Between the four of us we have written at least 17 biographies. It might be more than that. I was losing count because Randy Roberts has written so many. Youve written more than half of our total number i think. So we have a lot of experience in the genre. We have obviously been drawn to it and have an affinity for it some way or another. Before we begin, let me introduce the panelists, and as i introduce each of you, if you could just stand a minute or two, telling the audience what was it that you used for your biography. What is it you love about the genre. First we have larry, from New York University of arts and a musical writing program. He is particularly interested in the history of broadway and comedy. He has written a play with Richard Rogers in addition to several other books. His most recent biographical word is the documentary film semi davis junior, i gotta be me. Larry, tell us what has drawn you to this. I may be a little different from the rest of the panel my venue is really entertainment. Obviously, in entertainment you are dealing with the public persona and performers. What they saying, dance, acted. And of course what happens offstage or behind the curtain is equally fascinating to try to make some sense out of what a performer did publicly with what were his or her motivations. What was the context that of their time. What trends and tastes changed and, my case particularly american entertainment in favor or out of favor. I have always been interested and that dialectic between offstage and onstage and hopefully when we talk a little more about semi davis junior that may it be a little more persuasive. Thank you. John weaker, professor of the History Department at the university of missouri columbia. He is interested in religious history, particularly method had some. He was also on my committee when i took my comprehensive exams and wrote my dissertations. Im glad that im asking you the questions this time. He has written biographies on minister Francis Alice barry and most recently p. T. El, the rise and fall of jim and tammy fay bakers evangelical empire. Can you tell us a little bit about this . Thank you for organizing this and bringing it all together. You saw my paper, right . Bad joke. Thank you i dont really think of myself as a biographer. I have never really thought of it that way. In my mind, i dont research or really write any differently than when i am doing a biography versus anything else, historical or nonfiction. I think the advantage that biography has is that it lends itself to a good story well told. You can reach a broad audience with an engaging story that has a lot of human drama in it. That is not a bad thing and i think that is what of sort of drew me to writing what turns out to be biography. Emily said i wrote a book a few years ago on frances asbury, a guy who i think is endlessly fascinating and important. It was a big, dense book. Nobody read it. I sat back after doing that, and i thought, this is a lot of work. If im going to do this im going to write about topics that i care about and i think are important and will draw an audience. That is when i did jim and tammy baker book. Sure enough okay, sorry. I make sure your mic is on. Do i need to start over and do this all over again . Thank you. Thank you. Randi roberts is a professor in the History Department at purdue university. He is particularly interested in African American and sports history. Randi has written biographies of mike tyson, john wayne, charles lindbergh, john lewis, jack dempsey, jack johnson, Ronald Reagan, joni mitt and a team biography of the pittsburgh sealers. His most recent biographical works our blood brothers, the fatal friendship of malcolm x and mohammed halle. A season and the sun, the rise of making mental. Really, can you tell us a little bit about your interests and all this . This fits perfectly for me to kind of political history and biography Popular Culture. I have always seen myself as working at the intersection between political history and culture and Popular Culture. I write about performers like you. Actors, athletes, but ive never really been interested in writing a book about an athlete who is just an athlete or an actor who is just an actor. Somehow, they have to engage in a wider political culture, somebody like, for example, john wayne or muhammad ali, who clearly became iconic and you can tell a persons politics by talking to somebody and talk to them about john wayne. Their attitudes on john wayne will tell me a great deal about their politics or attitudes on mohammed ali. It will do the same thing. I brought a quote in here. How can i tie these things together . How can i tie politics in this political conference. With biography. Popular culture. I did find in a box in quote that i wanted to read to you and it was the sage of orange new jersey. I dont know if ever anybody ever heard of this. He was a rowley pulley boxer. Before he fought jewel lewis, he fought a guy named abe feldman down in miami on George Washingtons birthday. So he is trying to build up a fight a little bit and he also wants to Say Something about american history. Say something about american politics. Engage with the crucial questions of his day. This is the quote. Supposedly this quote is true, i but it came from a journalist, so we will see. He is trying to Say Something about George Washington and build up the fight at the same time. He said, it is time, it is high time that the south came to know and love washington as we know and love him more than the equator. Why cant we forget the civil war and its petty grudges. Why freed the slaves, but remember he also invented the lightning rod . Let the north and south class the hand of friendship on old hickorys birthday and try to get there early. Anybody who can conflate link in, Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin is truly the sage of orange new jersey. I have more on biography, but maybe we can get to it as we go along. I am emily raymond. I am a professor in the History Department and virginia commonwealth university. My area of focus up until now i am shifting a little bit, but it has been hollywood and pilot six. Ive written biographies on Charlton Heston, most recently about black celebrities in the Civil Rights Movements, called sars for freedom. I did not think of myself as going into the biography genre either. I really wanted to write about Charlton Heston because this is my dissertation topic. It was when he was the president of the national association. I also knew he had been involved in democratic administrations and in the Civil Rights Movements before he came to the gun cause and supporting republican candidates. I was really fascinated about his evolution and what that said about american political culture. I started with that. Then my next book, i had no intention of it being a biography. It was going to just generally be about celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement. But the more i looked at it, the more became very clear that there were about six who were really leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and they deserve to be recognized as the earliest, most consistent, most effective celebrity supporters. I decided to turn it into a group biography with this leading six at the forefront. Now my next book is going to be a dual biography. Ive come to really love the genre, because it is such a great way to look at these fascinating people in american political culture, and the dynamic tape that they bring to making change in particular. That is my spiel on biography, i suppose. I guess one thing, to point out, is that i feel biography has a lot more variety then most people think. A lot of people think biography is just a book about one person. But randys book, blood brothers, is about malcolm x and mohammed aly. Their relationship. John winners, the book on ttyl is about jim and tammy fay, and then of course stars for freedom is a group biography. It does not just have to be about one person. What i wanted to ask you all is what other ways can there be more variety to biography then might first meet the eye . Can i pitch in . Two quick things. I am also documentarian. Half of my work has been nonfiction publications and half my work has been film so obviously on film, if you are doing say, semi chavez junior, you have a whole different canvas to work on. You can kind of obviously use performances in juxtaposition to other performances as a way of creating some kind of tension. When you do that the other thing is i worked on another companion book to a six hour documentary series i did for pbs called make them laugh, the funny business of america. Essentially, it was American Comedy from chaplain to, who did we end with . Sarah i think was the most recent person we used. The director and i realize that if youre going to do a film, i did a companion book and wrote the documentary episodes. But if youre going to go, okay, here is American Comedy. Lets start in 19 whatever. 