Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject [Hardcover]

Meryle Secrest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2007

The first rule of biography, wrote Justin Kaplan: “Shoot the widow.”

In her new book, Meryle Secrest, acclaimed biographer (“Knowing, sympathetic and entertainingly droll”—The New York Times), writes about her comic triumphs and misadventures as a biographer in search of her nine celebrated subjects, about how the hunt for a “life” is like working one’s way through a maze, full of fall starts, dead ends, and occasional clear passages leading to the next part of the puzzle.

She writes about her first book, a life of Romaine Brooks, and how she was led to Nice and given invaluable letters by her subject’s heir that were slid across the table, one at a time; how she was led to the villa of Brooks’ lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio (poet, playwright, and aviator), a fantastic mausoleum left untouched since the moment of his death seventy years before; to a small English village, where she uncovered a lost Romaine Brooks painting; and finally, to 20, rue Jacob, Paris, where Romaine’s lover, Natalie Barney, had fifty years before entertained Cocteau, Gide, Proust, Colette, and others.

Secrest describes how her next book—a life of Berenson—prompted Francis Steegmuller, fellow biographer, to comment that he wouldn’t touch the subject with a ten-foot pole.

For her life of British art historian Kenneth Clark, Secrest was given permission to write the book by her subject, who surreptitiously financed it in the hopes of controlling its contents; we see how Clark’s plan was foiled by a jealous mistress and a stash of love letters that helped Secrest navigate Clark’s obstacle course.

Among the other biographical (mis)adventures, Secrest reveals: how she tracked Salvador Dalí to a hospital room, found him recovering from serious burns sustained in a mysterious fire, and learned that he was knee-deep in a scandal involving fake drawings and prints and surrounded by dangerous characters out of Murder, Inc. . . . and how she went in search of a subject’s grave (Frank Lloyd Wright’s) only to find that his body had been dug up to satisfy the whim of his last wife.

A fascinating account of a life spent in sometimes arduous, sometimes comical, always exciting pursuit of the truth about other lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To explain the homicidal title first: it's an axiom coined by Justin Kaplan, the distinguished biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, and it refers to one of the main hazards we practitioners of the genre face. I instantly recognized its provenance: Kaplan, the first professional biographer I ever knew, used to warn me about the obstacles that spouses of dead subjects can strew in a prospective biographer's path: permissions withheld, archives closed, requests for interviews denied. On the one hand, you need their co-operation to get the job done; on the other, they tend to get in the way. Maybe Secrest's title should have been: Obtain the Widow's Papers, Then Shoot the Widow. A career biographer, Secrest has nine biographies under her belt, among them Leonard Bernstein, Kenneth Clark and Salvador Dalí. It's an eclectic mix—not an altogether reassuring sign. The greatest biographers—Michael Holroyd, Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, Edmund Morris, Richard Holmes, to list a few at random—have imposed on themselves a mandate to enter as deeply as they can into another's mind and character: in Holmes's word, to haunt their subjects. The job can take a lifetime.Secrest doesn't haunt as much as insinuate. Her method is pragmatic. Deciding on a subject is mostly a cold-blooded business of weighing the subject against potential markets, timeliness, the availability of material and the likelihood of getting the story, the kinds of factors publishers have to worry about. Sometimes she's authorized; sometimes she's not. Sometimes the matter of authorization is left ambiguous. She shares with us, perhaps unwisely, John Guare's telling anagram for her name: Merely Secrets To her credit, Secrest is a lively storyteller—better than she knows. She puts herself down as a nosy parker, a boring stylist who finds the whole process baffling. But she's too hard on herself. Arriving at Lord Clark's ancient country manor, she finds the venerable art historian sitting in the living room, his mouth half open, looking flustered and vague. He had had a coup de vieux, he said. It's a touching moment—portrait of a great man on his way out. Maybe Secrest should write an autobiography. The glimpses she offers of her own life—her English childhood in Bath; the revelation, blurted out in passing, that she was an unwanted child—are tantalizing. She tearfully confesses to one of her subjects, Stephen Sondheim, the years of self-examination she's undergone. Tell us more. 61 b&w photos. (June 7)James Atlas, the publisher of Atlas Books, is the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The pleasures of biographer Secrest's reminiscences are many, beginning with her vivacious wit and self-deprecating candor and rising to her affecting insights into the quest for understanding the inner lives of creative and influential people. Free here to disclose gossip and less-than-glamorous moments in pursuit of biographical gold, Secrest chronicles dicey negotiations with her subjects' often disgruntled families, hence the book's startling title. And what incisive anecdotes she tells. Secrest describes unsettling visits with historian Kenneth Clark, an incredibly poignant moment with the ailing Salvador Dali, and the ironies of her passion for researching the little-known American painter Romaine Brooks. The revelations gleaned while researching Bernard Berenson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Leonard Bernstein are fascinating, and her tightrope interactions with Stephen Sondheim are intriguing. But the most radiant passages tell the tale of how a gal from Bath, England, with no college education became first a newspaper reporter in Canada and the U.S., then a world-class biographer prized for her sensitivity, versatility, and eloquence. These are the charming and enlightening confessions of a biographer whose motto is, "Well, you can't expect to be liked in my business, but with any luck you can avoid going to jail." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition. states edition (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307264831
• ISBN-13: 978-0307264831
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Teller of Tales, June 25, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Hardcover)

