After working as a disc jockey and radio announcer in Texas, Bain moved to New York …and struggled to make a living. He used that experience for some side work, though: he was the voice of the American Cancer Society’s public service announcements — even though he smoked. But things turned around when a cousin, a freelance writer, couldn’t do a writing project himself, and suggested Bain as a ghostwriter; it was a history of stock car racing, and released as written by a NASCAR executive. The editor of that book liked his writing, and gave him another assignment: two stewardesses (as they were called at the time) from Eastern Airlines wanted to write a book, but once he met them, Bain “realized they didn’t have enough to sustain a book, and I was going to have to use an awful lot of my own imagination,” he said later. He completely made up their story — and even their names. The resulting 1967 “memoir,” Coffee, Tea or Me? (1967) became a best-seller, and the “authors” went on tour to promote it, and “one of them legally changed her real name to the one I had given her on the book.” Amusingly, he dedicated the book to himself — as if it had been written by the authors: “To Don Bain, writer and friend, who’s flown enough to know how funny it really can be.” The book — and its three sequels — sold five million copies, and “became my annuity for almost 17 years,” he said on his web site.
GhostwriterDonald Bain
(Reading Time: 3 minutes)
From This is True for 29 October 2017