One reason I generally shy away from celebrity biographies is that they typically involve too much authorial sleight-of-hand. Though they’re written in the first-person, it’s always obvious that the actor or athlete or entrepreneur behind the “I” didn’t actually commit any words to paper. Even the savviest ghostwriter can’t help but leave their fingerprints all over the text, and that strikes me as semi-unseemly when the main character refuses to give much credit to their hired wordsmith. (The rare exception here is Andre Agassi’s Open, in which the subject is very upfront about why he hired J.R. Moehringer to write his life’s story, and how he trusted the ghostwriter’s vision.)
The flip side of my aversion to ghostwritten celebrity bios is my affinity for such memoirs that are clearly self-authored. The archetype I have in mind here is Mr. T’s splendid The Man with the Gold, my copy of which I recently unearthed while unpacking from a move. In addition to spawning one of the best publicity photos in human history, the book reveals its author—who makes clear that no ghostwriter was involved on the very first page—to be someone who used the writing process as a messy form of therapy. There are misspellings throughout, plot holes, contradictions, and poor grammar—all evidence that the former Lawrence Tureaud was true to his word about seeking little outside help. (I assume there was an editor at St. Martin’s Press, but he or she was probably mostly interested in rushing the project to press while The A-Team was still hot.) The Man with the Gold may be a country mile from the realm of literature, but it conveys a sense of genuine vulnerability and introspection that’s lacking from most celebrity autobiographies that now overwhelm the front tables at Barnes & Noble.
Re-discovering The Man with the Gold inspired me to seek out other examples of the self-written celebrity memoir genre, which is how I stumbled across the diamond in the rough entitled Life as I Know It Has Been “Finger Lickin’ Good”, by KFC founder Harland Sanders. (I feel a little weird referring to him as Colonel Sanders; after all, we don’t talk about “Colonel Darryl Strawberry” or “Colonel Hunter S. Thompson.”)
Sanders’ writing style is quite different from Mr. T: It’s more laid-back, less staccato and sermon-like. That’s not always a plus, as there are pages that slip by without making an impression—I do get the sense that Sanders probably dictated a lot of the book into a tape recorder, possibly while taking a warm bath. But the memoir still vibrates with an appealing sense of honesty, a lack of concern with how the more outré parts of the subject’s life might be perceived. The passage that will forever stick with me most is this harrowing one, in which Sanders nonchalantly recounts how, without a shred of formal training, he started delivering babies in an impoverished corner of southeastern Kentucky.
About that time I also got involved with obstetrical work, delivering babies. There was nobody else to do it. The husbands couldn’t afford a doctor when their wives were pregnant. They had no money at all. No nothing. Like I say, some of those homes didn’t have enough money for their next meal.
We had one family by the name of Humphrey. They lived back in the woods, way beyond the end of the road. The lady was due to deliver. I’d been told when she was expecting so I kept a close watch. When I didn’t get any call I went to her and did an examination and determined that the baby was dead. That was the reason it hadn’t been born.
I asked some men to get some bed clothing and lay it on poles lengthwise leaving the poles about two feet longer at each end than the bedspread. That made a stretcher. We put her on this bedspread, then four men took hold of the poles and we carried her about two miles out of the woods to where the ambulance could get her. They took her to the London hospital where they found that sure enough, the baby had died. The doctor said in another couple of hours, peritonitis would have set in and she would have died, too. I don’t know how they delivered the baby. I had no hand in that, but the mother came back a well woman.
Sanders’ career as an amateur midwife didn’t last long: He got out of game several months later, after he helped save a baby whom the mother then named “Harland” in his honor.
If you know of other self-written celebrity memoirs, please advise in comments; I’m thinking of devouring as many as I can over the summer to come. Bonus points if the book in question starts with the author emphatically stating that he or she would never dream of hiring a ghostwriter.
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