I read this book on a recent jaunt to LA and believe me, I didn't want it ever to end. I kept hoping that Meryle Secrest would reveal more and more data about her methods as a biographer.

That review from PW by James Atlas was just offbase in every possible way, culminating in his snidely separating Secrest from his precious rank of "great biographers" (note that every example he lists is a male writer, and this is said to have been "at random"). He's just way off base. Over the years I've read many of Secrest's biographies (though not all) and one has to admire her range, though Atlas says this is a sign of weakness and she should have stuck to a very limited cast of characters. If she had just stuck to Kenneth Clark and Berenson he would have had more respect for her I assume. But in reality, it is orecisely her willingness to jump in with both feet into a field she had previously left alone that makes her unique. When she wrote about Dali people said, "She knows nothing about surrealism," and when she turned to Frank Lloyd Wright there were complaints that she knew little about architecture. I hear people say that she knows nothing about musical theater and should have stayed away from Sondheim and Richard Rodgers. Well, maybe so, maybe not. But in SHOOT THE WIDOW we can now discover what gave Meryle Secrest her zest for the unknown. For she tells the story of her own life and sensitively, yet persuasively, makes you feel what it must have been like for a poor English girl uprooted out of a humble yet safe life in the UK and brought over on a troop ship and dragged halfway across Canada (to Hamilton) on a cross country nightmare train voyage, and set down in a lakeland paradise completely despoiled by steel mills.

There your Meryle learned the ABCs of journalism, as a way of escaping her personal and emotional circumstance. This part of SHOOT THE WIDOW is a real inspiration, as is her account of the great discovery she made while writing the life of the painter Romaine Brooks: in her entire mansion Brooks kept only one picture of a man, but who was he? Through amazing luck and a cool head, Secrest discovers a painting of the exact same guy, and when she reproduces them on adjoining pages we can see they're identical, and so she was able to solve the single biggest conundrum in Brooks' life. As a biographer myself I give her sleuthing four stars. As for her qualms about the family of her subjects, and how the family can reach in and try to quash the biographer's revelations (as happened to her with Kenneth Clark's family), it is a sobering possibility. Apparently those in Clark's family who gave her grief are all now dead, and she is having a fine old time dancing on their graves!

A friend told me some years ago that Meryle is the mother of Ryan Seacrest from AMERICAN IDOL but this is apparently not the case. No worries, she has accomplished plenty without having to depend on siring a famous son for validation.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to write successful, but not great biography, August 21, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Hardcover)

