On the 9th of May in 2012, while leaving his Manhattan apartment building, C. David Heymann dropped dead in the building’s lobby. He was 67 years old. Two years would elapse before the publishing behemoth owned by CBS, Simon & Schuster, under their colophons Emily Bestler and Atria Books, posthumously published Heymann’s Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love, essentially just another painfully untruthful Marilyn pathography, just another compilation of distortions and fabrications, one that was left incomplete when Clem Heymann dropped dead that day in early May twelve years ago. So that being the case, who compiled and completed Clem’s final foray into the world of what Norman Mailer would call creative non-fiction? According to an article published by the Columbia University’s School of the Arts, two women should be held responsible, should be held accountable for performing the necessary tasks and delivering the manuscript for publication. More about those women and that article will appear later in this subsection. Additionally, another one of Heymann’s often criticized publications involving a famous Kennedy was not actually written by him, even though he was credited with its authorship, a fact that both shocked and surprised me. That chicanery, however, is a topic for another day and another time.

Certainly Heymann’s death was a tragic event for his family and friends; but at least fortuitously for Heymann perhaps, depending on your perspective and attitude, he never had to defend Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love. He never had to answer additional questions about his literary proclivities, his integrity and his honesty, questions he had been frequently asked and questions he usually left unanswered during the previous forty-three years spanned by his literary career. Just like the other celebrity biographies written by Heymann, his posthumously published Joe & Marilyn: Legends in Love is also crammed with distortions and fabrications, facts that will become crystal clear as we proceed.

Clemens Claude Oscar Heymann, known to his friends and associates as Clem and to the literary world as C. David Heymann, was born into an upper class German-Jewish family on the 14th of January in 1945. As a young man, Heymann intended to follow his father into the lucrative world of hotel management and ownership; so he earned a degree at Cornell University to prepare him for that profession. Even so, Heymann realized that his real love was literature. After his graduation from Cornell in 1966, Heymann enrolled at the University of Massachusetts to pursue a Master’s degree in writing at the Amherst Campus. Along with his 1969 graduation from that university, Heymann published The Quiet Hours, a volume of poetry. Then, while studying for his doctorate in English Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he discovered the works of Ezra Pound.

Heymann’s first non-fiction literary effort, advertised and sold as a historical biography, appeared in 1976 and presented the life of the controversial American poet, expatriate, fascist and Nazi sympathizer, Ezra Pound. Heymann titled his first non-fiction effort, Ezra Pound, the Last Rower: A Political Profile. Heymann’s initial book was a moderately successful foray into the world of historical biographies; and the literary world initially praised the author’s work. On the inside flap of the book’s dust cover, the publisher announced:

This major new biography of one of the great poets of our age—a fascinating, charismatic, and always controversial figure—accomplishes what other studies of Pound have somehow failed to do: present a judicious, balanced account of the life and times of this complex, often contradictory man.

Eventually, however, the publication encountered controversy when an Ezra Pound scholar accused Heymann of plagiarism. According to a 1999 Observer article, written by Andrew Goldman, Hugh Kenner, a Johns Hopkins University scholar very familiar with Ezra Pound, had questioned the authenticity of Mr. Heymann’s work sixteen years earlier. Kenner demonstrated for the Wash­ington Post in 1983 that a question and answer interview allegedly performed by Clem Heymann was a wholesale fake, had been plagiarized: the interview Heymann represented as his work had actually been performed by an Italian interviewer. Heymann, who had once criticized Kenner in a book review,1“Kennedy ‘Expert’ C. David Heymann: Do His J.F.K. Jr. Stories Hold Up?” By Andrew Goldman. The Observer. 2 August 1999. Placing Heymann in the lofty position of a Kennedy ‘expert’ most certainly was a tongue-in-cheek placement by Goldman.
<http://observer.com/1999/08/kennedy-expert-c-david-heymann-do-his-jfk-jr-stories-hold-up/>denied the scholar’s accusation and accused the accuser of merely being spiteful.