1906. Pictures of charlie chaplain. Oh may west. Your first hour would be entirely silent and black and white. People would stop watching. That really forced us to rethink about how we want to what kind of taxonomy we wanted to create intense terms of gaining or ganging biographical figures together. We realize in america there were six great comedic archetypes. There were situation comedies. There were geeks and nerds. There were wiseguys, political satire, physical comedians. Each generation seemed to churn out their own version of that in a way that really reflected the democrat fix of america, the changing demographics of america. When we were able to do that was like an episode of wiseguys, i forget what it is. The wiseguys episode. Not the marx brothers. Then red fox who took on that tradition, eddie murphy took on that tradition. Freddy prince, so on and so forth. There was a way maybe of rethinking certain categories in group biography that would give it a little more spark. Rather than simply doing things chronologically. But within a completely Different Group work. That was really exciting to work on for us. It is a very interesting way to bring variety to the genre. Any other thoughts from you as well . What was the question again . Having more variety to biographies. People tend to think of it to be like one person and you chronologically go through their life and thats it. And that is the formula. What other formulas that maybe you tried and have worked that you liked . I think a dual biography is this interesting approach. It is what i use with muhammad ali and malcolm x in the book that i wrote with johnny smith on blood blood blood brothers. Youre write books, a number of books ive done have been not a full biography, but looking at a person at a particular time. A crucial time in their life. Ive done the full biography and if you do somebody like john wayne, a persons life is not interesting all the time. It is a fact. It is not crucial at one time. Take one segment of it, what you feel might be the most crucial period in your life and dig deeper. Tell a wider story than you could if you did the full beginning to end biography, is a way to approach it. That is what you do with nikki mantles in that biography as well. It is the rise of nick ricky mantle. It ends and 56. 56 was his great year. Mickey mantle before in 1956, he was kind of a failure. If he could have been a failure. A failure in terms of expectations. He came up to the yankees and in spring training he was hitting the ball over the moon when they were playing in the daytime, if you could hit the ball during the day. Everybody said youll be fair and all the players on the team said hes going to be the next demand you. Hes going to be the next babe ruth. Hes going to be the next lou gary. Everyone expected him to perform immediately like garrick, dimaggio, bruce. They were great, but mickey would show signs of brilliance, greatness, but he would get injured, he would not hit in the clutch. By 55 they were bullying him, he was solitary, mad, uncommunicative. Then he has a breakout season where he wins the triple crown and becomes the Mickey Mantle of legend. And that is where you end the book. To the extent, i think what ive done with biographies is more group biography. And that fully interesting people out when they are interesting. There are times when jim and tammy are the most interesting people in the room but other times when they are not. The one advantage of biography is that it allows you to weave a hey narrative to weave a narrative thats interesting. But its not just to tell the story of someones life, its to make larger points. To draw out a story that transcends them, even if they are at the center of it for a large part of the time. One of the most common critiques i have heard about biographies is that its one person from that standpoint it might feel like it does not have the same intellectual heft as opposed to voting patterns of a certain time. How do you respond to that critique . That is just one person . Its tough to make that a generic statement, because people become interesting in different times forward. We look back on people certainly in the theater when we did the broadway documentary, there were people who were fascinating in their time and lost to history, like ethel waters, a great africanamerican performer, the most highly paid entertainer in new york city, and mae west who was arrested and sent to rikers for violating decency acts, and they faded away. Then the world changes in their stories are interesting again. I think a great biography has velcro. You can move forward and it will pick up a life in a way, and when we worked on the Sammy Davis Jr documentary, it was shocking to me, as somebody who knew him, he was a venn diagram. He was a man who knew on one level because ethel waters and bill waterson. Archie bunker, and eddie cantor. Michael jackson as well. These intersection of lives was tremendous. His life was revelatory of when he lived. Thats what we always look for. Sammy davis jr was one of the most challenging subjects i ever came across. In terms of intellectual challenge. He was contradictory, and someone i really had to wrestle with to try to figure out how to characterize. The way you do it in the film, by giving him these different categories, activist, entertainer. Singer, impressionist, hipster. We tried to categorize the chronology of his life in the guises that he took on, or felt that he had to take on, for us to haunt him in his life. I think entertainment is a little bit like sports. You are still if you are an entertainer you are choosing with songs your singing, please you will act in. Those have tremendous external circumstances. You either hit the ball out of the ballpark where you dont. You are again looking at these things going on simultaneously but in terms of a performer, you are always looking at the choices they make. What are they choosing to portray. What are they choosing to be about. That is such a vacuum of the times in which they lived. Looking back on it, we have footage of semi davis when he was five years old tapped and sing. Then we have footage of him three months before he died, tap dancing. Within that bracket you can accomplish a lot, if you are clever about how you put those things together. John, i would say for jim and tammy fay baker, the book, it is not just about jim and tammy fay, right . No. It is not. It is really about the entire organization event. And to the weightiness of biography, if your sources are good, i dont see where its suffers in comparison to any other kind of non fiction writing. If your sources are good, and you can tell a rich story. You are political history is oftentimes, is the history of the aggregate. History is aggregate. Biography is history of individuals. There is an excitement to biography. There is a joy to it. If i could tell one story of a biographer i like. Hes a guy by the name of Richard Holmes. Has anybody ever heard of Richard Holmes in here . Richard holmes is an english biographer of the romantic period. He did a big thick book on shelley, a two volume biography on cool rich. In 1964 when he was about 19 years old, he read a book. Traveled with a donkey go up by robert lewiss davidson. Robert Lewis Stevenson before he became famous with kidnapped and doctor jekyll, Treasure Island and all these books. He read this book and robert Lewis Stevenson goes through this trip with a donkey, which is kind of an appellation region of france. He was intrigued by the book. He was intrigued by the biography of robert Lewis Stevenson at the time. Robert Lewis Stevenson was moving towards his mid to late twenties. He had not written anything great. He had scottish strict calvinist parents. When are you going to get a job . We are going to do something with your life . And maybe Richard Holmes felt the same way. What is he going to do . He wants to be a poet. Is there life and poetry . All of the anxious that a 19 year old would have. Robert Lewis Stevenson was going through a love problem, relationship problem. Maybe holmes was, i dont know. He decided to reproduce the strip. Sand donkey. No donkey. It was a very stylish hat. So he starts off, he is sleeping under the stars and what have you. He crosses over a bridge into langone a. A small little village. It is around dusk. The shops are closing up. He can smell garlic, crushed fruits from the stalls. Children are coming out and playing. People are taking walks and he has this overwhelming urge, overwhelming premonition he is going to meet robert Lewis Stevenson. He is serious. This was the 1960s, what else brought that on, i dont know. But he has this premonition. He starts pacing the streets and looking into the cafes, looking into the saloons, the hotels. He is looking for him. Then he is by the river, by the bridge. He looks downstream and sees another bridge. It is a bridge it is crumbled and ivy covered. It does not span the river anymore. It is washed out. He realizes that is the bridge that robert Lewis Stevenson came in to langone a through. It kind of acts as a metaphor for what we do as a biographer. We are trying to breach those subjects, trying to talk with those subjects. We are trying to interrogate people who are no longer alive in many cases. We talk to friends if they are recently departed or if they are still around. We read their sources. It becomes an allconsuming conversation with people that are not it is a oneway conversation. Sometimes i am not sure it is a oneway conversation. Maybe you people will see other biographers. Every biographer ive ever talked to. Something coincidently has happened. There are some plays and some documents show up that they have no reason to be there. They seem to stumble across something and it seems like it should not happen but it does happen. I am convinced that there may be a twoway conversation. You are shaking your head now one of the things about semi davis junior in particular, talking about sources, when he died in 89, he left the biggest he owed more money to the irs than any individual in the history of america. All of his stuff was locked up. It was pbs, so they made lawyers, airs, finally has adopted son said, my dad had to in burbank. Do you want to come and see them . I said will be there and six hours. We are going on a flight right now. Do not go anywhere. Sure enough, sami who is a rat pack rat no pun intended, he was a photographer he had all the stuff that was like elder auto for instance. We were doing all that. Next thing were in las vegas interviewing him. If youve ever if youve ever gone any through scrapbooks or yellow and paper and stuff, it leaves a try to us on the ground and after two days with fluorescent lighting, drinking endless cups of coffee, its time to pack up. The floor was like a parade. All of a sudden, i was picking stuff up and there was this card. It sits heroes on it. That is not the real card. Syros was a big night club where semi made his big breakthrough and jerry lewis was in the audience. It was a kind of thing that you find on the table. I opened it up and these were do jerry lewis is notes the night he saw semi sandy davis junior. You talk with a fake british accent. It does not make any sense. You treat a father and uncle like they are props. This is the way you should address the audience. The next day that allowed him to talk about we found a film of salmon saying jerry lewis came to see me at zeroes and gave me this advice and it changed my life. Exactly what you are saying. Its a Golden Ticket just lying there on the floor. Showed us the way to go forward. Sami made it happened. It was a twoway conversation. Another theme that we want to talk about was the use of media as source material and as evidence so i guess id like for each of you to talk about the kind of media youve consulted insights they gave you. You want to start john . One of the fun things about doing the project was i got to talk to living people. I had never done that before in my career. I did get sometimes you find the living are less cooperative than the dead in what they will and will not tell you. The other fun thing wish just the range of sources. Newspaper sources, trial transcripts. I learned that a good trial transcript, a good prosecutor does have your work for you. More than half, because they can compel people to say under oath things they do not want to say. Video as well. In this case jim and tammy lived their life on the screen so to speak. It is similar to your story. When i was very early in this project over 20,000 hours of their Television Show was in the hands of a private collector. I started trying to find at one point the guy called me up and offered to sell me 20,000 hours of videotape he had in four tractortrailers. It ended up going to the assemblies of god archive in springfield missouri. Which was obviously a much better home for it. Im not quite sure how this addressed your question, but just the range of sources, and a lot of them were media. Again, it was one of the great things about working on this. You work with people who live their life in the public eye. They leave a big footprint. They leave a lot of sources to work with. Did you watch all 20,000 hours . The good and bad of that is no, and thats probably a good thing because that is several years of 24 hours a day. It turned out that since most of it was from the seventies and eighties some from the sixties, it was on a variety of different film mediums, including two inch quadruple ex tape. It had to be digitized to be useful. In fact, a lot of the machines to just digitized that kind of stuff are 40 years old themselves. So the archive could only afford to digitize a few hundred hours at a time, so i think only ended up with only three or 400 hours at the end. They let me select what digitize out of the collection as far as we could tell. The vast majority of it still sits there, sort of slowly decomposing. Randi, one of the things about your blood brothers book is you talked about how mohammed aly and malcolm x had a strong relationship that was under appreciated, and in some cases, it was actually in the public eye and you went back to old media sources can you talk about that . It was not in the public eye here we have muhammad ali. This is before he is behind it mohammed only his goal was to become heavyweight champion of the world he meets malcolm x. He is influenced by malcolm x and he is already starting to embrace the nation of his lamb. If the word gets out that he is a black muslim, that he is a member of the nation of islam, he will probably never get a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship in the world. He will be toxic at that time. Boxing at that time is going through a period where it had all sorts of problems. They do not need a champion that is identifying in early 19 sixties with a win is considered a hate movement. That is how south americans viewed it. We were able to, johnny smith and i. We were able to find an incredible amount of material on malcolm giving speeches and mohammed aly giving speeches and giving talks. One of the things we were able to reconstruct is we watched malcolm Say Something and he would give a speech and he would use a metaphor and then some shortly afterwards you would see mohammed ali use the same story the same metaphor the same example. The great thing about muhammad ali, he was a wonderful person. If you told him something, a story, the next day he would tell the story and the next day he would tell it again, and pretty soon you would think he was the origin of the story. He would tell it better than anybody else would tell. He was great at telling stories. Using that media was good. With the john wayne of course, there were interviews, there were 200 films roughly that he made. You could see him progress. His art progressed, his character progressed. That iconic individual, how it evolved over time. I have one more story in and it is an interview story on the john wayne book. It is serendipitous and moments. I try to get an interview with a woman by the name of mary saintjean who was john waynes personal secretary throughout his entire career. She had never been interviewed before. She was living in kansas city