When Oprah Winfrey tore into James Frey, the author of the falsified memoir "A Million Little Pieces," and his publisher last month, it made for one of the most riveting hours of television in a long time. What is less clear is whether Ms. Winfrey's stand will have any lasting impact on the long tradition of peddling false stories as true.

The dust-up over Mr. Frey's fabrications was a personality-driven story, largely focused on one writer and his decision to put falsehoods in a book he sold as memoir. Ms. Winfrey made some admirable efforts to put the spotlight on the publishing industry — notably in the harsh words she directed at Nan Talese, Mr. Frey's publisher. But almost all of the attention in this scandal has focused on a single author.

There is a long history of memoir writers — and other nonfiction writers — embellishing the truth. Long before Mr. Frey, there were Clifford Irving, peddling a phony memoir of Howard Hughes; Lillian Hellman appropriating another woman's courageous story as a chapter in her own life; and Alastair Reid saying in 1984 that nonfiction in the New Yorker does not really have to be true. [reference retrieved and pasted below]

When these periodic scandals blow up, what is shocking is not that writers make things up, but that the supposed guardians of the writing culture — editors, publishers, and critics — are so quick to make excuses. Even Ms. Winfrey, the heroine of the latest scandal, began by calling the "Larry King Live" show to defend Mr. Frey's right to include falsehoods in his memoir, insisting that "the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me and I know that it resonates with millions of other people."

After she switched sides, Ms. Winfrey delivered a clear message to the publishing industry about its casual concern about truth: "That needs to change." It is far from clear, though, that it will. There are strong pressures, now more than ever, working against honesty and accuracy in books. Many writers are looking — as Mr. Frey admitted in his own case — to tell the best story, not necessarily the most accurate one. Book publishers are operating in a challenging market, and hyped-up stories may produce bigger sales.

Book reviewers, reporters, bloggers, readers — and Ms. Winfrey herself — need to remain vigilant. They should demand better practices from publishers. They should do what The Smoking Gun did — check out stories and facts that don't sound right. And they should hold specific authors, editors, and publishers responsible.

I. Oprah Winfrey Changes Her Mind

Mr. Frey's searing memoir has sold more than 3.5 million copies in significant part due to Ms. Winfrey's warm endorsement. The Smoking Gun, a muckraking Web site, set off a firestorm when it reported — in a bulletin entitled "A Million Little Lies" — that significant parts of the story were made up.

In her phone call to "Larry King Live" — which she later apologized for on her own show — Ms. Winfrey argued that what was important was the larger truth of Mr. Frey's book. And she insisted that she "rel[ied] on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work."

Ms. Winfrey, to her credit, changed her mind. She assembled an all-star journalistic hit-squad, including two columnists from The Times, to explain to Mr. Frey why it was important that memoirs be true. The most searing words, though, came from the host herself. "I really feel duped," she told Mr. Frey. "But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers."

In the face of Ms. Winfrey's wrath, Mr. Frey came off as pathetic — a troubled soul at best, or a trapped con artist at worst. It was Ms. Talese who was the real villain of the show because, unlike Mr. Frey, she tried to justify the unjustifiable.

Ms. Talese insisted that "a memoir is different from an autobiography," and suggested that an author has greater leeway to play with the facts in memoirs. As for her own responsibility in the process, Ms. Talese seemed to suggest that it went no further than asking "does it strike me as valid? Does it strike me as authentic?" But Ms. Winfrey made far more sense when she insisted that, simply put, stories have to be true if they are sold as memoirs. "You can make up stories and call them novels," she said. "People have done it for years."

On the show, Ms. Winfrey played a tape of her famous call to Larry King and expressed her deep regret over it. "I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter," she said. "And I am deeply sorry about that."

But Ms. Winfrey did not fully explain why she had made a 180-degree turn, to condemn a book she had continued to stand by, even after learning of the questions about its accuracy. One factor may well be that, as Frank Rich noted, the current book she has selected for her on-air book club is Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, "Night." The power and importance of that first-hand testament to the horrors of the Nazi era could be considerably diluted for her viewers if Ms. Winfrey leaves the impression that she is not attesting to, or even particularly concerned about, whether specific parts of the story are true.

II. The Larger Contest of Dissembling Writings

The biggest flaw of Ms. Winfrey's show was that it focused so tightly on a single book. Mr. Frey's dissembling is only the latest in a long line of literary scandals involving fiction being passed off as fact. The context is important because it makes clear that publishers should expect that writers will try to mislead them, and they should have procedures in place to guard against dishonest writing.