Hugh Kenner’s purported spitefulness notwithstanding, evidence of Heymann’s willingness to plagiarize has been noted by various journalists and Heymann critics over the years following the publication of Heymann’s literary efforts. For example, Mike Wilson noted humorously in a Miami Herald article that appeared on the 14th of May in 1989, regarding Heymann’s A Woman Named Jackie, the biographer’s professed search for the real Jackie Kennedy was obviously restricted and did not extend farther than his own bookshelf.2“Jackie Book Draws Heavy Fire: Steamy Biography Got It Wrong, Several Sources Say” by Mike Wilson. The Miami Herald, 14 May 1989.The journalist then offered several examples of Heymann’s plagiaristic tendencies, such as borrowing from Kitty Kelley’s 1978 Jackie biography.3As those in the know, know, birds of a feather flock together. According to a Slate article written by Michael Crowley, published in 2004: After close to 30 years and five breathless tell-alls, it’s clear that Kelley is no meticulous historian who nails down her facts with airtight precision. To the contrary, she is the consummate gossip monger, a vehicle for all the rumor and innuendo surrounding her illustrious subjects. She surely knows it as well as her readers do. People read Kelley for the same reason they read the National Enquirer: the taboo. How ironic that one fabulist plagiarizes from another fabulist.
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/09/kitty-kelley-colonoscopist-to-the-stars.html>In Jackie Oh!, Kelley wrote:

Another friend says, “The ‘other woman’ business was foremost in her mind. Sometimes she could be very adult about Jack’s little flings and other times she would retreat and thrash herself and mope for days, becoming very aloof from everyone and being glacially cold to him. That’s when she would go on shopping binges and spend hours visiting Walter Sohier in his Georgetown house (Kelley 59).

In A Woman Named Jackie, Heymann obviously helped himself to Kelley’s words. He wrote:

The “other woman” syndrome touched Jackie in different ways on different occasions. At intervals she would retreat and mope for long stretches, very aloof from everyone and glacially cold to the President. It was at these junctures that she went on shopping binges, disbursing thousands of dollars on jewelry, designer clothes, paintings; whatever captured her fancy (Heymann: Jackie, 292).

Wilson then offered a side-by-side tabulation of quotations Heymann presented in A Woman Named Jackie, lifted virtually word for word from A Hero for Our Time, written by Ralph G. Martin, published in 1983, and The Kennedys, written by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, published in 1984. Wilson additionally noted that Heymann borrowed liberally from Jackie Oh!

Heymann’s borrowing, however, was not limited to other biographical publications. Wilson noted that Heymann duplicated, virtually verbatim, a column written by Jack Anderson, published in April of 1975: With the disarming coquetry for which she is famous, Jackie Onassis often complained about her money problems.4Op. Cit. Wilson.Heymann held those words in such esteem that he included them in A Woman Named Jackie as follows: With the disarming coquetry for which she was famous, she often complained about her financial woes (Heymann: Jackie, 530). Clearly, and in short, Clem Heymann was a plagiarist. Even shorter: Heymann: plagiarist.

David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize Winner, asserted in a 2014 Newsweek article, that he had also exposed Heymann as a literary fraud the same year that Hugh Kenner had exposed Heymann as a plagiarist. Subsequently, David Johnston became one of the celebrity biographer’s most vocal and persistent critics. Johnston also asserted, in his Newsweek5“C. David Heymann’s Lies About JFK and Jackie, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor” by David Cay Johnston. Newsweek. 27 August 2014.
<http://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/05/c-david-heymanns-career-serial-fabulist-266876.html>article, that he confronted Heymann with the dubious and historically inaccurate assertions that the author had presented as facts in previous works, like the Ezra Pound publication; but Clem only offered excuses or blamed his researchers for his historical and biographical errors.

Slightly disgraced but undeterred, Heymann followed his Ezra Pound effort four years later with American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy and Robert Lowell. According to David Johnston, Heymann’s work was not well received; and the author got savaged by reviewers, particularly Kirkus, who ridiculed the book: What’s worse, the Kirkus review began, than a plodding, banal, badly written literary biography? Three plodding, banal, badly written literary biographies rolled into one. The reviewer noted that Heymann lacked either the skills or the patience to fashion the information he presented into art and the author’s writing is studded with outrageous bits of gaucherie, bad taste, and ignorance.6https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/c-david-heymann-2/american-aristocracy-the-lives-and-times-of-jam/

Another reviewer, according to Johnston, noted that Heymann wrote with neither grace nor insight and included information that was largely derivative and too often in error. Heymann’s publication was, in essence, kin to those tawdry, revelatory biographies that make for today’s best-selling, non-fiction list. In his Newsweek article cited above, Johnston noted that Heymann’s literary effort received at least one literary prize: The Village Voice’s “Most Mistakes Medallion” in 1980.7Op. Cit. Johnston.