at that time. She said i dont know, i dont know anything more than anybody else knows. I okay. Can we come out and talk to you . Okay come. We show up at 9 00, 8 00, early in the morning. I started asking questions and she said no. I do not want to answer questions. Let me just talk. Let me just tell you okay so tell us the story. It was like therapy. She just clearly she was in love with john wayne. Not romantic lee. She just admired the guy. Nothing salacious. She was on every set with him. She went on every set. Basically, people on the set you have actors that have been performing in movies and you have people behind the set, hairdressers, makeup people who have nothing to do all day long except gossip. She knew every gossip who was sleeping with who in hollywood at this time. It was incredible. Wayne took her to lunch. We went to dinner, she kept talking. The first interview lasted close to 17 hours. It was all material that i had. It allowed me to see don john wayne in a different way. I am rambling, im sorry. I want to pose this to the rest of my panelists. I have interviewed people who worked with people. We interview jerry lewis, but great Billy Crystal who not only went on to impersonates sammy davis but actually open for him. I often found that people who we interview, it is important for them it is important to go in there that you may know more about them than they do. Not necessarily just sort of like, oh this is the horses mouth as it were, so therefore im going to hear everything sort of unfiltered or an distinguished. Sometimes you can contradict them and get more interesting stuff out of them. Did you find that sometimes the best interviews are the people that are not used to being interviewed. If you interview celebrities, they have a you ask a question. I would ask a question, he would never really answer the question. It would remind him of another question and give me a stock answer that he had given 1 million times before. They are used to protecting their persona, whereas if you are interviewing somebody that is a makeup artist, they are not used to being interviewed, so sometimes i think you get Better Stories from them. Do you find that . I think it is also great sometimes, i also find it is true. If you have documentation you can present them with. I did american masters on Richard Rogers who had two daughters who were very successful in their own right. He had written something in his autobiography that said if i kept working with larry hart into the forties, i would wind up going crazy or being an alcoholic or both. In fact, we know that he was both. I read that quote at his daughter. I said what do you make of him writing that in his autobiography. She said on camera, he did become both and was able to compartmentalize it. The fact that he could write when he was that he actually wasnt. Put him into a drink tank. When he was about to open a big show in 1954, blah blah blah. I think sometimes if you have stuff that they said earlier or road earlier, it can really pose a destruction, which i think is what you are talking about. You want to create some kind of improvisation out of people, because that is when the best of comes out. The key is, when you interview somebody you really do your homework. You have to know what you are looking for. Bringing pictures sometimes helps. Going into an actual location with them. Just seeing what they think about it. What they remember. I find that has been useful. Or contradicting them with something that someone else has said. That way they are not arguing with you, they are arguing with the person you brought the quote about. It is not confrontation. I think also, people whose perceptions have changed and whose experiences would be interpreted differently now, they will tell a different story than maybe they told 30 years ago. What i have in mind is one of the best interviews i had for the pretty elbow questions that cohen. Jessica had told her story in the late eighties and early nineties. But the late ortiz eighties and nineties was a way different time in the way that her experience would be looked at, especially post me too movement. Then talking to her more recently just offered an entirely different take from all of this evidence, video of her interviews and so for that i had 30 years ago. It is just wonderful to now dive back into the story 30 years later in an entirely different context. Someone who had lived thinking about that for 30 years and who is thinking about it had changed. Another thing that all of our subjects have been in common is that they all seem to bring something new to the media landscape. Something exciting or Something Different something revolutionary. Can you all talk about a little bit about what that is. Our work on it or the subject weve written about . The subject youve written about. We were talking emily appears in the documentary and able to contextualize sammys contribution. Harry wouldnt speak to us. Did you speak to harry directly . I tried, but its sensitive. Again, if you are doing semi davis junior you are talking about someone for whom the spotlight was breakfast, lunch and dinner. A little bit like youre 20,000 hours of videotape, we had almost too much material. In a visual documentary, which hopefully you will get to see again, if you know you have something in the back, we had some performances that we did not know we had them, if we did not know we could license and digitize them and show them, then we would have to write about something else. You do not want Jesse Jackson or quincy jones say, well there was this night in chicago in 1972. And never forget. It sammy got up and saying that. The audience booed him. We have the footage of his groundbreaking performance on all in the family. We were able to build on that from these interviews. Im talking about documentary biography which is obviously a visual and auditory medium. Sammy davis junior certainly mohammed ali the flip side is often you deal with subjects who are an embarrassment of riches and the question is what to leave on the floor, whether it is a booker documentary. It is harder when you are writing about a performance then when you can just show it. As far as media source material for me, and then how same sammy davis junior brought something new to the media landscape, i think the most valuable thing for me was his appearances on variety shows. In an of themselves do not sound that exciting because they are just a few minutes and they are just kind of in and out, but he, in the 19 fifties was on, at least this is what i can count on one, 47 different variety show appearances, but seeing a number of them, i was able to realize that he brought something really new to television. Most Network Programming was very stereotypical in the way that it showed African Americans on television programs. Likes it comes. But on these variety shows he could come out just be himself and joke around and have a familiar relationship with the white people on the show. That really showed and integration, that you just would not see a Network Programming. That is almost how americans got to know semi davis junior. Most people do not go to night clubs. Most people saw him on tv. He became so familiar and so beloved that that was one of the reasons he could be a really effective civil rights activists. Without this kind of constant variety show presents, i think it would have been a lot difference. Interesting you say that. There is a corollary to that, which is, again youll see in the documentary, he will be embraced by white performers, in some cases literally, was like a hand reaching out to an entire community. Based on knowing that we have that footage to show, we then interviewed a number of black critics and professors who grew up during that time. They said to me some of the most revelatory things we have on camera like, you have no idea, if you are an African American family in detroit or atlanta or new orleans where people grew up, you would call each other up on the phone and say oh my god, lena horn is on tonight. Sami is on the eddie canter show. We would all gather around because it was so rare in the 19 fifties to see a black individual, let alone a major black individual on a network Television Show. When you find all those media things, it is important to stretch the canvas a little bit and say, i like his performance. He seems really well here. Wow, i wonder what