Emillio Mesa with Tom Reiss

By Emillio Mesa

Editor’s Note: Yesterday, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, and Tom Reiss was awarded the prize for Biography for his book The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, “a compelling story of a forgotten swashbuckling hero of mixed race whose bold exploits were captured by his son, Alexander Dumas, in famous 19th century novels.” We interviewed Reiss last September about his book; that interview is re-published below.

He has won the respect of many for his landmark actions as a man of mixed race, who led a nation through a crumbling economy. No, not President Obama, this is the story of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (Alex Dumas). Tom Reiss’s new biography The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown) chronicles how the son of a black slave and a disgraced French aristocrat rose to challenge Napoleon and became the inspiration for his son, also named Alexandre Dumas, to write The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Alex skyrocketed through the military ranks from private to general, thanks to his focus while under attack, equestrian ability, and swordsmanship. Despite all racial injustices of the period, he became one of the most legendary cavalry generals in Europe. To this day, he remains the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army, until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later.

At Andaz 5th Avenue Hotel, overlooking The New York Public Library, while drinking a soy-cappuccino, Tom Reiss discussed his latest book and why a 48 year old Upper East Side husband and father of two spent 7 years writing this book.

Interesting timing for this book with President Obama’s upcoming election. Was that your aim?
(Laughs) No. I started researching the life of Alexandre Dumas seven years ago, long before President Obama came into the picture. If you want the real roots of my interest, I think it started with my mother, Luce, who was born in Paris in the late 1930s and then arrested for being Jewish when the Nazis occupied the city.  She was saved by a pair of courageous neighbors and the blind eye of a policeman, who allowed them to take her off of a bus that was bound for a concentration camp.  In an orphanage after the war, at age nine, my mom was given a book, the 1938 Hachette edition of Le Comte de Monte Cristo. She brought it with her when she came to the United States, and this old green edition still sits on a shelf in my parents’ library, along with the other Dumas novels that my mom’s adoptive father, my beloved Great Uncle Lolek, gave her in her new home in Washington Heights.  These Dumas books always had a special connection to my family, spoke to me of a kind of hope in the bleakest hour.  When I learned that the novels had been inspired by the most incredible race-crossing minority man, who’d risen above incredible prejudice to do incredible things, I felt even more connected to Dumas.  I always wanted to investigate this incredible life behind the stories.

Your books are about history but also individuals who went on bizarre journeys to find their identity – bizarre collisions with history – why?
It’s because I’m a rootless cosmopolitan, a classic Jewish character. Before the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were struggling to find their identity in history–they were like people adrift in the oceans of other histories and cultures–and I loved to explore that through my closest relatives.  I began by interviewing them, about their life during incredible, dangerous times, and it made me realize how much history shapes individual lives. In some sense we really have no idea what the past was really like. History as it’s taught in school isn’t complete-everything is boiled down into clichés. The big historical events color the experience, it’s a footnote, but it really doesn’t describe the experiences of the people that lived during that time. History is just as complicated as the moment we’re living in. So it’s about rescuing the real people who lived in it, from being part of an oppressively bland construct “history” that’s essentially a steam roller that just runs over millions of lives-it’s almost an insult. Also, I was a strange little kid who liked to ride the bus and sit next to an old person, so that they could tell me their story. History is a lot about timing. There are periods where everything is up for grabs.

What makes a Jewish-American writer from Washington Heights obsessed with a free black slave during the French Revolution?
I’m obsessed with race relations and racism. I’m interested in people that were in high-risk situations and how they dealt with it.  What is it that allows someone to survive, triumph, or causes them to sink into despair? Also, his story is universal, an individual who had to deal with his creativity and personal life, against an oppressive ideology and how he came out on the other side.

