If ghostwriter Tony Schwartz had not suggested to Donald Trump that he should ghostwrite The Art of the Deal in Trump’s name, Trump would never have been cast as the front man for the US version of The Apprentice and would then never have become famous enough to win a presidential election.
What Lies Around Us
The majority of celebrity cookbooks are written in two months or less by ghostwriters, most of whom are also highly qualified home economists.
When Colette ghosted the first Claudine novel for her husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, she was only 26 years old.
When Barbara Feinman Todd was ghostwriting Hillary Clinton’s autobiography she confided in an old friend of hers, the Watergate journalist, Bob Woodward, that she had witnessed Hillary taking part in a séance at the White House, talking to Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi from the “other side”. Woodward wrote about the scene in his book The Choice and Hillary never spoke to her ghostwriter again.
In France the word for ghostwriter is “Negre”.
Many ghostwriters, particularly those working in developing countries, are paid slave wages, while a few are paid millions.
Former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, died while suing his ghostwriter, a distinguished journalist called Heribert Schwan, for US$5-million. Kohl accused the ghost of publishing an unauthorised biography in which Schwan claimed that Kohl said his former protégé, Angela Merkel, was so unsophisticated she “couldn’t use a knife and fork” when she first entered politics.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas was actually ghostwritten by Dumas’s friend Auguste Maquet.
At least half of successful non-fiction books are ghostwritten, and at least ten per cent of successful fiction.
When Tony Blair heard that his former friend, thriller-writer Robert Harris, had written a book titled The Ghost about a former prime minister, (reputedly based on Blair), writing his memoir with the help of a ghostwriter, (a book that was later filmed by Roman Polanski with Pierce Brosnan playing the prime minister and Ewan McGregor playing the ghostwriter), his first words were reported to be, “cheeky f***”.