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October 6, 1996
By JANNY SCOTT
here is a living purgatory inhabited by biographers who dare to write about famous people who are neither consenting nor dead, and that is where Carole Klein found herself one night several years ago at the New York Public Library.
The occasion was a reading by Doris Lessing, the novelist whose biography Ms. Klein was preparing to write -- over the objections of Mrs. Lessing, who had actively discouraged others from helping Ms. Klein. The auditorium was packed. In the crowd sat Ms. Klein, feeling the duplicity that is the unauthorized biographer's burden -- unrecognizable yet conspicuous, sheepish yet righteous, professional writer turned amateur spy.
Then a strange thing happened. Mrs. Lessing, formidable in her 70's, finished reading, and no one rose to ask a question. It occurred to Ms. Klein that the audience was afraid of looking stupid. The silence grew awkward.
Suddenly, she found herself feeling, of all things, protective of Mrs. Lessing. ''I thought to myself: Should I ask a question?'' Ms. Klein recalled recently. ''Then I thought: No, I'll ask the question and she'll think I'm stupid.''
These may be boom years in the biography business, but the economics of publishing and popular tastes have put pressure on writers to select living subjects instead of the kind one biographer calls ''nice and dead.''
The problem is that the living ones tend to say no. Some even encourage their friends to do the same. Which can make spending three or four years reconstructing a hostile subject's life a lonely, dispiriting way of paying the bills.
Letters go unanswered, calls unreturned. Sources hang up when the biographer introduces himself over the phone. One potential source let Ms. Klein fly all the way to London before canceling their lunch date.
And when Carl Rollyson wrote to a former husband of one of his subjects asking why their marriage had failed, the man shooed him away by quoting Macbeth's dismissal of Banquo's ghost: ''Hence, horrible shadow!/Unreal mockery, hence!''
Then he signed the letter: ''Insincerely yours.''
It gets painful.
''I will never, never do another living person,'' said Ann Waldron, who is completing a biography of Eudora Welty. ''I have a pretty thick skin but not that thick to undergo this for the rest of my life.''
And in a city where virtually every definable group has its corresponding support group, and where biographers are abundant enough to have two, one small subset of biographers working on living subjects hangs loosely together, mostly by phone, to share war stories, lick their wounds and offer moral support.
They are all experienced biographers with multiple books to their names. They consider themselves serious, responsible writers -- who just happen to have chosen subjects who are less than ecstatic about their plans.
The group includes Ms. Klein, writing her book on Doris Lessing; Marion Meade, researching a biography of Woody Allen; Mrs. Waldron, doing a book on Eudora Welty, and Mr. Rollyson and his wife, Lisa Paddock, who are researching a biography of Susan Sontag.
The writers met through the New York University Biography Seminar, a larger group of published biographers, many of them academics writing on figures long dead, who gather monthly at N.Y.U. to do the biographer's equivalent of talking shop.
But the writers with living subjects are almost a breed apart.
''Let me put it this way: I don't think I could do that,'' said Brenda Wineapple, a biographer and professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., who is a co-director of the N.Y.U. group. ''It can be very demoralizing, very difficult. You need a certain kind of personality to confront that.
''Plus, you really need to believe in what you're doing,'' she said. ''Which is not being a literary paparazzo, it's not being a scandal monger. It's really, in some sense, excavating history. And that's difficult when your subject is alive.''
None of them started out looking for trouble. They describe themselves, mostly, as admirers of their subjects. Ms. Klein was ''a tremendous fan'' of Mrs. Lessing's books, interested in the social and cultural context of her life. As she puts it: ''I had this feeling that we would connect.''
Ms. Meade's previous subjects had all been dead -- Eleanor of Aquitaine, Dorothy Parker, Buster Keaton and others. But when she proposed another ''dead person'' last year, she found editors said things like: ''I'm only going to be able to ship 3,000 copies of a subject like that. What else do you have?''
So she suggested Woody Allen.
Neither Ms. Meade nor Mr. Rollyson sought their subject's cooperation first; they believe they are more objective biographers without it. Instead, each wrote a letter informing the subject that they had signed a contract to write a biography. Neither received a letter back.
Mrs. Waldron and Ms. Klein, on the other hand, each approached their subjects before making a book proposal. They had known them, at least slightly, before. Mrs. Waldron had visited Miss Welty in Jackson, Miss., on several occasions. Ms. Klein had had earlier telephone conversations with Mrs. Lessing about receiving an award from a group of which Ms. Klein is a member.
But Miss Welty and Mrs. Lessing said no, repeatedly. They were not interested in having biographies done, they said. They gave reasons subjects often give: Miss Welty said she wanted her writing to stand on its own; Mrs. Lessing said she was writing a memoir.
''I was a fool,'' Mrs. Waldron said in retrospect. ''I rushed in where angels would have feared to tread.'' She said she allowed herself to believe Miss Welty was not adamantly opposed. And being from the South, like Miss Welty, she figured she would be able to get Southerners to talk.
One of the first people she called was a man she had interviewed for an earlier book. ''I'll have to call Eudora,'' she remembers him saying. When he called back, he said he had been asked not to cooperate. He said Miss Welty had said: ''Ask Ann to call me.''
Mrs. Waldron didn't.
''She'd just talk me out of it,'' she explained.
Mrs. Waldron went to Memphis and tracked down a retired college administrator who had known Miss Welty years before. Does Eudora know you're working on this book? The woman asked over the phone. Mrs. Waldron said yes. Do you have her permission? No. The woman hung up.
