Beatrice Schwartz
Before I place an exclamation point to end this revision and lengthy discussion about C. David Heymann, allow me to return to the topic of who actually wrote Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love and the two women mentioned earlier who completed the manuscript. According to an article published on August the 7th in 2014 by the Columbia University School of the Arts’ website, columbiajournal.org, Clem Heymann’s widow, Beatrice Swartz and an author by the name of Carla Stockton, who wrote the article, actually completed Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love. Carla was also one of Heymann’s researchers and a ghost writer. Beatrice and Carla prepared the manuscript for publication; therefore then, for all intents and purposes, Beatrice and Carla actually created the book.
Beatrice Swartz graduated from both Cornell University and Columbia University, which prepared her, according to the art school’s article, to become a hard-working employee of the City of New York […]. Even though she was not a writer, she was the spouse of one, a writer who thrived on controversy. It was, according to the article, the controversy that maintained Clem Heymann’s constant location within the limelight. Beatrice understood better than most, you see, that no writer, no matter how rich and famous they might actually be, can hide from the threat of obscurity. Evidently, Clem struggled constantly against descending headlong into the darkness of obscurity. So, Beatrice spent the last two years of her life making sure that Heymann’s place in the literary pantheon was secure; but this question must be asked; into which literary pantheon had C. David Heymann been permanently and securely enshrined?
Carla’s art school article is a curiosity, to say the least; and Carla curiously, but at least honestly, noted that Clem […] made it his business to pry into the lives and loves of the rich and famous, and he had a reputation for skirting fast and loose around the facts. He had a nose for the salacious, and he was not shy about embellishing it. Clearly, Carla had no problem with nor any concern about Clem’s literary proclivities, his prying or his lying: she did not even raise a feeble objection, not even to Clem’s willingness to plagiarize. We can only conclude that Beatrice Schwartz shared the ghost writer’s same lack of concern.
We cannot really know exactly how far Clem’s final manuscript had progressed prior to his death in 2012; but obviously, two year’s worth of work remained to be done; and as the article noted, Beatrice made it her noblesse oblige to get the book finished.1Still, the article provides a hint regarding the manuscript’s level of completion:
He had done the research, conducted the interviews, sleuthed out tidbits of new information to astonish even the most ardent fans of the Yankee Clipper and his Hollywood Princess. He was especially proud of anecdotal evidence he had unearthed that enabled him to flesh out the relationship between Joe and his only son Joe Jr. and the way in which Monroe enhanced and enabled that relationship.
Which interviews had Clem Heymann completed prior to his May of 2012 unexpected trip into eternity? His mysterious interview of Peter Lawford, who had relocated his residency into eternity twenty-eight years earlier? His interviews with Joe DiMaggio, Jr., whose residency had relocated into eternity thirteen years earlier? His interviews with George and Robert Solotaire, both deceased, George’s death forty-seven years earlier and Robert’s four years earlier? Had all the fabricated interviews with and all the fabricated testimony from fabricated characters like Paul Baer and Kurt Lamprecht, just to mention two—had those whole cloth fabrications been written, along with the fabricated testimony of the Joe DiMaggio, Jr.? Were the words attributed to all of the preceding sleuthed out tidbits of new information designed to astonish even the most ardent fans of the Yankee Clipper and his Hollywood Princess? Or just how much of the magical fabrications and creations had been left to the capable imaginations of Beatrice Swartz and Carla Stockton? That is the mystery.
As preposterous a publication as C. David Heymann’s final fictional book actually was, and actually is, all things considered, Carla Stockton managed to declare the following:
The real proof is in the pudding. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and of course they refer to David’s propensity for hyperbole and fabrication. What intrigues readers most are the degree of deliciousness David folds into the scandal, the height of the non-sentimentality he weaves into his characters’ emotional revelations and the authenticity he carves out of his very flawed subjects, rendered all the more believable for their inconsistencies.
Incredible, to say the least; but then Clem often told his wife, regarding the obviously dubious publication about Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe: It’s my best book. I know it is. My observation is this: Clem Heymann’s subjects may have been imperfect, flawed according to Carla; but they were not nearly as flawed as the man who wrote scurrilous lies about them.
In an email, Donna Morel informed me that she contacted Carla Stockton:
I emailed her about the fabrications in Heymann’s book’s. Stockton told me to never email her again. She slammed the Newsweek cover story. I shared the email with David Cay Johnston and Johnston wrote her directly stating her comments about the Newsweek piece were defamatory. Stockton never responded.
Renowned JFK researcher and author, Jim DiEugenio, offered a less than flattering comment about Emily Bestler, the Senior Vice-President and Editor-in-chief of Emily Bestler Books, which she founded in 2011. Jim suggested that I contact Lisa Pease about Emily, which I did. Lisa, a renowned RFK researcher and author, informed me via email that her contact with Emily Bestler happened so long ago that she could not recall very much about the words that they exchanged. Evidently, Emily dismissed, nay, excused her involvement with Clem Heymann’s dishonest books by pronouncing that he was the expert, meaning that she merely accepted what Clem wrote based on that assessment of him. Although Lisa disagreed with Emily by noting that Clem was lying, Lisa lamented: I made no headway with her at all. Emily was, in a certain sense, correct in her assessment of Clem. He was an expert. He was an expert liar. The Flim Flam Man, bestowed with an MBS, CS, DD—a Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing and Dirty-Dealing. By now that fact, that unfortunate reality should be as pellucid and clear as recently cleaned window glass.
Finally and in closing, according to Carla’s article, Emily Bestler knew from the start that the book would make it into print. “I never doubted it.” She affirms. “We have done well with David’s books, and Bea was there to usher it along!” Ah, yes, the real reason why publishers always printed C. David Heymann’s dishonest books. Doing well. Money. In the publishing world, money talks and evidently so does bullshit!
An Ironic Post Script
The subject of C. David Heymann’s first biography was the poet and essayist Ezra Pound. That fact is an incredible irony. Many years ago, Pound wrote an essay entitled “The Serious Artist.” In that essay, Pound offered a stern pronouncement regarding the artist who lies; and he made no distinction between the artist who unknowingly lies and the artist who lies willfully:
If an artist falsifies his report as to the nature of man, as to his own nature, as to the nature of his ideal of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god, if god exist, of the life force, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, of the force with which he believes or disbelieves this, that or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or is made glad; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or on any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness, out of laziness, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be punished or despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence. His offence is of the same nature as the physician’s and according to his position and the nature of his lie he is responsible for future oppressions and for future misconceptions.
Remarkably enough, Heymann included the preceding quotation as an epigraph at the beginning of his publication about Ezra Pound. It occurs to me that Clem never actually read it.2
I suppose a fellow could argue that Clem Heymann merely conformed to the taste of his time, a time in America and around the globe when humanity evidently craves sensationalism along with voyeurism and cares precious little about the facts or the truth. The latter of the preceding two may possess a gossamer nature, a quiddity difficult to define; and while we could debate whether truth is absolute or whether it is relative to shifting circumstances, we all know what the word truth means and what being truthful actually is, Bill Clinton’s Old Potomac Two Step around and his corruption of the meaning of that two letter word notwithstanding. C. David Heymann was not a truthful man.
