Susan Johnston on Writing a Tell-All Novel About Republican Fundraising

Susan Johnston was a published playwright living in sin in Los Angeles, voting liberally, and writing scripts about her native West Virginia when she was hired by Nicole Sexton to write the book Party Favors. Her “fictional” inside look at the world of fundraising for the Republican Party (cue air quotes, eye-rolling and puh-leases.) This book is, in fact, a thinly veiled tell-all of extreme proportions. Let’s just say after reading it, I know who Senator Griswold really is. And after only using about a sixth of the 800 pages of transcribed interview material to write the book, the things Johnston (a yoga-practicing resident of Santa Monica with a bumper sticker announcing her “Redneck Liberal” status) knows about the apathetic, lazy and racist behavior of the rest of the country’s elected officials are sad, embarrassing, and yet somehow not surprising. More surprising is that Johnston’s debut novel as a ghostwriter was sold on a proposal, with her name right there on the cover.

The novel follows Temple Sachet, Sexton’s alter ego, all the way from girlhood to her rise to power as the director of finance for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to her present position raising money for a celebrity do-gooder. Sachet’s a tiny woman with incredible strength, bucket loads of sass, and layers of political savvy who sacrifices everything — her love life, sleeping in a bed, even all her earthly possessions — for a job she excels at, yet is increasingly unfulfilled, even horrified, by. Luckily, only those first couple things also apply to Johnston’s experience writing the book.

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Watch Susan Johnston offer her tips on being a great ghostwriter:

When did you start writing Party Favors?

I was hired to write Party Favors in July, 2006. I had been working for Marty Richards’ company, The Producers Circle, (who produced Cabaret, Chicago, Sweeney Todd, and La Cage Aux Folles) developing new material for musicals and TV. [Richards] would hand me books or people, and ask me to interview them or look at the material and create treatments. From there he would decide whether or not it was something he wanted to actually produce or commission a script for. I’d done that for about three projects while interviewing celebrities for Interview and writing for A&E’s Biography series, so I had one foot in journalism, one foot in theater, and one foot in TV.

That’s three feet!

Yes, I had three feet — I’m remarkable that way.

So is that how you connected with Nicole, through Marty Richards?

Yes, Marty had met Nicole’s mother and they went to the President’s dinner for George Bush. Marty is a liberal and he ended up on the dais table. He was so impressed being at the front of that room and seeing Nicole running the 7,000-person event, he thought, “Her life would make a good story.” So he asked me if I would talk to her. We had a few phone conversations and I said, “I think we need to meet in person.” I flew to New York and interviewed her for a week solid. The only rule was: Just tell me the truth and then we’ll start from there. Those recordings are now locked up somewhere very safe because they could get some people in trouble! After two hours of interviewing her, I knew we had a book.

Was Marty still involved at that point? When did you separate from him?

We just met and were doing exploratory interviews to figure out if there was a project there, and in that process Marty’s company shuttered [and] he retired. So we went ahead and continued to work on our own. He hadn’t optioned the story from her.

Who realized that there was a book there?

I’m not quite sure [of] the details. Either Nicole or Marty took the project to Darren Star Productions and said, “We think this is a television show.” This was before I even came on board. They took Nicole, brought her to the room and had her meet Darren Star and he said, “You need a book for this to work. You should do a book.” It makes sense that Darren Star would say that because he made Sex and the City, which was a book originally, so he felt that they needed source material. That’s why Marty brought me into the process. But to say that Marty ‘brought me into the process’ makes it seem like he was paying for me to be there, which he wasn’t. He just asked me to come meet with her because of other stuff I was doing for him.

When he suggested that you meet with her, was he suggesting that you write the book?

No, Nicole and I just clicked. When we spoke on the phone we just had a really good rapport with each other. Marty had spoken very highly of me and I think she felt she could trust me. We’re both Southern women [and] we had a very similar sensibility, so I think she just trusted that I was going to be the person for the material. Once we did a week of interviews, I mean, that’s like a week of intensive therapy. I tell people that I interview for the book process, “You’re going to tell me things you’ve never told your husband. You’re going to tell me things you’ve never told anyone.” And they do.

So after you stopped working with Marty, you formally started working for Nicole on a book proposal?

Yes, my contract was directly with Nicole. She hired me to take the interviews and turn them into a book proposal. Originally, the proposal was under the name ‘Anonymous with Susan Johnston.’ She didn’t want her name on the book at all because she wasn’t sure whether she was going to do it as a nonfiction book or a fiction book. Once she saw the fictionalized materials I created for the proposal, she was okay putting her name on it.

At what point in this process did you get an on-cover “with” writing credit instead of being an anonymous ghostwriter?

She just happens to be a very fair person, so the contract from the beginning said, “Nicole Sexton and Susan Johnston.” Once we sold the book to a publisher and they started dealing with publicity, they changed it to “Nicole Sexton with Susan Johnston” in order to make it clearer who needed to be the face of the book.

But it’s highly unusual — it’s not like I’m Hillary Clinton’s bio writer. This is essentially my debut novel and her debut novel. So it’s highly unusual for me to be credited on the cover, and it’s outrageously unusual to sell a fiction book off a book proposal.