Why does Alex Dumas fascinate you?
I’m drawn to people who have a strong ideology. Alex, more than any of the people I dealt with before, lived out his ideology very actively. He’s from a time and a place where to be a man, you wanted to put your ideology in your body. He trained to be what we call today an “action hero”. In those times the movies were real life. He lived out, what we today, vicariously live through movies. I like periods where social-clubs about a higher ideal were formed, where they lunged to remake the world into a better place. Don’t get me wrong, I like our own period, our beautiful-hedonistic-materialistic culture but I also crave something more in life. The reason that I write these types of books and characters is because they give me that something more, that we’re missing right now.

I recently went to a book party and a European writer said to me “It’s very interesting how Americans prefer personal stories, compared to Europeans who prefer literature.” Do you think Americans will care about the story of Alex Dumas?
Because of my books I’ve traveled the world. That comment is based on the notion that Americans are arrogant and don’t care. If you scratch below the surface, the problem with Americans is that we care too much. Just like Alexandre Dumas, we’re all still trying to find ourselves.

Was researching the book like an Indiana Jones adventure?
It was like digging for human-buried treasure. At one point I had a safe blown up in order to recover an importance piece of the puzzle. He was written out of history, the Nazis melted the only statue of him, and he was literally white-washed, they painted a blond guy over his image. I had to retrace his steps from France, Egypt, to the Caribbean. It was fun having to resurrect this man and reconstruct his life…like rescuing an individual from the past and giving him the chance to speak in his own voice, because great measures were taken in order to make him disappear.

If The Black Count were being made into a movie, who would you cast?
Fifteen years ago it would’ve been Denzel Washington. I think it should be a young actor, maybe an unknown-someone with a presence of power. Morgan Freeman would be a great narrator.

If Alexandre Dumas were alive today, what would he say about the upcoming election?
What happened? You need to learn how to believe in yourselves again and find your enthusiasm. Embrace the true ideals from which your country was founded and help to create inspiration. To be an American is to be somebody from the new world, a new person of beliefs and ideas-someone who’s excited by life and never lets oppression have the upper hand.

And that someone as visibly, pronouncedly Jewish should forever share her moment with Hepburn, celluloid’ s ultimate WASP exemplar, makes that announcement even more of a milestone. So who should know better to chronicle Streisand in Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand than author William J. Mann, who has previously penned the insightful biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn?

While the title cribs from Streisand’s signature, first line in Funny Girl, the movie that nabbed her her first Oscar, Mann never gets to that point. Instead, he focuses on a smaller window of her life, from 1960 to 1964, as the ambitious performer first made it out of the Brooklyn house dominated by her tough mother, Diana Kind, and began her launch into the stratosphere. He homes in on the gray areas usually bypassed in James Lipton’s useless Inside the Actor’s Studio filmographies. And so Gorgeous becomes a simultaneous dissection of a woman, a star, a talent and an industry all at once.

Meticulously researched and told with a cunning sense of acuity, Gorgeous provides enough personal details to whet the appetite without veering into overly salacious territory. Mann recounts Streisand’s family background – the father she lost before her second birthday, her mother’s remarriage and the rancorous relationship between the two women. He provides new accounts of her early sexual fumblings and the start of her relationship with first husband Elliott Gould, his subsequent drug use and her eventual straying. And if he gives short shrift to her early recording successes and Emmy and Grammy wins, his detailed account of ascent to Broadway stardom in I Can Get It For You Wholesale and then attachment to the Fanny Brice story in Girl remain a testament to a day when stardom still required both pluck and talent.

Most important of all, however, was how Streisand wore her ethnicity on her sleeve. Her refusal to alter her nose or name and her penchant for over-enunciating were both a shtick and a calling card. Mann dwells on how she forced people to look at her as is, which was a gamble, equal parts brave and stupid. While other Jewish actresses had become familiar to audiences (including Judy Holliday), most were relegated to character actress status. Streisand would blast past all of them. Through a series of interviews with such subjects as Kaye Ballard and Lainie Kazan, Mann carves a very human portrait.  He details the nerves and insecurities that came her way as a performer, even as the encomiums did as well. He acknowledges that she was never known to say “thank you,” but also highlights the rare instances when she did.

