The TV biography: fill an hour with old photos - a criticism

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 24, 1997 by Raymond A. Schroth

"Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world," writes Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman, her analysis of several biographers' failure to capture the life, spirit and suicide of the tragic poet Sylvia Plath. A biographer is like a burglar, she says. He breaks into a house, rifles through drawers for jewelry and money and takes off with the loot.

The loot: all those things the dead person never wanted known.

Like that other low form of life, the journalist, says Malcolm, the biographer sees himself as successful when he can spill some dirt and ruin a reputation. We who read biographies are voyeurs who shadow the writer from keyhole to keyhole Why else would we put up with such miserable writing -- except for the reward of invading someone's privacy?

The creators of the Arts & Entertainment Network's successful series "Biography" have not yet taken on Sylvia Plath. Nor is there any sign they have been influenced by Malcolm's powerful treatise, which emphasizes the virtual impossibility of an artist's biographer grasping that secret inner reality that makes a person whoever he or she is

No one with that attitude could ever put on a TV show. Before I wrote a biography, I facetiously characterized the process as "You just get a lot of stuff about someone and put it in a book." After watching 25 episodes of "Biography," I suspect their guiding philosophy is: "Quick, get a lot of old photos and film clips about someone famous and shove them into an hour.

If not the depth, then at least the sheer breadth of the program's scope is staggering, with no apparent scale applied to weigh the subject's real importance or impact on world history. The more than 400 shows have included Heidi Fleiss, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Betty Boop, alleged Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Grable, Abbott and Costello, Edward VIII, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Roy Rogers (twice), Gen. George Marshall, Liberace, Timothy McVeigh and Jesus. In short, everyone is equally worthy of the "Biography" treatment. That is, everyone "famous," even if only notorious for last month's string of sex murders.

Indeed, to merit a "biography" it's not even necessary to have existed! Thus, "biographies" of Frankenstein (the monster, not the creator), Dracula, Betty Boop, Zorro, Sherlock Holmes (although Holmes has been recreated so many times, he has accumulated more reality than most real people), and comic book characters like the Phantom.

Among subjects who really did exist, the list is heavy on entertainers, often grouped thematically. Halloween week featured the lives of stars who played monsters: Boris Karloff; poor old, multi-married drug addict Bela Lugosi; and alcoholic Lon Chaney Jr., whose life, as we might have imagined, was not really like that of the little boy portrayed in his father's screen biography, "Man with A Thousand Faces." There have also been weeks devoted to famous comedians and famous gangsters and famous warriors like Saddam Hussein and H. Norman Schwartzkopf.

But are these programs any good? And compared to what? The quality varies. They don't seem to be produced by any one team but rather farmed out to a variety of production companies, so there's no Edward R. Murrow-like standard of excellence applied to them all. As with written biographies, quality depends, too, on the availability of material -- particularly film footage, the openness of archives and the cooperation of families who, for both noble and ignoble reasons, protect the secrets and hide the truth about the famous dead.

But considering that they have to come up with a more or less new documentary every night, "Biography" is one of the best hours on television. Unless we have already read books about these people, we almost always learn something. They often interview leading scholars. And a though I'm not sure an hour with Heidi Fleiss is a good investment of a child's time, the show could help educate our history-deprived younger generation who have never heard of George Marshall, Rosa Parks or even Al Jolson.

Let's look at some of the shows.

I grew up reading Roy Rogers comic books and watching Roy Rogers Republic Studios Trucolor movies at the State Theater in Trenton, N.J., in the 1940s, and I saw Roy and Trigger live at the Madison Square Garden Rodeo when I was in high school, and have seen several documentaries on Roy and Dale Evans in the last few years. Roy has marketed himself as well as any American entertainer, and press coverage has shied away from his right-wing, pro-death penalty and anti-gun control views -- perhaps on the grounds that no one so clean and lovable could be so stupid on any public issue. "Biography" focused on Roy as the hero of American boys like me, especially as he traveled from city to city to ride down Main Street and accept their applause.

Not a word about us handing us name to Marriott for the Roy Rogers restaurants, which bought the name and discarded the image as out of date. I defy anyone to find a Roy Rogers restaurant with a picture of Roy Rogers or -any indication for this generation of where the name came from. If the name deserves to live, it is because he was a great cowboy singer. Was? Is. He did an album in us 80s last year. But "Biography" doesn't let him sing! He could have been John Wayne with a sweet face.