Storytellersunplugged

By Janet Berliner

Since I, too, just finished and turned in a novel, I considered writing about post-book depression, but as two of my fellows have already well covered that issue this month, I decided to find something new.

A few weeks ago, I saw the movie “Talk to Me,” the story of Washington, D.C. DJ Ralph “Petey” Greene, an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist in the 1960s. Where I was raised, we had no television, and given my dysfunctional background, radio and books were pretty much my only friends. One of my first paid writing gigs was for SABC, South African Broadcasting Company. One of the first celebrities I met in America was the infamous Don Imus.

In the late 1980s, Laurie Harper employed me to guide her through a final restructuring and rewrite of her book: Don Sherwood: The Life and Times of the World’s Greatest Disc Jockey. Her husband, Hap, was the first man to do airborne traffic reports from a plane, which he did for the radio station that employed Don Sherwood, with whom he had worked for a lot of years. Many of Sherwood’s fans were Hap’s fans, too. Through him, Laurie had the connections for the interviews. She soon found out that doing the research for such a book was only the beginning of a complex project and employed me as her editor.

What follows is as much as anything about the making of a biography. We decided, given her close deadline, that I would move into her townhouse and stay there until the book was done. And so it began. “Why you?” I asked her. “You didn’t know him. You were hardly alive when he was ‘The Greatest.’”

“Da Vinci did not have to attend the last supper to paint it,” she said. We were off and running.

Some quick background: In the fifties and sixties, a disc jockey by the name of Don Sherwood became a surrogate member of almost every family in the San Francisco Bay Area. His was the voice that woke them in the mornings, his were the jokes they laughed at, his the antics they followed in every newspaper in town. His fans had kept his memory alive since his death; they were ready for a celebration of Don’s reign as king of the airwaves. There was to be a bash at the San Francisco Fairmont on his birthday, September 7th, and all of the people who knew and loved him–as well as many of those whose careers got off the ground because of him–would be there. MacLeren Park would be dedicated to him and become Sherwood Forest, with a “bring your own shovel” tree planting. All kinds of other Sherwood-style fun and games would dot the period in-between.

Laurie’s purpose was to create a fascinating book, one unlike the dime-a-dozen celebrity biographies; it was to be different … special … particularly for those who lived in the Bay Area, but also for anyone interested the effects of fame and fandom.

Laurie Harper was a bright and beautiful young woman in her thirties for whom this book became much more than a chronicle of Don Sherwood’s escapades. In 1985, she was establishing the Sebastian Literary Agency. She had written one book–A Taste For Life–but she was definitely not looking for another book to write when she innocently asked the Sherwood family if anyone was assigned the biography. She didn’t even know who Don Sherwood was until she met and married Hap Harper, who at that time still did the airborne traffic watch on KSFO. She knew enough to be fascinated by the fact that she and Hap ran into Sherwood fans everywhere they went. She was a little girl during his heyday in the fifties and sixties, and Don hadn’t been on the radio for years, yet his fans’ love for him had not diminished.

She began to wonder what had lent this man his power and charisma, what had turned him into a legend in an industry where you’re lucky if people remember you two weeks after you’re gone.

“I did what I would have told any other writer in my “stable” to do,” she said. “I read How to Write a Biography. It was immediately clear, however, that in death, as in life, Don was not going to fit neatly into a standard structure, so I threw the book away.”

She went back to basics and asked herself for whom she was writing this book, what they wanted to know, what she wanted to know. Without knowing the story or the players, she began a random series of interviews–she had never seen him, heard him, read a single article about him. She met with: “You’re too young to understand what he was all about”; “You’ll never pull it off”; “You’ll quit.”Who could resist such a challenge? Not Laurie Harper!”

I didn’t write a thing for over two years. While running my agency, I interviewed people and followed leads during the evening, on weekends and holidays. Don’s old engineer, a wonderful man named Charlie Smith, gave me a bunch of tapes from the radio shows and I listened to them over and over.

“The Sherwood family, still skeptical, nonetheless gave me boxes of newspaper clippings–with hardly a date on anything. I spent months reading everything, trying to piece together what went with what, unable to tell what had happened, when, and how significant it was in the scheme of Don’s life. I taped and transcribed interviews, set up my files and working system, and wondered if all the bits and pieces, parallels and contradictions, would ever come together.”