black audiences felt about that in 1954 and make sure you get that context in as well. To just know that he was on was not enough. He really had to see it. You have to see the mopping of the brow, steve allen. He muffed his brow. Its like they are friends. It was really effective from that standpoint. What about jim and tammy . What did jim bring that was new to media in the late seventies and late 1980s . I think one way to describe this is that the story has that three layers to it. Most peoples and three point to the story was the sex and money scandal in the late eighties. The thing one of the things you can do in telling that story is jump back earlier. Why were these people celebrities . Why did anyone care at that point . Basically, p. T. Al had three innovations. Really quickly, the first one in the sixties and early seventies was baker created a new kind of christian talk show. He and tammy or small time pen to coastal evangelists in the show and unwind at night by watching Johnny Carson who was at the height of cultural cool in the sixties. Baker would say, why cant somebody do that, do a christian version of that . Up until then, most Christian Television was a Church Service on tv morales. So his first big innovation was creating this new format that christian talk shows that would look inhibition initially a lot like Johnny Carson, later like oprah. It was innovative and it was something new. The second was, in the late seventies, they figured out because the small you each f station they were broadcasting and charlotte from, was owned by ted turner. They watched ted turner put up his station on satellite. They in effect created the first private Satellite Television network. A year before espn went on the air. It was innovative and it dramatically expanded their audience and it also produced a tremendous amount of money. That led to the third innovation which was really their undoing as well. Baker wanted to create a christian disneyland so he built heritage usa and in 1986, they had 6 million visitors. It was the third biggest theme park after disneyland and disney world. So they have all of these innovations, and they revolve around the talk show and Satellite Network. This is what built them up to the point where the sex and money scandal mattered. But that is the entry point for most people, the service that you can do is sort of pulling it back and telling the story that leads after. That then i think that third layer is to further step back and say what is any of this matter . What is the save American Culture and American Religion . Did other event tell culls pattern themselves after him, with the Satellite Network and Television Shows . Yes, they did. Actually, he was with Pat Robertson before he launched his own ministry, and helped create the 700 club, then he was in Southern California and helped create the trinity broadcasting network. There were many competitors, and people doing more or less the same thing, but as all of this is sort of developing and swirling around, they are one of the people at the center of the story. And theyre just fun. Tammy is endlessly engaging. Everybody loves tammy. Thats one of the things that i found out in the, book Everybody Loves her. She continues to have this enduring presence. Theyre discussing doing a musical about her. I think there is already one. Can i add one more thing, i did a special on this. It ended up being the best rated program on that station in a year. It was the ups of the pulled in the most viewers. Because of you. Yes of course because me on camera. Because of tammy. Yes i think thats probably it. Would you see that in a way they created the first reality show because theyre on tv so much . They did. Their show was originally two hours a day. They did it and scripted. Jim refused to script anything, i spoke to the production people and they never knew what would happen next. Viewers tuned in because they loved them. It was sloppy and ridiculous, but it was unpredictable and fun. People tuned in to find out what would happen next. Thats part of it to right . The and scripted nature and how he starts to sell shares to heritage usa, in a way no and has proved in the organization. Exactly. He said anything and everything on television. When he went on trial the prosecutors were able to pull out the pieces that they wanted. There were things that he said that were in appropriate and fraudulent. But he said it just about everything. If you want to find him saying anything on any topic, you could find it. Because he was on for hours on end . Yeah, im scripted. What about muhammad ali . What did he bring to the landscape . Before him we had to stereotype athletes. The Mickey Mantle type of athlete. Non controversial. You dont deal with politics. You stay away from everything controversial. Muhammad ali was controversial. He wins the title, the day after he wins the title at this press conference, he announces that his name is no longer muhammad ali. He changes his name. He is a member of the nation of islam. He at least hint that hes a member of the nation of islam. He is political. He was just a little bit ahead of his generation. He comes out against vietnam before it is a popular stance to take. So he completely changes the landscape for an athlete. I mean he creates the landscape that athletes can have today, where they can take a political position. Most dont but some can and do. I think that is an interesting venn diagram, i am going to sort of indigestion sully lump tammy fay into the entertainment category, these are roads that have such tension when the wires get crossed. We worked for a long time on a documentary which we couldnt get made called actors in america, the offstage history of actors in america. Edwin boothe at that point was the most famous actor, he was escorted at the dead of night by federal marshals from boston to new york. He essentially retired from the stage for about five of his most important years because he was the entertainer and then all of a sudden the political world spilled one of the gravest messes onto his lap. There was no precedent for how to toggle between those two things. I think you find a lot about, we obviously live in a world with basketball athletes in the post mohammed aly world, where athletes are in some ways expected to be political. In the entertainment world it was to be avoided at all costs. Semi davis was in the era of people who said literally, i dont have any promise to make statements about, this i sing i dance and i act. Then it was said you have to come down to sell. Mom he was born in new york, he had never gone across the masondixon line in his life because he knew what would happen if he did. He had to be kicked and screamed into, selma. There are these aspects of politics where again, we live in an era where a former actor became president , sean pan and others like that gravitate to a political stance easily, comfortably, and passionately. That however is not extensive history of the country at all. You did it at the peril of your entertainment career. I think one of the things that muhammad ali did was he was one of the first athletes who was just fabulously aware of the camera. He would do anything for publicity. He read poetry in greenwich village. He was very interested in he sang eight musical number on the ed sullivan show. He came out with a musical lp. Life was big in the 1960s. He knew that Sports Illustrated was good, boxing magazines were good, but how do you get into life magazine . So a photographer was taking pictures of him for Sports Illustrated. The photographer had had life magazine pictures. Mohammed aly knew that he took underwater pictures. He had done a underwater spread for life magazine. So at the time he said i have this new workout regimen. It is underwater. It develops the tension and punching better. You have to take pictures of it. The guy comes down with his scuba diving gear and his bubbled water coming out, he gets these great shots and it gets into life magazine. He had never worked out in water in his life, he couldnt swim. But he knew that this was a way to get a new audience. The camera was important. The new audience spreading his name. I think that is another thing that all of these topics have in common. Their relationship with the press, and how sometimes it could be adversarial, and sometimes the celebrity playing the press and sometimes the, upset with the