The term “ghostwriting” was coined by Christy Walsh, whose agency for years controlled the literary output of American sports celebrities from Babe Ruth onwards. The agency had a series of rules. One suggested that a new ghostwriter “usually makes the mistake of thinking that he ought to write the way his celebrity talks. That is an error. He ought to write the way the public thinks his celebrity talks.”
Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, wrote his own memoir before he started to write the lives of others. In that book, The Tender Bar, he describes how he was on an existential, drink-sodden search for surrogates for his absent father – a New York DJ – mostly among the regulars in his local boozer. That quest, he suggested, instilled in him a quality that has no doubt subsequently been prized by his celebrity subjects (who include Andre Agassi as well as Harry): “I was a master at ‘identity theft’ when that crime was more benign. The bar fostered in me the habit of turning each person who crossed my path into a mentor, or a character, and I credit the bar, and blame it, for my becoming a reflection, or a refraction, of them all,” he wrote.