Gorgeous was not authorized by its subject, but nor was Mann’s access to information blocked in any way. It differs from other treatises on the woman who would sing “I’m the Greatest Star” in that instead of charting the course of her life and career – divorce, diva reputation, refusal to perform live – it focuses on the mechanics of the roller coaster that would lead to all the ups and downs. And this tome, at more than 500 pages, is quite the well-oiled machine. It’s a must for those who know nothing about La Streisand as well as for those who think they already know it all.

For more information about Hello, Gorgeous, go to williamjmann.com.

By Angela Barbuti

Bruce Springsteen gets a lot of play—literally. Even President Obama has said, “I’m the president, but he’s the Boss.” And now, after more than 30 years of research, Peter Ames Carlin finally put his respect for the musician down on paper. Replete with interviews from Bruce’s family, the E Street Band and Bruce himself, Carlin has recorded a biography that lives up to all the hype it has generated. Bruce, released Oct. 30, has won the honor of a four-star rating from Rolling Stone. On Nov. 14, the author will be at Barnes & Noble at 18th Street to sign his book, which is the perfect holiday gift for the Bruce fan in your life.

You began writing the book in the fall of 2009, but your interest in Bruce dates back to when you went to a concert of his in 1978. 

I had been collecting material and knowledge starting as a 15-year-old, when I saw Bruce’s show in the fall of ’78 on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. The show was kind of—I don’t want to say “life changing,” that’s a bit much—but it altered my sense of music and possibility. It resonated with me, and I carried that for decades.

After a year and a half of writing on your own, Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, called you.

I was doing research on my own with no connection at all to Bruce. I was speaking to a ton of people before that—old friends, people from Freehold and Asbury Park, and veterans from Columbia Records who were extremely eager to talk. The phone rang in January of 2011 while I was sitting in my office—my basement here in Portland—and it was Jon. We got together the next week for a drink, and from that point on, Jon became super-helpful and gave the green light to friends, collaborators and band members.

What surprised you about Bruce?

We spent a lot of time together. Everyone told me along the way that he’s pretty much exactly who you think he is. In a way, that was very true. It was clear to me from his work that he’s a very intense, complicated and, in some ways, conflicted person. He is enormously charming, but there’s also a distance around him to a degree. He wears his moods and inner tension close to the surface.

Photo by Elizabeth S. Ames

You conducted the last major interview with Clarence Clemons. What was he like?

I had a couple days’ worth of interviews with him just a couple of months before he died. Physically, he was a little compromised; he had just had another bout of surgery. He was doing a lot of physical therapy, trying to get in shape for this tour. Mentally, he was incredibly smart, funny, sensitive and intense. He had a lot to talk about and was very excited to do so, which was cool.

You list Bruce’s many accomplishments—120 million albums sold, 20 Grammys, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. Why do you think he’s able to do so much?

Bruce is, in a lot of ways, a self-invented human being. But these threads—the energy, drive and passion—come from his mom’s side of the family. The part that helps him work onstage for three to four hours a night and pursue his art for 50 years now. His mom’s side is this very vibrant, hilarious, hard-working Italian family. His dad had a lot of emotional problems, and there has been a lot of darkness on that side of the family. The disturbance in Bruce’s soul that has branded him came through his dad’s side.

You dedicate the book to your wife, Sarah, and thank her for thinking of the title. Besides that, did she help along the way?

[Laughs] She helped me by making it okay for me to disappear for weeks on end. And there was a point halfway through the process where I quit the job I had for 10-plus years at The Oregonian. Things had gotten kind of unpleasant there for me, and I knew it was time to move on. When the Bruce thing really got rolling, I had the sense that if anything is worth throwing all your eggs in a basket for, it’s this book that no one else had the chance to do yet. My wife encouraged me to do exactly that.

You mention Café Wha? and Kenny’s Castaways as part of Bruce’s early life. What role do you see New York City as having in his development? 

Oh my gosh—a big role. As big as his earlier bands were in New Jersey and the South, they never tried to play New York for some reason. When he started building his career as a professional recording artist, that drew him to New York. His becoming familiar with it and seeing the world from that perspective transformed his sense of possibility. If you listen to “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street,” the impact is everywhere.

