Writing the personality profile

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April, 1989 by Peter P. Jacobi

Where does one start?

Where does one go?

Where does one finish?

The persistent problem questions of the biographer.

Russell Baker, in his beautiful autobiography, Growing Up, begins near the end--near the end of the life of one of the main characters in his story, his mother. It is a beginning that suggests the direction of his story because it is looking back. Here are his Pulitzer Prize winning words:

At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

"Where's Russell?" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

"I'm Russell," I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

"Russell's only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife with chickens in the backyard and a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

Mood and details become vital aspects of the successful profile. Newsweek offers this atmospheric mood setter:

The sunlight is fierce. A lone, lean figure stands concentrating on his task. A hush descends, all eyes upon the craggy profile and 6-foot-4 frame, the land stretched beyond him, the weapon in his hands. He makes his move, his arms draw back...whaack...the golf ball flies off into the distance and descends on the fairway beside a startled bird.

His eyes squint, famously. A slit of a smile. "That's as close to a birdie as I'll get all day," he says in his breathy, toneless voice.

The Man With No Name needs no introduction. He's as unmistakable on the Cypress Point golf course in Carmel, Calif., the arts-and-craftsy seacoast town that has been his home for 25 years, as he is on the streets of Dirty Harry's San Francisco or the dusty trails of the Wild West. When Clint Eastwood ambles into a Carmel sushi bar some people just can't help but quake--not vicious punks fearing retribution but waitresses trembling at his proximity. "I hope he didn't notice me shaking when I served him," a waitress at a local bar worries. "I've never been that close to him before."

The folks in Carmel have been seeing quite a bit of their most famous citizen lately.

To discuss a quality profile is to discuss writing that has several functions. A good profile is story or narrative. It is impression or description. It is explanation or exposition. It is opinion or argument. The biographical piece offers anecdotal material that has a scenic home, a sense of place. The material gives meaning to a person's life and work. It offers a point of view. How much of each depends on the purpose of the biography, the approach, and the depth. But the best biography combines, blends. A verbal portrait results.