What inspired you to write your memoir?
Good question. Two experiences led to it.
A publisher had read a screenplay of mine and wanted me to give them a book adaptation. I lacked time and interest but they offered to have it ghost-written and still pay a decent royalty. They wrote it badly, I edited it and they ignored my edit. I gave them the cover layout and elements and they messed that up. Then they pulled a bogus bankruptcy and left me with bad taste in my mouth.
A few weeks later I had an incredibly funny experience with a dog in a park, felt compelled to write about it, and sent it to a friend in Hollywood who worked as a BBC stringer. She passed it on to one of my favorite comics of the 1960s who is still active and both of them urged me to find a publication for which I ought to write a similar piece on a weekly basis. I explained that this would be impossible since this was not fiction and such experiences don’t happen on a weekly basis.
As I read over my little article I realized I had done something interesting, writing diary notes that segued into mini-memoir. Since e-books had begun their ascent to popularity, I decided me to write and self-publish my autobiography which grew to over a million words with much of my life still to cover. I then decided to ‘mine’ the overly-long bio by zeroing in on certain periods of my 88 years and break it down by subjects.
To date this tack has produced IT AIN’T FINE IF IT DON’T RHYME (60 years of lyrics and my experiences in the music industry) GHOST TOWN (fictionalization of a strange experience in a real ghost town in Utah) 100 NAKED GIRLS (book adaptation of another of my screenplays with a postscript nearly as long as the story in which I detail the events that led to my writing of the screenplay) THE FIRST 85 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST, Volume I (my early life up to my early 20s) THE ZSA ZSA AFFAIR (coverage of three of my years on Madison Avenue in which I moved from abject poverty to huge success and a production of a TV commercial with Zsa Zsa with whom I subsequently partnered to plan a cosmetics company and now the provocative title for a humorous look at sex life. We have three children so I can’t be labeled as an 88 year old virgin.
About your Book:
As indicated above, it is a memoir that focuses on sex-related experiences (or near-experiences) often looked at through a lens that focuses on the humorous. One of the stories supports my claim to fame for having told a lover a line that had her laughing so hard she fell out of bed. Even Jerry Seinfeld with all his writers has probably never achieved as much.
How did you decide how to publish your book and where is it published through:
I explained earlier how I decided to self-publish because e-books make it so easy. In the past I had found that trying to interest publishers and gaining an agent was a demeaning effort. Also, I met too many of them who struck as plain dumb. But after deciding to self-publish I developed ego problems and registered a publishing company, Veni Vici Books, making it a division of my Veni Vici Entertainment Inc., which covers, film, TV, music publishing and a record label, Tibor Music. Later I discovered a wonderful writer which gave me my first real publishing effort by publishing LUCCA’S STORIES, a collection of her pieces. Now, as a publisher without a staff, I have great plans including for audio books which will have me install an in-house recording studio because I was weaned in radio – did my first radio network drama with Leslie Nielsen and recorded my first radio commercial with Monty Hall – all back in the 1940s.
How do you see writing a Memoir as different from writing other genres of books?
The differences, of course, are obvious. The memoir requires a lot of digging in one’s memory, which, amazingly improves as you go along, while in fiction I let my imagination take off to let the characters I create develop the story to entertain and surprise me. I wrote a screenplay – The American Healys – in the 1990s which combined the two approaches. It was based on the true story of an Irishman who came to Georgia in the early 1800s, defied slavery laws and married a slave girl with whom he had nine children who, in turn, became enormously accomplished. The eldest became America’s first black bishop, the second, president of Georgetown University, the third lad became a legendary sea captain; one of the girls became a mother superior, a younger son, a priest, served at the Vatican and the youngest, a rebel in this ecclesiastic family, became a professional gambler. Here I had months of research, then fleshing out the characters, then creating two fictitious contemporary character to narrate the story and in a sense, I injected myself into the Healy family which found me writing as though I were writing biography. I didn’t work at it so much as I let it happen. When people reach my age and still have a mind left, the tendency is to have everything that we see or that happens to us remind us of something in the past. More than half the pieces or chapters, if you will, in this collection combine diary notes with mini-memoir. Over the few years that I have been into this, I found myself recalling things from early childhood that I had completely forgotten. And as my brain got into the habit of digging in the past a really strange thing occurred one day. I used to always have trouble recalling people’s names and, having moved a great number of times, I never bothered trying to recall old street addresses. One day, as I started to fill out a form with my address, I found myself typing an address in Queens, New York where we had lived from 1954 to 1960. If I had been offered a million dollars to recall that address a day or two before, I couldn’t have done it. Writing one’s own life may be medically beneficial. I have found myself reliving experiences of decades ago and sometimes getting a new perspective on events of the past that I had failed to gain in those earlier years. It also helps to get to know oneself better. I would recommend to all retired men and women to write their life stories. It would be of help to future members of their family doing genealogical searches and it might even stave off dementia or Alzheimer’s. The brain is like the rest of the body. The more we use it the stronger its muscles.
Author Bio:
Born in Romania in a twenty room mansion built by my grandmother, who had been widowed and left destitute with two little girls under the age of three, who trained herself as a designer and became the top couturiere in our little cultural center of Eastern Austria, sometimes called “Little Vienna.” Mother was Austrian, dad Hungarian. I grew up with Romanian, German, French and Hungarian.
Came to Canada at age 12 and was doing radio work and theater in English without an accent in less than five years. Had a whirlwind career in radio before the advent of TV; worked as a TV pioneer, acting, writing, directing producing. Was lured into advertising and moved to New York and Madison Avenue where I found myself overpaid and underworked which led to filling time writing songs and recording. Ended up with 30 releases on most major labels with artists such as Paul Simon, Carl Perkins, Fred Neil, Lillian Briggs, Eddie Fontaine, etc. On Madison Avenue I peaked as VP Creative on America’s biggest TV spot account, won five awards for creative excellence but tired of it all eventually and decided to take early retirement in Baja, Mexico to fish, grow my own foods and write books. On the way down I stopped off in Hollywood to see if I could open any doors and pitched four TV programs to King World Productions which picked up three of them – which ended the retirement plans. Settled in Sherman Oaks at Horace Heidt’s Magnolia Estates surrounded by the greatest collection of retired showbiz folks including Helen Forrest (who used to sing with Harry James and Benny Goodman, Roberta Sherwood on my left, Sid Kuller on my right – he had been chief writer on one of the top comedy shows, had written for Bob Hope, the Ritz Brothers, bla bla bla; then Pat Buttram moved in with that crazy country voice he used on Green Acres. He inspired me to establish a new musical genre – Country Rap – but I couldn’t get him into a studio – he said he was retired and wouldn’t work any more. He died that same year. I had sold TV scripts in the early days of TV and later had others optioned by HBO and ABC-TV. At this point I was introduced to Howard Minsky who had produced Love Story which saved Paramount from bankruptcy. He hired me to write a screenplay about polo and later we partnered on The American Healys. My mother in Toronto broke a hip which found me moving up to look after her. Here I applied to CRTC, Canada’s FCC for a licence for a cable channel I called The Global Village Theatre Channel. They awarded the license but my plans for original programming were too ambitious to be supported by Canada’s limited market so I incorporated in the U.S. with plans to concurrently launch the channel in both countries (I’m a dual citizen of both) U.S. cable operators weren’t interested in the channel and I let the license expire to concentrate on indie films and TV programs, adding the music and book divisions later.
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