Must an Author Be an Assassin?

I began to reflect on my moral position as a writer as I stood in a booth at the Houston Livestock Show. I was in the midst of trying to sell a rancher some Senepol cattle--I think I had just finished praising their “gentle, pet-like dispositions”--when I was struck by the ambiguity of my role. I was writing a book (“Small Fortunes: Two Guys in Pursuit of the American Dream”) about two Texas entrepreneurs. One of them, Pete Binion, whose cattle these were, had just gone off for a walk and casually left me in charge of his booth, and I had just as casually taken charge. I was writing a book about the guy. I had become his friend. And now I was selling his cows.

Hell, if the book didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize maybe I’d at least get a commission on the cows.

I was, of course, fated to betray Pete Binion. At least that’s what I’d read in Janet Malcolm’s celebrated New Yorker essay about the writer Joe McGinniss and the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinniss had buddied around with MacDonald during the latter’s trial and corresponded with him for years afterward, all the while concealing his belief that MacDonald was guilty.

After the publication of McGinniss’ best-selling book on the case, MacDonald had sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract (they had an arrangement whereby McGinniss got exclusive access to MacDonald in exchange for a share of the book’s earnings). MacDonald’s lawyer asserted that McGinniss had been a “false friend” to his client. Malcolm agreed. And she argued, moreover, that such duplicity is intrinsic to the writer-subject relationship: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Malcolm’s essay left a lot of writers sputtering in outrage or murmuring assent. But I don’t think many of them were, at that very moment, attending the family reunion in Burnet, Tex., of someone they were writing a book about, playing bridge with his wife’s elderly aunts and generally cementing fine, friendly relations with the entire clan. I was.

I had entered the lives of Pete Binion and Jim Teal (a T-shirt magnate who was my other subject) just as Joe McGinniss had entered that of Jeffrey MacDonald. I was there under pretenses that were, at least, questionable. I wanted to write a book about American entrepreneurs, and I had found my subjects in Pete and Jim. It was my book, not their book, and I wanted it to be perfect--sharp, true, intimate, funny, sad.

Every minute I spent with Pete or Jim had a dual agenda: to do whatever we were doing, and to gather good material. I thought about Malcolm’s accusation of betrayal every time I sat around with Pete or Jim over a fourth round of Margaritas or beers, steered the conversation to something I wanted to know about, strained to memorize what was said to me (making no outward sign), and then casually sauntered to the men’s room to whip out a pocket notebook and scrawl a few lines.

How would Pete and Jim feel about seeing tidbits from barroom nights in print years later? Would I have to choose between writing the best book I could and honoring their sensitivities? Was the conflict implacable? Was I a skunk? Or can a writer and his subject be pals, before and after pub date?

First of all, I tried to be fair. I carefully explained the rules of going “off the record” to both Pete and Jim--if the secretary of state can do it, why not a Senepol breeder?--and they both exercised that option from time to time, often when I least expected it. Jim didn’t mind my reporting on his hot-tub orgies, but he held back on some minor business matters. Stumbling into a Guatemala City whorehouse one midnight, Pete announced: “This entire evening is off the record,” even though he had been dragged there reluctantly by a business associate and didn’t do anything there except get drunk and make a speech denouncing communism to the whores. (For the purposes of this essay, Pete has put the evening back on the record.)

Most of the time, Pete and Jim spoke to me without restrictions. They told me more about themselves than all but their closest friends knew and, as we became friends, I found myself behaving in a most unMalcolmesque way: I began to worry that they were telling me too much. For Pete’s sake, I thought, shouldn’t I forget his story about what happened the night he met his wife? For Jim’s, shouldn’t I edit conversations like the one wherein his partner tried to interest a Times Square drug dealer in the T-shirt business?

Malcolm notwithstanding, many authors have in fact edited their texts to protect the reputations of their subjects, but before I could even begin to worry about what I might leave out when I wrote my book, I found myself confronted with more immediate issues. As the time I spent with Pete and Jim spilled over several years, our lives entangled. When Jim went to meet, for the first time, the mother of his new bride, I went along. The three of us--bride, groom, and writer--walked up to the older woman together. She smiled, said, “Welcome to the family,” and gave me a big kiss. Jim’s wife had to point out her actual husband.

Then there was the matter of stage-managing. Naturally, I directed plenty of conversations to topics I wanted to hear about. And I once turned on the Pee Wee Herman show to see how Pete would react (he didn’t like it). But what if I caused Pete or Jim to do something that changed his life? If a writer induced something to happen to a person he was writing about that would not have occurred in the writer’s absence, did some sort of journalistic Uncertainty Principle come into play? Should every biography of a living person be titled Whosis and Me ?

I wondered about this when Jim invited me to join his foursome at a topless golf tournament. How well should I play? Should I sink 20-foot putts (ignoring the naked women performing somersaults at the edge of the greens), thus propelling our team to the tournament championship and possibly launching Jim as a professional topless golfer?

These questions quickly became moot in the tournament (I was too easily distracted). And I never sold any cows either. But when Jim obtained the T-shirt rights to the Soviet space program, I helped him sell shirts at the Paris Air Show. (“Feel that cotton,” I urged a wavering Flemish tourist, who bought the shirt.) I hedged when I could, but I occasionally told Pete what I thought about his business. When his business collapsed (no connection, I believe, to my always tentative advice), he borrowed money from me to hire a bankruptcy lawyer. This brought me so irretrievably into Pete’s story that I had to switch, on Page 272, from third-person narrative to first.

My net effect on Jim and Pete’s lives was small. My loan was particularly small. But something more subtle was occurring. Pete and Jim were affecting me. This did not have any effect on the book, though.

Just on my life. I was going native.

Writing is essentially a passive activity. Journalists like myself write about people doing interesting things. In my case, at least, there is a little envy in the transaction. Pete and Jim’s projects were alive, daring, throbbing with hope. Mine was a bunch of scrawls in a stack of notebooks.

One day on Pete’s ranch--Hopes Creek Ranch--all work stopped while Pete and his wife Becky rolled out a blackboard and Becky wrote down the names of every available woman she knew in Brazos County. She had decided I needed a Texas date. As she ran down the list--”This one’s a swim mom. That one likes to go country dancing”--I looked out at the ranch where I had spent so many days. Red cows were grazing in the pastures. The children were climbing in a tree. I was beguiled by the idea that I might hit it off with one of these women--the swim mom sounded nice--and settle down on a neighboring ranch and start raising Senepols. And some journalist could come out and write a book about me.

That didn’t happen. I went home, and I wrote my book. I faced at last the issue of including things that might embarrass my friends Pete and Jim. And I put them in. I wrote exactly the book I wanted to write. Then I flew back to Texas and sat down with Pete and Jim and a copy of the manuscript. If they wanted to object to something, I would listen. If they wanted me to change something I thought was important to the book, I didn’t know what I would do.

I learned immediately that I should have given them more credit than to worry about the issue at all. They were intelligent adults and when they gave me access to their lives, they were prepared to accept the consequences. Pete didn’t ask me to change a thing. Jim asked only that I clean up his language a little. I deleted three four-letter words. The book was finished.

There was a publication party in New York last month, and I invited Jim and Pete and Becky. A friend of mine who had read the book expressed amazement that they would come “unarmed and without lawyers.” But they did. They all slept on the floor of my apartment, and we went out every night till 3 a.m., and we all had a fine old friendly time.

We are now making plans for our joint book tour. You can catch us on Channel 11 in Fort Worth. Pete and Jim are the ones without the knives in their backs.