Despite the controversies, Heymann’s first two books were moderately successful; but much to his dismay, his earnings were similarly modest and did not rise to the level of his expectations. According to the 1999 Andrew Goldman article that ran in the New York Observer, Heymann recognized what caused his lack of early financial success: if he wanted to sell books, he should not have written about a poet. Additionally, according to obituaries published by The Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times in 20128<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9357281/C-David-Heymann.html>
<https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-c-david-heymann-20120514-story.html>Heymann acknowledged that writing about a dead poet would not make him rich. Obviously, Heymann observed, I couldn’t continue to write literary biography and support a family. I don’t mean to suggest I write just for money, but a person does have to make a living. And some persons will say and do virtually anything to make a living. Consequently, Heymann turned his now financially motivated and astutely savvy literary attentions upon the eccentric heir to the Woolworth fortune, Barbara Hutton.

In 1983, Random House published Heymann’s Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton. Almost immediately, problems surfaced. Heymann claimed the heiress permitted him to access her secret notebooks which, Hutton’s intimates stated, never existed; he also claimed that he interviewed the ailing heiress over a six week span in 1979, the year before she died, which Hutton’s intimates derided because, they claimed, Hutton was too ill to be interviewed. Additionally, Heymann claimed to have interviewed the persons that he quoted in his text. However, most of those quoted later denied ever talking to Heymann, or anyone associated with the biographer, and each interviewee asserted that the quotes attributed to them were fabricated. More significantly, perhaps, Cary Grant, who was once married to Hutton, denounced the book as mostly fictitious. For example, Heymann claimed that Hutton’s physician, Dr. Edward A. Kantor, grossly overprescribed drugs for her in 1943. That assertion created a major problem for the author since Kantor was only fourteen years old in 1943. When the physician’s attorney threatened legal action, Random House, Heymann’s publisher at the time, recovered as many copies of the dubious biography as the publisher could and pulped them. Meanwhile, Heymann blamed all the inaccuracies in his Hutton narrative on his investigators; but certainly, it was Heymann’s duty and his responsibility to at least spot-check the information provided by his investigators.

Additionally, Kirkus criticized Heymann for including, with inadequate justification or editing, a long chunk of anti-Grant nastiness from an ex-servant. Evidently Kirkus doubted the ex-servant’s statement that Grant could be a terrible bastard […]. Kirkus opined that some readers may keep wading through … Heymann’s cliché ridden prose due to his graphic fixation on Hutton’s sex life. According to Heymann, the heiress developed a reputation as a fag hag.

Disgraced and depressed, Heymann attempted suicide with a bottle of Scotch and Valium but failed. He eventually collected himself, rewrote his Barbara Hutton work and then sold it to another publisher. Lyle Stuart, a publisher known for publishing controversial and renegade books republished Poor Little Rich Girl, allegedly an updated and corrected version. In 1987, Lester Persky, Nick Gillot and Tomlinson Dean based a television miniseries on Heymann’s account; but concerning his factual errors, Heymann had commented in 1984 that he understood the differing degree of accuracy expected and required in a biography about Ezra Pound and one about Barbara Hutton, the former a historical figure and the latter a socialite. What I wanted to do was a mise en scène of a life. I may have made an error or two, or three, or four, or five, Heymann admitted, according to a Margalit Fox penned New York Times obituary, but at least I tried to write an accurate biography.9“C. David Heymann, Biographer of the Rich and Famous, Dies at 67” by Margalit Fox. The New York Times. 10 May 2012.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/books/c-david-heymann-biographer-of-rich-and-famous-dies-at-67.html?_r=0>Obviously, for C. David Heymann, accuracy was, for the most part, a relative term; and having learned his lesson about selecting his subject matter, Heymann appropriately aimed his biographical attentions and his heightened capitalist aspirations at a prominent American family that included the English actor Peter Lawford, who was then married to a daughter of the prominent family, the only authentic Royal American Family.