By then, Laurie was developing an inner sense about the man–at least about the man everyone else thought Don was. But she was concerned about finding out who he was to himself and knew she wouldn’t feel satisfied until she began to see things from his perspective.

“I needed to make the connections between his private life and his public life, his professional victories and his personal losses.”

Don’s childhood was marked by his mother’s emotional, and sometimes physical, abuse. His father abandoned them and his Aunt Marie tried to balance things by smothering him. His school and teenage years were filled with rebellion, and his early marriages and frequent unemployment showed him to be a naive romantic. Then he hit it big on radio and television, and his quick wit, sharp tongue, imaginative escapades and devil-may-care attitude, at least publicly, masked any inner pain he might have been feeling.Patterns had begun to form, giving Laurie a path to follow.”After two years, there had at last come a point where I felt I knew what everyone else knew. It was time to try to fill in the blanks by writing. At first I dealt purely with the chronology of it all. Then I became the one person who knew more about Don than anyone. He had no one single person with whom he shared everything in his life, so everyone was learning new things about him. People were being brought together, reliving the era, beginning to really talk about things that had happened.

Having been a chronicler with all the distance in the world, Laurie suddenly developed a tendency to romanticize, to become sentimental. Again and again she had to force herself to step back and ask: how did Don see this? What did it mean to him? What would he say about it?

“I began to think about what it might feel like to see my own life all laid out like that, with someone else connecting the dots and drawing the conclusions. I began wondering about the patterns in my life, the choices I’d made, the values I’d based them on. That was when I realized that, underlying all Don’s fun and games, was a serious personal philosophy. The more I learned about it, the more I admired him. The most surprising feeling of all was realizing that I had become his friend, which shocked me after having spent so much time with people who had been hurt by him.”Don Sherwood was an alcoholic, a manic-depressive. It wasn’t until emphysema cornered him that he began the emotional task of making amends for allowing his personal demons to wreak havoc on family and friends.This is dealt with in the last third of the book and is the most powerful part of the biography. Here, the readers, get to the core of Don Sherwood the performer, and Danny Cohelan the man. For those already part of the fan club, this would confirm their love of the man; if not, this is where they would forgive him his weaknesses and take him into their hearts.”I couldn’t help but join The Club. The Sherwood attitude is contagious. He believed that each of us should control our own destiny, that we shouldn’t make deals with life, shouldn’t compromise who we are and what we want.”

In the course of her travels with Sherwood, Laurie met many fascinating people, many warm and wonderful ones–the family, talented DJs, and professionals who were a critical part of Don’s success. And the fans.Always the fans–a clan united by the man who sparked their imaginations, made them laugh, think and cry.

“It is a great sadness that Don never found the joy he gave others. Today we have support groups and organizations to help us deal with alcoholism and dysfunctional families. Those were either not yet available or not yet fully recognized when Don needed them. Maybe–probably–he wouldn’t have listened to them. But I can’t help wondering where “the world’s greatest disc jockey” would be today if he knew then what we know now.”

We worked together almost around the clock. Most of the time we were in accord. When we weren’t, we almost came to blows. I went to “my” room and packed more than once. When we were done, we collapsed onto the carpet and cried together.

Later, months later, I asked Laurie how she’d felt as she’d waited to see the results of her labors?

“I am thrilled that Don’s story turned out to be every bit as important and fascinating as I thought it would be and that I was able to find the right choice at the right time to tell Don Sherwood’s story. That was the hardest part, I think–admitting that I had the right to my own voice in all of this–that I wasn’t simply supposed to be a chronicler.”

Robin, Don Sherwood’s daughter, said, “It’s the book Dad would have wanted.”

What more could any biographer–any writer–want?

My lesson was this: Writing a retrospective brings with it memories, awareness, insights. Mostly it reconfirms that hindsight is the true harbinger of wisdom. I hope this piece has piqued some interest. As the book is no longer widely available, I can put any interested reader in touch with Laurie, who still has some copies she can sell.

—Janet Berliner