Amber Heard and Her Ghost Writer

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is the sort of news story that I generally pay as little attention to as possible--one reason why I was surprised when I found out just how much attention others were paying it, and what significances they were loading it with. Inevitably I picked up a few of the details--one of the more interesting of which was that Heard's op-ed was produced a ghost writer.

More interesting still was how many were shocked by the fact.

When you actually do much writing--perhaps even more, when you teach writing, as I have done for two decades--you learn just what a demanding craft writing is, and how time-consuming the activity can be, enough so as to make the idea of highly public personalities with extremely busy schedules producing lots and lots of writing seem highly suspect. Indeed, it is no secret that what public figures supposedly "write" is commonly produced by another individual for publication under their name. As C. Wright Mills explained in his classic White Collar way back in 1951, with the ever-greater "rationalization" and "commercialization" of publishing that had already taken over book distribution penetrating ever more deeply into book production, editors sought "out prominent names . . . men with such names crave even more prominence" with becoming "authors" one way of getting it, and in the process ghost-writing exploded.

For his part Mills estimated that a "book by a prominent but non-literary man" has at best a "fifty-fifty chance" of being by that public figure rather than having been written by someone else. And I would imagine that the chances are far lower now. After all, amid the hyper-commercialization of publishing of which I have written so many a time there is that much more emphasis on the name on the byline (and the publicity to be done on the book's behalf by the famous individual in question), so much so that it is not only the books by the "non-literary men" but even those by the "literary men" that are not by the ostensible authors, with James Patterson only the most notorious example--because even when the required level of quality is low the publishers want more "product," more "content," than any one human being can actually produce.

At the same time it seems likely, in an ever less literate age, that fewer people have the skills to produce such a work, with this going especially for the kinds of public figure we have today, not least in the entertainment industry from which so many "authors" are drawn these days, and not solely because of the busy schedules. While the lickspittles of the entertainment press would have you believe that every "celebrity" is a superhumanly accomplished Renaissance figure who would have been taking home a passel of Nobel Prizes were they not playing bit roles in sub-mediocre movies, at least in part on the grounds that they are infinitely better-educated than you (Harvard this, Yale that), looking at Hollywood's A-list closely one sees that Ricky Gervais' quip about their having "spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg" is no exaggeration--that so many of them never even finished high school one could mistake it for a requirement. (Incidentally both Heard and Depp fall into this category, both of them high school dropouts. So, stay in school, I guess?) And, I might add, Hollywood has never struck me as a place particularly conducive to people being relentlessly self-educating Martin Edens.

Still, if recent history is any guide the public will not retain the revelation--and go on thinking that the books Park Avenue pushes onto them, and the other content people with quite different purposes push onto them (as seen in this case), are actually by the people whose names are on the covers as they play a game gone far, far beyond what Mills described in his day, perhaps so much so that he could not even have imagined it.