Mrs. Waldron wrote to another man; he never answered, then declined to talk when she reached him by phone. Still another agreed to see her as soon as he returned from Europe. When he got back, he called her. ''Don't come,'' he said. ''I've talked to Eudora.''
Mrs. Waldron drafted and redrafted a letter to him, explaining how much she wanted and needed the interview. She offered not to quote him, if that would help. To try to convince him she was a serious literary biographer, she sent along a copy of one of her earlier books.
''He sent the book back unopened and a one-line letter saying: 'The last thing Eudora needs at this stage in her life is an unauthorized biography,' '' Mrs. Waldron said. She called her colleague Carl Rollyson from the N.Y.U. biography group and said, ''I can't stand this!''
''Nobody ever told you it was going to be easy,'' he said coolly.
Ms. Klein ran into similar problems. When she published an author's query in The New York Times Book Review, looking for correspondence and personal recollections about Mrs. Lessing, Mrs. Lessing's agent sent a frosty letter to the editor that was then published in the Book Review.
''I am writing on behalf of Mrs. Lessing to say that this biography is totally unauthorized, that no permissions will be granted for extracts from the author's work and that her letters are also copyrighted and cannot be used without her permission,'' the two-paragraph letter said.
Ms. Klein was stunned.
''If you were an unsophisticated person reading this, you would have thought it was illegal to answer,'' she said. ''I did think that was out of bounds. This was cutting off the most valuable research tool a biographer has. It was such an extreme step, particularly for a writer to do to another writer.''
There are other difficulties, too. When Mr. Rollyson proposed an unauthorized biography of Lillian Hellman, he knew her papers were stored at the University of Texas. Only after he had signed a book contract did he learn that the only biographer with access to the papers was her authorized one.
After an initial panic, he says he ordered copies of every Ph.D. dissertation that had been written using the archive, knowing that graduate students did not need permission from Miss Hellman's estate to use it. He says he was able to reconstruct much of the Texas archive through the dissertations.
For his unauthorized biography of Martha Gellhorn, the writer and third wife of Ernest Hemingway, Mr. Rollyson found that copyright laws severely limited his ability to quote from her unpublished letters. The lawyer for his publishing company ended up allowing him to quote just three words.
According to Mr. Rollyson, the three words had appeared in a letter from Miss Gellhorn to Bernard Berenson, responding to his teasing suggestion that Mr. Hemingway, from whom she was then divorced, might be visiting him in Italy at the same time as Miss Gellhorn had planned to come.
''She said, 'Don't you dare. I don't want to feel his hot jungle breath on my neck,' '' Mr. Rollyson recalled in an interview. ''I said to the lawyer: 'Come on! I'm going to come up with a paraphrase for 'hot jungle breath'?' So she said, 'O.K., O.K., O.K.' So 'hot jungle breath' is in the book.''
Ms. Meade said she believes biographers' feelings often follow a predictable course: They adore the subject, then despise the subject, then wonder whatever possessed them to choose that subject at all. Eventually, biographers ''work through that hostility and come out in the proper place,'' she said.
Ms. Meade herself had a hard time adjusting to a living subject. ''The very idea that my subject was alive and living across the park freaked me out,'' she said. For months, she would wake up in her Upper West Side apartment ''feeling just horribly depressed.''
But as time passes, she said, ''the subject recedes to a place which is like a twilight zone.'' Much of the research is the same, whether the subject is living or dead. ''Now, I don't feel as terrified,'' she said. ''Besides, I do keep telling myself: This is my job.''
There are signs above Ms. Meade's desk. One that appeals to her sense of humor reads: ''The less said about this person the better.''
Of everyone in the group, Mr. Rollyson appears to have achieved the deepest state of emotional detachment. He professes, persuasively, to take a clinical view of his work. He and Ms. Paddock describe his attitude as a product of temperament and long experience.
The son of a bartender and a discount-store sales clerk, Mr. Rollyson was an actor in his adolescence, then got a Ph.D. in English literature and became an academic. He writes in small spurts -- ''two, three hours, tops'' -- while also working as a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York.
He gets his legal advice on copyright matters from Ms. Paddock, a lawyer, former stock broker and now a freelance writer. Their home is an apartment in what was once an Ex-Lax factory in downtown Brooklyn. Together, they have also written a couple of how-to books about genealogy.
Biography, as Mr. Rollyson sees it, is all about exposure.
''I seem to fasten on subjects who have created these images of themselves and who seem to feel entitled to project this as history,'' he said. He believes the public is entitled to understand how that is done. If his subjects reject him, Mr. Rollyson doesn't mind. After a half a dozen biographies, mostly of writers, he understands.
''I feel my subject is entitled to their anger,'' he said. ''I can certainly understand why someone would be nervous that there's someone around inquiring into their life. They have no control over this person. Who is this person?
''You know, you're dealing with someone with a very significant literary reputation. And the biographer, compared to that person, could easily be called a second- or third-rater. So I can see all sorts of reasons why they might be upset and worried.''
How would he feel? he was asked.
''I've left instructions to everybody: Talk, talk, talk,'' Mr. Rollyson said, laughing. ''I want it to be a good book, colorful stories. Everybody talk. I want to be famous.''
And Ms. Paddock?
''I wouldn't like it at all,'' she said. ''It would make me very angry and upset.''