If there was ever a time of innocence in American publishing — and it is doubtful that there was — it ended in dramatic form in 1972, when Clifford Irving was caught trying to pass off a phony memoir of Howard Hughes (pdf), the reclusive billionaire. Mr. Irving could not claim artistic license, or confusion about the line between truth and fiction. He was, as a Time magazine cover story branded him, "The Con Man of 1972," and he was eventually sentenced to prison time (pdf).

Mr. Irving perpetrated a sophisticated swindle on McGraw Hill, the publisher that paid $750,000 in advances, and Life magazine, which purchased the serial rights. Still, it is hard to know why the publisher and the magazine let things get so far. Shortly after Mr. Irving's book deal was announced, a spokesman for Mr. Hughes labeled it a "hoax." And an investigative reporter, who was working on his own Hughes book, was able to poke holes in the manuscript (pdf).

This sort of dishonesty is hardly limited to professional con men. Lillian Hellman, the noted playwright and memoirist, appears to have perpetrated an equally audacious fraud in her 1973 memoir "Pentimento." In a chapter called "Julia," Ms. Hellman tells of her daring journey to smuggle money to her childhood friend Julia, who was resisting the Nazis in Vienna — a story that was turned into a movie starring Jane Fonda. A decade later, Yale published the memoir of a psychoanalyst named Muriel Gardiner, "Code Name: 'Mary,'" in which Ms. Gardner told of her own experiences in the anti-fascist resistance in Vienna. Ms. Gardner strongly suggests, and many people now believe, that Ms. Hellman stole her life and turned it into the "Julia" story. [reference retrieved and pasted below]

The problem of fiction being passed off as fact goes far beyond the memoir category. Some of the new conventions of narrative nonfiction are controversial because, critics say, they introduce elements of fiction. Nonfiction political page-turners in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein's "The Final Days," and business profiles now use quotations in scenes that were not recorded at the time, raising the question of whether the dialogue is being reconstructed — or fabricated. "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," John Berendt's mega-bestseller, has been criticized for rearranging the story's chronology and making up dialogue.

When I was a reporter, an editor asked me to check out some of the anecdotes in "The Death of Common Sense," a bestselling attack on the American legal system. I selected a handful to check, and I was shocked by how poorly they held up. The book complained about how ridiculous it was that Minnetonka, Minn., was forced to "alter the municipal hockey rink to make the scorer's box wheelchair accessible" to comply with the American Disabilities Act. But when I checked with the city's A.D.A. compliance officer, she told me that Minnetonka had done no such thing. Other stories also failed to check out. When I contacted the author, Philip K. Howard, he put much of the blame on a researcher who helped him with the book.

III. The Response of the Gatekeepers

It is striking, and unfortunate, how many respected publishers, editors, and writers believe that it is okay for fiction of various kinds to be marketed to the public as fact. The New Yorker, which has a reputation for carefulness, was roiled by a fact-fiction controversy in 1984. In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, a long-time staff writer was quoted insisting that it was okay to change facts in non-fiction articles as long as they were faithful to a "larger reality."

It was bad enough that Alastair Reid, the writer, expressed these beliefs — which he justified by saying that in some cases, being faithful to what people actually said "would be terribly boring for readers." But what was worse is that other writers at the magazine stood by Mr. Reid. "If you're having a conversation with somebody on an airplane and you want to make it a train because it's better for the piece, I don't see that it's all that dreadful," E.J. Kahn, a New Yorker writer, told The New York Times at the time. It took nearly two weeks for the magazine to formally disavow Mr. Reid's approach. [reference retrieved and pasted below]

Academics and critics, who should be particularly outraged by literary dishonesty, have a spotty record of sticking up for the truth. A new biography of Ms. Hellman, written by the chair of English Writing at Occidental College lets its subject off far too easily. "The controversy pits reader against reader, literary scholar against political historian, all anathema to Hellman's purpose," Deborah Martinson shrugs in "Lillian: A Life with Scoundrels and Foxes." "Literary scholars now dismiss the furor as a tempest in a teapot, covering the same old literary ground, fought endlessly over the place of self in art."

The publishing industry has been reluctant to confront the issue of false non-fiction head-on. After Ms. Winfrey's highly publicized criticism of "A Million Little Pieces," the book's publishers, Doubleday and Anchor books, announced that they were delaying shipping and printing new books until an author's note could be added, which advises that Mr. Frey "altered events all the way through the book" to make a better story.

But Ms. Hellman's memoirs are still being sold without any such warnings. If publishers of the new brand of narrative non-fiction assume that some of the quotations are reconstructed, or that the chronology may have been altered for dramatic purposes, they rarely bother to inform the reader of these liberties.