press was playing. Them with mohammed aly you talked a lot about Sports Writers, and what they viewed their role was in terms of their subjects. Yes that was all media as well. It used to be in the twenties to sixties, the Sports Writer straw was something that took place at an event. That is what they did. The Sports Writers job was to build up the audience, they were god like. They would be against a october, sky that whole kind of thing. By the sixties you have a new group of journalists. They call themselves chipmunks. What they do is they realize that people are seeing on television. The events are all across america. They need to get into the locker, room and we need to show what they are very, really like. We have a new form of journalism. Expose journalism. The landscape is changing, and mohammed aly enters the world when the landscape is changing. He is perfect, the chipmunks love him. There is a great story that bob tells. He is interviewing mohammed aly, he is in florida for the championship. Aly is fantastic, giving the journalist everything they want. Than joe lewis showed up and said virtually nothing. He was a quiet guy. But all of the old Sports Writers, the jimmy cannons go talk to joe lewis. Then he says to one of the Sports Writers, where are you going . The Sports Writer is here. He says you dont understand, you should have seen him then. That was their, hero this is a new generation. Im fascinated because thats what i grew up with. This complicity as the performers slash athletes have more real estate in the media. You can show the fights now so they dont have to be done on the microphone. I was also fascinated by the complicity between those. To then you have the most improbable media reporter of alltime, but they must have worked out something that was mutually to their advantage and their sort of relationship. No question about it. They both understood that the other was helpful to their career. It was creating another thing. Of course allie was probably more important to him at then ally was. Though it was always an act. It was always an act. They repeatedly used the same routines. Same poems. Your hair looks like a horses tail for his to pay. I see analogy between that and the rest back, there were these Public Events that were magnified private events. Obviously sammy davis idolized sinatra. Theres something going on in close stores, they were able to meddle more fires into something that was a big deal in entertainment. I listen to a lot of sinatra on the radio, and sometimes i listen to them and the rat pack will be on. The condescending way that sammy davis and dean martin will treat him. I think its in an resolvable issue. Just to fill, un rat pack were to italians, a jew and a african america that converted to judaism. The soninlaw of the president was also in the group. A lot of their humor was very hardhitting. It was because semi was not only black, but also the youngest of the group, and was physically short he was picked up a lot. He was picked up often and said i want to thank the and double acp for giving me this award. The documentary really doesnt come down on any side. Mood beautiful goldberg and crystal who assistance oblique were sensitive to that said in the entertainment business with was. What we dont remember, because we dont see them, are the clips of dean martin being told he was a drunk and anti italian jokes about sinatra and anti jewish jokes about bishop, but because of the world in which we lived understandably, it bubbled to the surface. It is interesting again, with coal cell and only, it is a bit of a devils bargain because semi knew that this was the biggest platform in america, and playing with sinatra and getting access to all of that was the Golden Ticket to his career and they genuinely loved each other. Again, the world spins around and i am sure with the lewis shelling all sorts of things that are racially sensitive in our history are looked at oneway when they happened, another way 30 years later, and another way 30 years later. We have to be cognizant of where speaking of relationship with the press. How would you describe jim and tammy fay bakers relationship with the press. Did they try to cultivate the press . They just do their own thing . Not really. Before the scandal, their biggest contact point was the charlotte observer. That was a decidedly hostile relationship on both sides. It was the kind of relationship that i do not really think could happen today between that kind of local newspaper and this enormous ministry, Christian Ministry and theme park right in their backdoor outside of charlotte. Everything changes once the scandal happens in 87. The kind of highlight of this is that they go on night line with ted, enormously influential at the time. It was the highest rated episode of couples career and he was widely criticized afterward for being too soft on them. One reporter wrote that he had the ferocity of an overweight house cat. By the way, the abc thing that aired earlier this year, couples on their quite a bit. They really cheat him gently. They do not bring any of that up at all. He gets to interpret his interaction with jim and tammy. But it proved if nothing else, that even though people did not know them, couple did not know them, he did not know how to handle them. They knew media. They had spent their entire careers on television and they knew how to handle television. They pretty much ate him alive that night. One thing you talk about is how, i asked biographers we always have to grapple with the public versus the private and how much are they really telling us. About their private lives . One thing i found so interesting in your book is that we can tell how stressed tammy fay was based on her makeup. Her makeup. It was really a mask that she wore to distance herself from the public and all of the staff said we could tell at reday what kind of mood tammy was. In the thick or her makeup was, the worse was her mood. So you can almost use that as a source. Sure. You can cross check. What is going on in her life and see what kind of makeup she is wearing that they. You actually could, as well as her hair. If she was wearing her natural usually short hair, late in her career, or she was wearing one of her big wigs that she often wore. The big whip was not a good day. She was super stressed on those days. Another thing that our subjects have in common is that they were only somewhat interested in politics, or sometimes not interested in politics at all. They still came to play an Important Role in political culture in the post war era. That is kind of my concluding team before we turn it over to the audience. Larry, in the movie about davis yes you hit the net and the nail on the head. That is one major trajectory of telling his life, which is he grew up as self segue segregated as you could be in america. Not only was he black, he was an entertainer. When he manage to hitch his wagon to the magic that was the rat pack, the rat pack through all of their weight behind john f. Kennedy. We have some very wonderful, i think, commentary about how the rat pack represented a group of ethnic people coming together to support a young president. But, as we know, once the inauguration ball happened, sammy was actively disinvited by the white house because kennedy did not want to incur the wrath of some of the democrats he had dragged on board reluctantly. And sammy was totally disillusioned. He was dragged kicking and screaming initially into the Civil Rights Movement, but i think you might concur towards the end, certainly by the time Martin Luther king is assassinated, he is out on the front lines. Thanks to emily, in fact, uncovered the information that he probably either in kind or actually out of his pocket contributed more to the Civil Rights Movement than any celebrity. Then of course, the sky who comes in, nixon comes along and starts to dangle bright shiny things in front of him. And ambassadorship, speaking on behalf of the black population. Would you like to come to the white house . Would you like to stay overnight in the lincoln bedroom . Sammy says, sounds good to me. He throws himself quite forcefully behind the Nixon Administration in 1972 and 1973. He goes to visit vietnam on the administrations behalf and is its essentially so tonedeaf to his own community that the reverberations, i think, were felt for the rest of his life. That is when when the