Writing a biography is extremely difficult. It takes a great deal of effort and time, and the results usually do not please the people closest to the one written about. I know this from personal experience having spent more than five years writing a biography which I hoped would make the world want to know more about one who in my judgment was a great Jewish leader, Rabbi Shlomo Goren.
Meryle Secrest is the author of among others biographies of Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Salvador Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, Steven Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rogers. In this memoir she describes her experiences as a biographer, though there is too much autobiographical information which tells how a Secrest worked her way to an honored place both in journalism and as a biographer.
Among the secrets of the trade she reveals is the one suggested by the title. The close relatives, especially the widow can be the bane of the biographer in denying access to important materials, letters, archives, etc. Family members want to see their honored representative in a good light and do not want the skeletons in the closet revealed. Here the most instructive story relates to Secrest's writing of the Kenneth Clark biography. All was cooperation and sweetness at first but then when it became apparent that the story of Clark's first wife's alcoholism, and his frequent dalliances were going to be part of the story the tone and situation changed. Here Secrest herself became a bit two- faced in her dealings.
It is interesting that Secrest presents herself as a certain kind of biographer, what might be called the 'commercial biographer'. There are biographers who become so devoted to the study of their subject that they virtually give their life-work to it. One thinks of Leon Edel with his five- volume biography of Henry James. But Secrest clearly explains it is not her absolute devotion and desire to understand to the depths which motivates her but rather a combination of real interest and commercial prospect. Her subjects are people who have been very successful, who there is a great public curiosity about.
Another element in her work is what be called finding the 'secret element' often the 'dirty secret element' This is the set of facts which is the great revelation of the inquiry the new stuff which then leads to the marketing hype around the book. But as Louis Menand points out in an instructive article on this book in the 'New Yorker' explaining the apparent gift, the valuable public thing by the secret small private one is an extremely dubious practice..
Secrest is considered a very respectable, workmanlike biographer. She is not aiming to be Johnson's Boswell, and she does not perhaps go deep enough into her subjects to give us the great and memorable work. But she is a hard- working, inventive, and amusing story-teller who has written an instructive and entertaining book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Almost Autobiography and Luminary Chase, March 28, 2009

By 

Donald A. Collins "Free Lance Writer" (Washington, DC, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Hardcover)

With 4000 books coming out every couple of months, finding a good read beyond the Greshams and Ludlum's or fiction in general keeps busy people like moi moving swiftly through the NY Times Book Review section, lamenting deeply the loss of the Washington Post's Book World, and consulting with the bright light employees at my neighborhood book store, Politics and Prose, America's leading independent purveyor of such goods.

But living in DC, I also have an unfair advantage. I meet a number of fascinating people. In this case recently the author, Meryle Secrest, who it turns out shares some political views with me. So she sent me a copy of her latest book, "Shoot the Widow", which otherwise I surely would have missed in the welter of my travels, other work and in the flooding river flow of other prose.

Don't miss this great fun almost autobiography. I had no idea in my short acquaintance with Secrest of her astonishing array of associations gleaned through her successful life of creating commercial biographies. She brings great erudition about so much of European and North American culture and language to her task.

In a most engaging way, Secrest tells a lot of the kind of clay feet dirt readers want to learn about some of the famous characters of the art, music and architecture world, Kenneth Clark, Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, art dealer, Joseph Duveen, Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers, dropping other famous names like Hansel and Gretel did on the way into her penetration of the deep forests of her subjects's innermost secrets.

Her main modus vivendi is don't talk directly for the most part to her all but one male subjects, but mostly to those who knew them. One, like her first and only woman, Romaine Brooks, was already deceased, but others were close to the end of their lives, such as Clark and Dali. This process for Secrest has proved to be a bit like panning for gold, since most of their family members and pals are elusive, mute or evasive, making the finding of nuggets very hard. Hence "Shoot the Protective Widow"! But the detritus from one book seems often to have lead her to her next subject.

Having visited her native city, Bath, in the UK several times, I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of its history, skillfully interwoven into her account of a relatively humble upbringing and her surprising escape from what could well have been a humdrum life. That she did took both pluck and luck, but mostly the former.

Her route to becoming a biographer will fascinate the reader. She will tell you a lot about her pursuit of such luminaries, but as all of us learn if we choose to travel any professional path, anyone's success involves 90% hard work,10% genius. And clearly in her case, what I would call "guts" and a moderate kind of chutzpah! I won't outline for you her own biography, other than to say her persistence in the face of endless frustrations and monumental hard work can only suggest her sheer joy at the chase or a continuing need to pay her living bills or both.

In this almost autobiography, she fails to mention by name her long time husband, Thomas Beveridge, composer of the widely heralded Yizkor Requiem (recorded in 2000 by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy and Chorus of St. Martin in the Fields) and Artistic Director of the New Dominion Chorale. Tsk, tsk. He is too delightful a fellow to go unnamed!

Her previous nine finished products, all but one about males, get mostly good reviews from many arbiters of distinction, so this book and their praise will lead me to read more of her oeuvre. Bravo, Meryle.