In her appearance on Ms. Winfrey's show, Ms. Talese demonstrated just how out of touch many publishers are on the issue. Ms. Talese seemed to believe that it would be impossible for publishers to fact check the wild stories that memoirists come to them with. "I do not know how you get inside another person's mind," she said. Once again, Ms. Winfrey got the best of the exchange. When Ms. Talese seemed to be accepting of the idea that "anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have" and have it published as a memoir, Ms. Winfrey said bluntly: "Well, that needs to change."

IV. Can Phony Memoirs Be Stopped?

The problem of "A Million Little Pieces" has been solved — no reader is ever likely to be confused about the fact that some of it is fiction. The larger question, though, is whether the system that allowed Mr. Frey to publish his falsified memoir will change.

For that to happen, many of the actors in these literary dramas will need to be part of the solution.

Publishers. As Ms. Winfrey suggests, publishing houses will have to do a better gatekeeping job than they are right now. For many publishers and editors, this will require a change in outlook. Some editors have Ms. Talese's trusting attitude toward the manuscripts that cross their desk, but others are even worse. It is a poorly kept secret that many literary agents and editors encourage memoir writers to elaborate on their stories for dramatic, and commercial, effect. Publishing houses need to make clear that they will insist that the non-fiction stories they publish are true, and that they will make efforts to determine that they are.

Those efforts are the second way publishing needs to change. First, publishers and editors need to approach book proposals and manuscripts with greater skepticism. They should demand back-up documentation for a book's key facts and claims, and have people on staff who can fact- check. It may not be possible to verify every single fact, but a good fact checker can hone in on the most questionable ones, and spot-check the others.

Book Critics. Book reviewers, academics, journalists, bloggers, and other guardians of the nation's literary life should — obvious though it seems — make clear that truth matters. They should make it clear to authors and publishers that they will be critical of false statements in non-fiction, and that they will hold everyone involved accountable.

These literary guardians should also be more skeptical readers of memoirs and non-fiction. The Smoking Gun showed, in impressive style, how false statements can be ferreted out and exposed.

Readers. Readers need to make clear that they expect memoirs and other works marketed as non-fiction to be true. They should shun books that have been revealed to take liberty with the facts, and should even consider trying to return them for refunds.

This may already be happening. Since the revelations by The Smoking Gun, sales of "A Million Little Pieces" are down by more than half. Publishing is, in the end, a business, and the best way to cut off the supply of phony memoirs and other fictional non-fiction is to cut off the demand.

Lela Moore contributed research for this article.

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS is about to publish the memoirs of an American woman who was active in the Austrian underground in World War II, memoirs that raise questions about Lillian Hellman's similar account of anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi activities.

The Hellman memoirs, ''Pentimento,'' published in 1973, portray a pseudonymous childhood friend of the author called Julia. This part of the book became the basis for ''Julia,'' the 1977 motion picture, starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. The character of Julia has long been a subject of literary controversy. In Miss Hellman's memoir, she describes Julia as a real person, with whom she was briefly involved in the anti-Fascist underground just before World War II. Critics have long suggested that Julia is a composite figure or even an invention.

The Yale book, ''Code Name 'Mary,' '' is by Muriel Gardiner, a psychoanalyst, who joined the anti-Fascist resistance during her student days in Vienna. Both the Yale publicity release and the book's dust jacket declare that many people believe Dr. Gardiner's life was the model for the Hellman story. One of those people is Joseph P. Lash, the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. On the jacket he writes: ''No self-styled thriller can match this book's story. There are no fantasies. Names are named. There are real Socialists and Communists as well as Nazis and Fascists. They are recognizable and verifiable.'' Need for an Explanation

Asked if he was thinking of ''Julia'' when he wrote the blurb, Mr. Lash replied, ''I don't want to get into a controversy with Lillian Hellman, but I was.'' He added: ''The thing that appalled me, 'Julia' ends up with Lillian Hellman bringing Julia's body back to this country. Well, if Julia is, in effect, Muriel Gardiner, then I think readers are entitled to some explanation.''

Miss Hellman said that she had never heard of Dr. Gardiner until this week. ''She may have been the model for somebody else's Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia,'' she said. In a commentary for a new edition of ''Pentimento,'' in 1979, Miss Hellman said she refused to reveal Julia's name for personal and legal reasons.

''I don't make any claims of being Julia because I couldn't possibly prove it,'' said Dr. Gardiner, who is 81 years old and lives in Pennington, N.J. But she added that the resemblances are ''remarkable.''