documentary started. Performers are not necessarily excellent barometers of political taste or Political Action and infrequently find themselves quite thrown into the wind, thrown back and forth on the boat depending on the shifting tides of the popular opinion of the day. In a way, sammys story its kind of a bit of a warning story about what happens when people who are frankly out of their lead politically, embrace causes that they may not know the deep consequences of. He was drawn more through personal connections then political ideology. After being totally shunned by the kennedy administration, you can see why he developed a direct relationship with nixon, he would be comfortable pushing for him. But it has such a devastating impact at the time on his reputation as an activist. I felt that his reputation as an actor as well. I felt that until i came along, it looked at some of his work in the 19 fifties, very early, that it totally undermine his historical reputation into the present. One of those situations where he was not that interested in politics, politics came to him and then he played an Important Role in sort of the racial and political culture. The same way with the bakers. They were not that interested in politics, but they were sort of on the front lines of this evangelical political culture in a way. I think this is one way in which the story can be useful today. Throughout most of their careers, jim and tammy were very politically naive. They did not start with much of a political agenda at all. By the time by the late seventies, they have a big following and they become attractive to politicians, because they control a big audience. So baker goes to the carter white house, writes in air force one with jimmy carter. He interviews Ronald Reagan on camera when reagan is running in 1980. In one sense you could say, well they are politically important. But the problem is, if you start there and say, these people are primarily political actors, you misunderstand them entirely. They are not primarily political actors. The politics was a secondary thing. The thing baker loved about politics was the celebrity value. Who does not want to write on air force one or be photographed in the white house shaking hands with the president , or having lunch with the first lady . That was their primary interest. The reason i say i think it is informative today is i think a lot of people, when they look at the socalled religious right and evangelicals, they tend to say these are political organizations. Let us start their. If you start there, you misunderstand that. Im sure they might have a political involvement or a political footprint, but you will never understand them if you start there and say, this is all about politics. Certainly in this case, it was not all about politics. The politics was secondary. The third scandal, the sexual and financial scandal, did those scandals hurt the religious right politically . That is a pretty broad category. Its certainly hurt them as evangelists. Jimmy swaggered, roberts, at exactly the same time had their own meltdowns and spit tackler it changed the way in the case of evangelicals, it changed the way they interacted with politics. It did not really reshape the contours again they were not primarily political organizations. Their demise, so to speak as an organization did not have an effect on that, because that is not what they were primarily about. One of the things i learned from your book is that the nation of islam discouraged politics. Discouraged voting. Discourage it was a separatist movement. They are not trying to reform america. They are trying to separate from and that allowed them to be less controversial. Oddly enough, it was almost going back to the 19th century. There are going back to the markets derby, going back to the nationalist organization, and at that time when cassius clay is coming into the picture, malcolm ex is beginning to tire of that. Malcolm x is saying, look, we have something to we have to do something in the Civil Rights Movement. We talk a good game, but we are not doing anything. He is starting to become more controversial. Most famously, after john f. Kennedy is assassinated, he is told, say nothing. The nation of his limb, the preachers were saying, do not make any comments on this assassination. This is a revered man in america. Do not say anything. Of course malcolm does. He says, as an old country boy, this is just chickens coming home to roost. This does not make me sad, it makes me glad. And of course, he is officially silenced by the nation of his limb. Mohammed aly, catches clay is caught between does he go with elijah mohammed, does he go with a more conservative separatist movement . Or does he go with malcolm as being pushed out of the nation and its clearly going to form his own organization that will be more orthodox in terms of Civil Rights Movements . It puts him in a difficult situation. I think this is one of the problem he is active politically, there is no question about it. But he was a boxer before anything else. He was like john wayne. John wayne did not serve during world war ii. He becomes the image of the american soldier, american sailor, american flyer in world war ii. He never enlisted, he never served in world war ii, but after the war, his interest in politics, to generalize, two things. He becomes a cold war hero. Most americans adopted the cold war position. Number two is, he could not stand americas taxation policy. The world war ii taxation which was taking, like Charleston Heston and Ronald Reagan, 90 of your income. He wanted to change. He moves from being a democrat to being a republican. But if you talk with people people talked with john wayne. He did not talk about politics. He talked about movies. But you get that image of john wayne that is attached to western iconography, and you throw it into the republican party, and it is a pretty heavy brew. It is interesting, because Johnny Mattis actually said during the birmingham, he said you know, do not ask me about that. I am just an entertainer. I am wondering whether those forwards were actually in this generation a kind of meaningless paradox. I think in the fifties and sixties you probably get away with saying that. But i think thats a meaningless thing to say post mahmoud aly, post sammy davis, post a lot of people. But i think that there was a period in history where you could take that position, but now i think its not possible. Politics and media culture it sucks them out. I think its the media, everything in athletics has changed post alley. I know nothing about sports, i only know entertainment, but again these platforms are so large and they meet so many people. The meat you, i think also in john waynes era and also jury loses era, you could control when someone picks up your voice on a mic, now you lose control over your narrative. The most ironic was in 67 or 68 he said guess who is coming to dinner, in the heat of the night, and by the end of the year he is that this pass a. The movement has passed him by. He goes from the biggest hero to completely of the past. I think this is a good time to open it up to audience questions, if anyone has anything they want to ask. We can bring you the microphone, yes. This is a fascinating panel. I greatly admire this genre. I treat, teach at purdue. It strikes me that this is a very challenging genre. How do you reconcile the imperative to tell the story of someones life, with the necessity of making an argument that intervenes in debates. Something that reveals something new. How do you do that . Is it implicit . How do you weave narrative in telling the story of someones life . Okay. That is a big one. Thats a tough question. Its a big question but also to tell the story of someones, life to tell john waynes life he made 200 films as i said before. You cant just go oh he made that film and this one, you have to look for a larger meaning in that life. Why was he important and iconic . Why was he politically a focal point of america in the 1960s into the 1970s, in the fifties, beyond that. Youre just telling the full story, sammy davis junior, to tell his story without telling the story of race would make no sense. You are just telling a entertainment story. You have to engage. They all meet at that point that i said earlier, political culture and Popular Culture meet. You are telling the life and the meaning of the