebrity’s seven-figure advance. If the collaboration with Daniel Ortega clicks, the former Nicaraguan leader is sure to amass a large advance, which would bring Fisher another big payoff. This possible collaboration arose through Fisher’s childhood friend Paul Reichler--who is Ortega’s attorney.

“He told me that Daniel has to be concerned with earning a living because he doesn’t have a job and he didn’t rob the treasury,” Fisher says. “I said, ‘He could do well writing a book. If he’s willing, I’d be interested.’ ”

Ortega is interested, Fisher says, adding that he won’t write an apologia for him.

“Here’s somebody who lived in the jungles for 10 years,” he says, “and like most revolutionaries, he did not consider what would happen if the dream came true. I want to ask him, ‘Now you’re out of the jungle and the president. Where do you start on the first day?’ I’m more interested in the mistakes he made. I want to do the textbook on what went wrong.”

Of course, that textbook would forever be Ortega’s. That is the price Fisher pays for being a ghost.