Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost by Hope McIntyre Read Free Book Online

the rock ’n’ roll Chappa-quiddick and if he told the whole story in his autobiography, it would be dynamite.
    I was desperate to land the job of working on that autobiography because it might well turn out to be the plum job of my career. I’m a ghostwriter. I am the “as told to” or the “written with” you see in small type underneath the celebrity’s name. For
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    How to Marry a Ghost
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    the past ten years I’ve worked in my native London coaxing reminiscences—or in some cases mentally blocking my ears to a torrent of sentimental fabrication—from showbiz personalities, sports stars, a medium, a fashion entrepreneur, you name it. My beloved agent Genevieve kept the work coming on a regular basis and all I had to do was show up, listen—and then go away and write, of course.
    But recently I had encountered a problem in the form of a certain Bettina Pleshette.
    I had always been aware that Genevieve had other clients besides me but until she’d taken on Bettina about eighteen months earlier, I had never been remotely interested in them. Providing Genevieve found me work, I didn’t care a fig what her other clients were up to. But Bettina presented me with something I’d never encountered before: competition. I was used to the interviews Genevieve set up for me being merely a formality. Then, suddenly, whenever she put my name forward for a job, I’d find Bettina was also in the running.
    “They asked for her, they knew about her, what could I do?”
    was always Genevieve’s excuse. The problem was Bettina invariably got the job.
    I found I wasn’t comfortable being competitive. It comes naturally to some people but I had never even thought about it until Bettina entered the fray. I suppose I should have been grateful to her for single-handedly putting ghostwriters on the map. Until she came along we were backroom people both by nature and profession, content to suppress our egos and remain invisible.
    But that just wasn’t Bettina’s style. She’d hired a publicist and made herself a star as well as her subjects, so that whenever she ghosted a book, it immediately raised the stakes. This went against every single ghostwriting grain in my body and I hated her long before she ever came up against me for work.

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    Hope McIntyre
    Cards on the table: She’s twenty-eight, eleven years younger than me. She’s incredibly well-connected. She’s sexier, firmer, and her hair is thicker. She seems to go out with a different guy every night and while Genevieve has never let on, I’m convinced Bettina commands a much higher rate than I do.
    I faced up to the fact that I felt threatened. There was a new breed of ghost for hire and for the first time I felt just a little bit past it. To begin with I could rationalize Bettina’s success by telling myself that the jobs she landed were the fluff stuff, writing the memoirs— Memoirs? Ha! More like the teenage diaries —of MTV chart toppers or someone hailed as the next Paris Hilton.
    There was a role for her as ghost for the youth market. But then she snatched a job I coveted from right under my nose, that of ghosting the autobiography of a respected BBC newscaster with an addiction to painkillers.That certainly wasn’t a good fit for the youth chronicler niche and I felt the unfamiliar stirrings of ri-valry, so much so that the first thing that came out of my mouth when I went to Genevieve’s office for a meeting to discuss future work was:
    “What’s Bettina working on at the moment?”
    Genevieve is a treasure. She is always brisk and efficient but she is also mumsy. There’s no other word for it. She mothers me in a way my own mother never has. There I’ll be in her tiny Covent Garden office, 5' 8" tall with my long Madonna (not the singer!) face and my willowy frame inevitably encased in the most minimalist clothes I can find, fretting about what my next job will be. And there she’ll be, 5' 2", fussing around me in pastel-colored suits.