life. For me that contextualize is it and brings in in two the stories that historians and political scientists are saying. I think that shifted passionate about your subject. You have to be passionate about what they went through, you are spending a lot of time with that person or persons. The other thing that i would say in terms of documentary work that ive, done i think that there has to be something being made, im guessing i wish i read your book. In my case with sammy davis i have to be me, or when we did the broadway documentary a song about lynching in 1993, almost an imaginable. You have to find the moment where their lives either represent or interact with something that has a larger metaphorical value, otherwise you are just going to then the maid, then they, wrote then she did. It is subjective. You get to decide that this song is more important to the life of sammy davis, then this song because it means more to me at this point than this other does. As if history is not subjective. Its so subjective. I agree with all my fellow panelists. You have to have a larger point you want to make. There has to be some reason why you want to write this story. And that sense every account is selective. You cant throw an absolutely everything you know, in a nondescript hodgepodge. I think its the reason why you can have more than one interesting biography but the same person. People come with interests, a different this point they want to make, and sort of pull together the evidence that moves that story along. An earlier book that i britain was on the first black heavyweight champion that won a title in 1908. I had a larger point i was interested in. I was interested in his life, but he was the heavyweight champion during the progressive area. This progressive area was an era when the highest lynching was in america. It was really spitting in the south. This race of southern governors. The larger question that im asking is with their progressivism for black americans . What was life like for a black american during this progressive era. Youre interacting with a historic graphical question at the time. I think things changed cyclical. One of the things that made sammy davis very attracted to us is here is the summit that is black, i know you want to go to college, why did you decide to turn to . He chose to be jewish. He made his own identity politics. Identity politics now strikes me as one of the two or three most vibrant and topical subjects who can come up with. That is bubbling up here in 1917 and its through the lens of someone at another time and place. Tonight the great white hope mourn the tiny award for best play. 50 years ago that story was very interesting, now post ali, but to answer your question, to measure the impact of the subject, and tried to build a argument around that. With my freedom book i found it pretty easily how much people risk money. Then trying to figure out how did that help and some rights movements . What did they bring to it and try to build an argument about that overall impact. Then again, sort of context, how they brought it to hollywood and helped change the culture of hollywood, which when they started will allow black actors, and that is the only way they employed African Americans. The stars for freedom went back to hollywood and started pushing and hiring on their own, becoming producers or directors themselves, saying we are going to hire African Americans behind the scenes. That was the way for me to try and think about that. So it is a good way to construct a narrative and an argument at the same time. Any other questions . Have any of you ever done a biography of a scientist or another intellectual figure . I have not, no. No. How would that be any different . The kind of writing you are describing . I have read biographies of scientists. Celebrity, most of what we have dealt with, i think all four of us were dealing with celebrities, highprofile individuals. Now, there are celebrity scientists to, but i dont i think the questions you would ask, if you explain, number one, you are trying to explain what they did. You are focusing on them. You are interested in the individual. Who were they . What made them tick . What did they do that is important . If if they are important, how are they perceived . The movie, a beautiful mind, that came out, which is kind of a narrative of a mathematician of a scientist and it was an utterly compelling film, and it was a compelling book as well, and it went all sorts of awards. We ask the same questions. Awesome this gentlemans question right here. I want to ask you about process. The process of developing the argument and constructing the narrative. Which comes first, usually . Of course, you have these wonderful stories. You have the anecdotes. You have the things that you want to put in the book. Does the story and the argument come after you sort of put in the main and major points that you wanted to make, and then you start to work on the, how it all fits together . I will tell you from my point of view, it is an inquiry. When i was seven or eight, i saw sammy davis junior. He was this goofy jester. He did all the silly goofy things. Two years later, i went to the Public Library and looked in the original cast album section, and there was a record call golden bore golden boy. And it was an album about the Civil Rights Movement, which never had existed in the 1960s and done in the 1964. Here was tammy davis junior singing about being a black man in love with the white women in the 1960s. Here was the alpha, here you mega. Before i was 11 i was like, how can that be the same person . How can that be the same person . That was a question that was always in the back of my mind for four or five decades until i had a chance to work on his documentary. How do you reconcile that persons life . I think you are always trying to grapple with and try to find a good question in that persons life that seems to be unreconciled. I dont know, some bob cummings show in the fifties wouldve been a compelling documentary subject. Jacqui glisten is a compelling subject. How could this lovable guy be such a monster to everyone he worked with . You have to find something you want to wrestle with. I think it flows naturally out of that. I began with an immersion. You just have to immerse yourself in her life. Robert kaye wrote when he started to do his multi volume biography of lyndon johnson, he went down to austin to work, to do research and he would work for five and a half days because it was closed sunday. Every day after he worked, he would go to the hill country which was not that far from austin and interview someone who knew johnson from that area. On sundays, saturdays, he would interview to people. He realized, i do not understand these people. I just dont get them. He is going to the hill country which was an extraordinarily poor place in the 1930s. He was from new york city. He said to his wife, we have to move to the hill country. I have to live in that land. I have to understand these people. I will never understand johnson unless i understand the people. His wife, who is a french historian said, cant you write a biography on Robert Mulligan or napoleon . Must we go to paris . He went he went all the other biographies on johnson and said nobody understands what made him tick . It was going to the hill country, living in the hill country, suddenly he was living there and people will talk to him. They would tell him things that they would not tell him before when he was just sort of a fly by new york are dropping in and asking questions. You started off immersing yourself with sammy danas davis junior young. I was interested in boxers when i was young. There is a personal interest that factors into this. I think you need to start with some big compelling reason that you want to do this. Some big compelling question that you want to answer. But after that, it all evolves, it all evolves together. I think an interesting exercise if you could ever get others to show it to you would be their first proposal for any book, because it never looks anything like the final book. That is a good thing. Your ideas change as you get into the sources. Let it all develops together well i think that our time is up. Thank you for the excellent questions, and thank you to the panelists. And sammy davis junior is playing at 3 30 down the hallway if you want to see that. Thank you. applause