Word: novaks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about her reliance on astrology, her feuds with White House chief of staff Donald Regan and her troubled relations with her children. "When she'd say, 'Now Bill, you're not going to talk about this,' I'd use the editors: 'But the editors insist on these subjects,' " says Novak. "The fact is, if you ask readers to pay $22 for a book, you have to reveal new material. Ironically, the better known the person the more they must reveal." Recalls Reagan: "There were tough, difficult times and good times. But I wanted it honest and personal...
...Novak is able to elicit such responses because he is a most unassuming, amiable sort who leaves his ego at the door. He fits his approach to his subject. With the brusque, no-nonsense Iacocca, he conducted interviews in offices and conference rooms, never sharing a meal with him. With O'Neill, he took drives around Cape Cod in the former Speaker's beat-up Chrysler and listened to endless anecdotes over tuna sandwiches. "I worried that these were only a wall of stories," he says. "I came to realize that Tip's opinions were expressed through his stories...
After doing exhaustive library research on a subject, Novak typically talks to dozens of family members and friends to build up lists of questions for his interviews. No muckraker, he uses challenging or contradictory material only to try to jog his subject's memory or trigger fresh stories. "I push as far as I can go," he says. "I'm not trying to change a person's version of himself." Novak works from transcriptions of his interviews, occasionally going back to the tapes to capture the subject's voice -- one of his strengths, he believes. A couple of months into...
Toronto-born, Novak graduated from local York University intending to be a writer ("No kid goes to bed at night dreaming he'll be a ghostwriter"). After earning an M.A. in contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis, he spent ten years editing scholarly magazines and writing a string of financially unsuccessful books (among them: High Culture, about marijuana use, The Great American Man Shortage and a compendium of Jewish humor). Just as he resigned himself to "finding a real job," an editor friend at Bantam suggested Lee Iacocca. "Great! My kind of guy," said Novak, who had never heard of Iacocca...
...future celebrity subjects. He muses about Mikhail Gorbachev ("but somehow I think he's busy right now"), and, as a music lover who has recently resumed piano lessons, he thinks about Paul McCartney or Barbra Streisand. "Or Elvis, if he can find him," wisecracks Ben, 10, one of the Novaks' two sons. As for a return to the solo byline of William Novak, he says it's not soon likely. "I get far more ego gratification and attention from these books than I ever did from my own." But aren't the celebrity books his own too? No. This John...