Miss Hellman portrayed Julia as a wealthy American who attended Oxford University and then went to a medical school in Vienna, became a patient-pupil of Freud and a Socialist, gave birth to a daughter and died in May 1938, apparently after having been tortured by the Nazis, who found her in an underground colleague's apartment. Somehow Julia got to London before she died, and Miss Hellman wrote that she flew to London and brought the body home but was unable to find Julia's mother. ''I had the body cremated,'' she wrote, ''and the ashes are still where they were that day so long ago.''

In Dr. Gardiner's book, to be published on May 18, she says she was a wealthy young graduate of Wellesley College who attended Oxford, went to Vienna, hoping to be analyzed by Freud, received a degree in medicine at the University of Vienna, married Joseph Buttinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists, and in 1934 became involved in anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi activities. Using the code name ''Mary,'' she smuggled passports and money and offered her home as a safe house for anti-Fascist dissidents. In the fall of 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, the couple and their daughter sailed for the United States.

Dr. Gardiner edited ''The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man,'' documents in the case history of a wealthy young Russian who went to Vienna in 1910 to be analyzed by Freud and who became the subject of Freud's ''History of an Infantile Neurosis.'' Dr. Gardiner met Freud only once, but she knew the ''Wolf-Man'' in Vienna, and ''Code Name 'Mary' '' carries a foreword by Freud's late daughter Anna.

In her 1979 commentary for ''Pentimento,'' Miss Hellman wrote that Julia's baby, as well as the man and woman with whom she was boarding, ''were among the first to be wiped out by the Germans when they entered Alsace.'' The Buttingers' daughter, Connie, lives with her husband and six children in Aspen, Colo.

''Think about it,'' said Gladys Topkis, Dr. Gardiner's editor at Yale University Press. ''How many American millionaire medical students were there in Vienna in the late 1930's who married the head of the resistance and were active in that resistance?''

Dr. Gardiner said that on Oct. 26, 1976, she wrote Miss Hellman in care of Miss Hellman's publisher, pointing out that many friends and acquaintances had noticed the similarity between Julia and her, and wondered if Julia might be a composite. She said she did not receive a reply, and Miss Hellman said if she received such a letter she doesn't remember it. Search for a 'Julia'

In the introduction to her book, Dr. Gardiner says that she never met Lillian Hellman, but that she had often heard about her from a friend with whose family she shared a house for more than 10 years and who had visited her once in Vienna. That friend, Wolf Schwabacher, once Dr. Gardiner's lawyer, is now dead. Dr. Gardiner adds that on a visit to Vienna she asked Dr. Herbert Steiner, director of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, what other American women he knew of who had been deeply involved in the Austrian underground.

''He knew of none,'' she writes. ''Some months later, Dr. Steiner wrote me that since our talks he had renewed contact with many former resistance workers to ask them about American women they had known or heard of who were deeply involved in the resistance. Their answer was always: 'Only Mary.' ''

Miss Hellman said she was not surprised that Julia remains a mystery figure. ''Who would keep archives of an underground movement?'' she asked. ''That's comedy stuff. A real underground movement would have been in hiding and would have had almost no records.''

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CULTURAL DESK

NEW YORKER EDITOR CALLS REPORTING STYLE WRONG

By EDWIN MCDOWELL (NYT) 1177 words
Published: July 3, 1984

In the wake of the recent disclosures that a writer for The New Yorker invented characters and composed conversations in nonfiction articles, Peter F. Fleischmann, the chairman of the weekly magazine, has sent a memorandum to the staff that quotes William Shawn, the editor, as unequivocally describing the practice as wrong.

While the one-page memorandum does not mention by name Alastair Reid, who acknowledged at least five instances in the last 23 years in which he modified facts in nonfiction articles, it says that ''one veteran writer'' violated the magazine's principles.

''He made a journalistic mistake,'' the memorandum said. ''He was wrong. The editors of The New Yorker do not condone what he did.''

The New Yorker magazine, under the editorship of Mr. Shawn for the last three decades, has been highly esteemed for its literary and journalistic excellence.

'No Action Planned'

When Mr. Reid's acknowledgements were published in a newspaper story two weeks ago, Mr. Shawn said that he believed Mr. Reid had been misunderstood, but the editor added that if he had in fact practiced such techniques, it would be ''a mistake.'' The June 23 issue of Editor & Publisher quotes Mr. Shawn, on the basis of a telephone interview with that publication, as having said, ''No action is planned against Mr. Reid because Mr. Reid did nothing wrong.''

Asked yesterday to explain the apparent contradiction, Mr. Shawn said through a spokesman that at the time he spoke with Editor & Publisher, he did not know that Mr. Reid had changed two facts in his stories from Spain.

