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  • Fresh Pages from Charles Bowden
  • Jennifer Powers-Murphy (bio)

In 1991, I started working for Tim Schaffner, a young literary agent who the previous year had relocated the agency his father founded in New York City in 1948 to Tucson, Arizona. One of Tim's authors at the time was Chuck Bowden. Tim could see a wider audience for Chuck's work than purely regional interest and had taken him on as a client, adding to a roster that included Maxine Hong Kingston, C. E. Poverman, Gary Paul Nabhan, and the James Beard Estate.

I met Chuck in May, when he stopped by the office to pick up finished copies of his book Desierto: Memories of the Future. Although he didn't know it, I was somewhat indebted to him for my new position. For some reason, Tim's previous assistant had been afraid of Chuck, which made her working relationship with him difficult, if not impossible. My friend Laura Greenberg had worked for Chuck and Dick Vonier at City Magazine, where she produced great work under their editorial guidance. Revered for quality writing, eclectic voices, and outstanding photography, City Magazine was a liberal-leaning publication that refused to pull punches, even if it meant going after one of their own. When they thought Tom Volgy, the Democratic mayor, wasn't devoting enough time to running Tucson, they ran a contest asking readers if they knew where the mayor was. I reasoned that if Laura could work with Chuck, I could too. I wanted to develop good working relationships with all of Tim's authors.

The first thing I noticed when I met Chuck was his height. He was 6 feet 4 inches and had to duck to enter the office. The second was his voice. A twelve-grit low growl. Finally, there were his eyes. They looked straight into mine. Yours. Everyone's. It was this trio of physical traits combined with an insatiable curiosity that made people not just willing to answer Chuck's questions, but to divulge their most intimate and confidential details. [End Page 86]

After the introductions, he complimented the Baja Arizona T-shirt I was wearing. I complimented him on his new book. Not long after, we were on the phone, and for reasons I don't recall, Ben Bradlee's name came up. Chuck acknowledged a job well done on Watergate, but was quick to bring up Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her story "Jimmy's World," about an eight-year-old heroin addict, that turned out to be fabricated. Chuck thought Bradlee should have recognized the story as fake straight away but overlooked it because she worked for the Post. I told him I suspected the story was fake when I started reading it, then became convinced by the time I got to the metaphor describing a needle going into the child's vein "like a straw pushed through the center of a freshly-baked cake." We recited the line in unison.

Blood Orchid was on deck to be published next, but the opportunity to co-author a book on Charles Keating intervened. Chuck had interviewed Keating for City Magazine, and had contacts with people at American Continental. A deal was struck with Random House and Chuck developed an obsession with Keating that would consume him for the next two years.

Although Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions exists as a bit of an anomaly in Chuck's body of work, it's the book he worked on for the majority of time I was professionally associated with him at Schaffner Agency. Chuck's creative process included a lot of verbalization, his first step in synthesizing the information he collected from research and interviews. The phone calls were epic, rarely less than an hour in duration. I listened carefully, noting questions to ask later rather than interrupt his train of thought, and answered honestly whenever he intoned, "You follow?"

Chuck and I got to know each other very well during those conversations. The subjects were wide ranging and we agreed on more than we disagreed. We discussed politics a lot. He...

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