Did you listen to Bruce’s music as you were writing his biography? 

Well, sure. I mean, I listened to Bruce music when I was writing about everything else over the years. [Laughs] It’s just part of my internal soundtrack.

What is your favorite Bruce song?

[Laughs] It sort of depends on the day or the hour. The songs have been part of my life on a step-by-step basis since I was a sophomore in high school. “Racing in the Streets” from Darkness. I just feel that there’s something vital in that song that comes from so deep.

What do you think the future holds for Bruce and the E Street Band?

At this point, it seems he’s very committed to the band and to keeping the group going. Bruce himself as an artist, songwriter, musician and performer—he’ll do that for the rest of his life. Because that’s who he is—it’s what makes him alive.

Everybody knows you can’t run for president without writing a book. As my mom used to say, “They’re all doing it now.” Many of the new political books are about Andrew Cuomo. In fact, Cuomo himself is writing a book, and a New York Post columnist and a writer for Vanity Fair are each writing a book about Cuomo.

The Vanity Fair version has the best chance of being the real thing. For their part, Team Cuomo has been saying they will “cooperate” with the guy from the Post who has been very, very nice to the governor. Team Cuomo has been hinting they might cooperate with the Vanity Fair guy, who is closest to real critical journalism.

It sounds to me like the price of such gubernatorial cooperation might be an “understanding” about how tough the book will be. These things are never put in words, and I would be the last person in the world to suggest that a quid pro quo might be at work here.

If I wrote a book about Cuomo, it would not be about Cuomo. There’s just too much competition. I don’t think Team Cuomo likes me and I am quite sure they wouldn’t cooperate. I once wrote a very complimentary book about Mario Cuomo; very few people read it.

Nope, the way to do it is to write a thinly disguised novel. You could begin with the usual Law & Order-type disclosure making it quite clear that “this book has absolutely nothing to do with any governor living or dead.” The main character’s name might be Anthony. It would have lots of sex and tales of old and new lovers. It would chronicle a huge political divorce that rips two of the dynastic families in the country asunder.

It would show Gov. Anthony to be a loving father who does anything he can for his three lovely daughters. It would show Anthony on the phone daily with his dad, the family patriarch and former governor to whom he was so devoted to he would do anything to further his father’s place in history. A familiar line from the older Cuomo to the younger might be, “Now Anthony, you’ve got to get that guy before he gets you.”

Obviously there would have to be side plots. There would be the U.S. senator who incurred the governor’s wrath because she didn’t fall in line. There would be the former senator, now secretary of state, who had the best chance to put a stop to Anthony’s chance to be president. She would make the ambitious governor crazy.

The novel would chronicle the governor’s chief strategist who went around threatening those who would not go along. He would be heard saying, “We have two speeds: go along or death.” Obviously, you’d have to include at least three of the top legislative leaders. These would include the wily, brilliant Democratic speaker; the silver-haired Republican who owed everything to Anthony, a Democrat who had saved his hash; and a bitter black Democratic Senate minority leader who, but for Anthony’s intervention on behalf of the Republicans, would have been the leader of the Senate.

Of course, there would be the back-room real estate moguls who funded a political action committee to do the young governor’s bidding. They would chuckle that they had a Democrat who was really a closet Republican and they would throw obscene amounts of money into keeping the young governor in power. They would spend more money than any other influence-peddling group.

Naturally, there would have to a beautiful heroine, probably a television anchor who desperately loved our hero and who ended up, after living with him for years, marrying him just before he ran for president so the voters in Kansas would go along. In the background would be a former president who hugged young Anthony when he saw him but kept putting his wife, now the secretary of state, into the catbird seat and urging her to run for president—with her numbers, she couldn’t lose. There would be lots of telephone dialogue between the white-haired ex-president and young Anthony.
That’s just for starters! Once the book comes out, a movie would be inevitable. If you’re an agent out there and like this idea, give me a call.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.