He added, also through the spokesman, that Mr. Reid's status had not changed. ''He will continue to do what he has been doing for the magazine,'' Mr. Shawn said.

Several attempts to reach Mr. Reid yesterday by telephone at his home were unavailing.

The memorandum also appears to contradict Mr. Reid's earlier statement to The New York Times - after a discussion with Mr. Shawn - that ''He and I are on the same wavelength.''

Several New Yorker writers, interviewed by The New York Times, also defended Mr. Reid's use of composites.

But the memorandum to The New Yorker staff, dated June 29 but not widely distributed at the magazine until yesterday, unequivocally condemned such practices. It said:

''We do not permit composites.

''We do not rearrange events.

''We do not create conversations.''

Invented Characters Condemned

It also condemned the use of invented characters. ''The only exceptions are characters invented in the spirit of fun for The Talk of The Town (Mr. Stanley, Mr. Frimbo, the Long- Winded Lady, various 'friends'),'' the memorandum said, ''and when this is done it is well understood by our readers. Anything that purports to be a fact in The Talk of The Town is a fact.''

It was in ''The Talk of the Town,'' the section of brief items in the front of the magazine, that Mr. Reid described a ''flinty old friend'' who watched his grandniece graduate from Yale. In fact, Mr. Reid was describing his own attendance at his son's graduation from Yale. He defended the practice, saying that it involved ''questions of literature more than reportage.''

The memorandum, addressed to the staff by Mr. Fleischmann, consists of one line from the chairman, ''In response to our inquiries, William Shawn has sent us the following,'' and a 27-line response from the editor.

Asked what those inquiries were, and why Mr. Shawn did not send the memorandum in his own name, Joyce Richter, media manager of the magazine, said, ''A number of inquiries came to the ad department, and Mr. Fleischmann asked Mr. Shawn what would be a correct response to this. After thinking about it, he came up with this answer to any queries we might get from readers or from people who read the press accounts.''

Mrs. Richter said that the memorandum went out over Mr. Fleischmann's name because it was distributed ''to the business side of the magazine,'' to the advertising, circulation and promotion departments, although she acknowledged that the editorial staff was likely to see it also.

The revelations about Mr. Reid's journalistic techniques, which first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, have prompted wide discussion in newspapers and magazines about the blurring of journalistic distinctions between fact and fiction.

Most publications have condemned the practice. A New York Times editorial titled ''The Fiction of Truth'' said, ''Wrong truths are always correctable, with facts. Fictional facts are forever counterfeit.'' Time magazine concluded its article on the subject, ''Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward unbelievability.'' James A. Michener, writing in The Los Angeles Times, described Mr. Reid as ''one of The New Yorker's most distinguished writers of nonfiction,'' but said, ''It is not healthy for a magazine to permit such deception, and if I were an editor I would try to prevent it.''

Renata Adler, a New Yorker writer, said yesterday that the magazine's policy toward facts and accuracy was clear from the moment a writer joined The New Yorker.

''Part of the reason the reaction has been so strong,'' she said, ''is that The New Yorker set a kind of standard for factual accuracy. That standard is - and always has been - Mr. Shawn's.''

William F. Buckley Jr., the columnist and novelist who is also a contributor to The New Yorker, was not personally offended by the disclosures ''because I never had the sensation I'd been taken'' and because the rearrangements appeared to be ''mainly atmospheric.''

''Having said that,'' he added, ''I think that Mr. Shawn is correct in that if that kind of thing is going on, somewhere along the line a reader should be tipped off. Still, to say that The New Yorker never creates conversations can only be three-quarters true, because no one is as articulate as the people quoted in The Talk of the Town. I have no objection to it, but the impression is left that these are extemporaneous discussions, and they can't be, entirely, because people don't really speak as though they were reading 'Fowler's.' '' ''Fowler's'' is shorthand for ''A Dictionary of Modern English Usage'' by H. W. Fowler, the classic work on English usage.

In his memorandum, Mr. Shawn acknowledged that Mr. Reid altered facts in two articles. ''Our writer was the only person in the world who knew that,'' he said. ''While he says he did not intend to deceive anyone, he violated New Yorker principles. He made a journalistic mistake. He was wrong. The editors of The New Yorker do not condone what he did.

''We have eight people in our Checking Department who spend their days and, if need be, their nights rigorously verifying every checkable fact before it goes into the magazine. Every writer is held to the same severe standards of factuality. Errors still occur, but they are inadvertent and rare.

''The New Yorker has devoted itself for fifty-nine years not only to facts and literal accuracy but to truth. And truth begins, journalistically, with the facts.''

photo of William Shawn

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