How did you sell a fiction book off a book proposal without having a manuscript?

There were several issues at play: Nicole was highly placed within the Republican Party. Because she was so highly placed, people felt that she had a tell-all in her back pocket, so they were willing to listen to a pitch or look at the proposal even though the materials weren’t complete. It’s an election cycle, and this is a book about raising money for elections, so it was very timely. We knew we had to move really quickly. We met in 2006 and we sold the book in July 2007. Most of the publishers that we met with felt they didn’t have time to see an entire book — they needed to know whether they wanted it then.

You had six months to write the book after you sold the proposal. What was your writing schedule like?

The writing schedule was insane. Relentless. I was very lucky — during the selling process, one of the things that was on the table, at my request, was a project editor. Because it was such a fast process and I had never written a novel before, I didn’t feel confident about doing that by myself in a room. I wanted to make sure that I had a really strong editor working with me directly to shape the book. So I ended up with an editor named Vanessa Mickan; I would take the raw interview material, write a chapter, send that to Vanessa, Vanessa would send it back with notes, I would rewrite, and that went on for six months. At the first draft I was writing 12 pages a day, on the second draft I was covering 24 pages a day, and on the third draft I was covering somewhere between 36 and 40 pages a day.

So you wrote three drafts in six months?

Oh I wrote way more than three drafts of the book. I would guess that some sections of that book have been rewritten 12 times. Probably the prologue was rewritten at least eight or nine times.

What was that process like for you? Was Nicole involved with the writing?

I would show her large chunks. Vanessa and I would work on the first 100, 125, 130 pages. Then I would send it to Maura [Teitelbaum, Susan’s agent at Abrams Artist Agency] and Nicole, then Maura would send me notes, Nicole would send me notes, Vanessa would send me more notes. Nicole would also send that chunk to her lawyers, and the lawyers would give us notes because they had real concerns about the material that was being put down on the page. So there was lots of feedback. Constantly.

How did you push through all that writing?

Well, I gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand! The day I got the edits back on the first half of the book, I stayed in bed for two days and cried. I had never seen so much blue on a page in my life. It was very tough to push through that. And then the last week of the book I was on Xanax, so that helped! I made it all the way to the last week, and then said, “I surrender! Somebody give me something!”

Because so much of the book seems to be based on real life people from the world of political fundraising, how much liberty did you have to fictionalize the material?

Campaign finance reform makes people fall asleep at their desks. I was encouraged to fictionalize as much as possible. We changed everything we could change — details of a person’s appearance, how they dressed, their ethnicity, age, weight — to ensure that no one could point to a character and say, “That’s me.” None of us want to be sued; the more I changed the better off we were, legally.

I think truth is more interesting than fiction, so I tried to keep the details of events she described as accurate as possible. Also, she’s a political insider, so there are details I have no possible way of knowing. I had the vice president and the president at the same dinner. She read that and said, “You need to change this. The vice president and the president are never in the same room at the same time. Secret Service will never allow that to happen because God forbid something were to happen, the country would be leaderless.”

What does it mean to have a platform, and how did you and Nicole draw on that to get the book deal?

This is the hot word in publishing right now, “What’s your platform?” When a writer comes into the room, a publisher wants to see what resources they have to sell their own book. Platform is ‘How are you, the writer, going to sell your book to the country?’, not ‘How is the publisher going to sell your book?’ It’s, ‘If we publish this book for you, how are you personally going to sell the book for us?’ Nicole was the finance director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, so we knew that she had resources in D.C. in terms of her political connections. Part of our platform was [that] she could get jacket cover quotes from politicians, senators, and political pundits who are famous names. The publisher wants to hear that you have a publicist already on your team, that you will hire a media coach so that you’re prepped for your interviews on television, that you’re going to do radio interviews, your own book tour, and book parties. They want to see that you are going to be the marketing engine behind your book.

Basically, “Are you going to sink a lot of your own money into your book?”

Yes. They’re asking, ‘How much money are you willing to put behind your own book?’ And it applies to everything, not just memoirs. It’s absolutely the way that publishing is being done now. You have to be able to prove that you can get the press done for your own book and get your own media buzz created, because really, the publishers don’t do that anymore.

We’re very lucky because we’re a debut novel that was picked up by a publisher that’s never done fiction before, and they wanted to use us as their anchor book. We wanted to go with a smaller house because we knew we would get more attention than at the bigger houses. We ended up with a smaller publisher that was trying to break into a new market, and they’ve put a great deal of support behind us in ways that most people who have a debut novel don’t get. What we’re experiencing is definitely better than the industry standard.

What kind of advertising and promotion did the publisher provide? How much have you and Nicole done on your own?

The publisher has done a Web site for us, put ads in several newspapers and magazines, sent galleys out for book reviews, and brought us to the Book Expo of America. Nicole has hired her own publicist; she threw the New York book party, she’s throwing a D.C. book party, there’s going to be an L.A. book party which is being hosted by a donor friend of hers, and we’re tagging along to the One Campaign parties that are happening at the conventions. It’s almost like the icing on the cake is what you have to do, and the publisher bakes the cake. They get the book done, they get the jacket cover done, they do all the production elements of it, and all the basic sales and marketing within their own world of publishing and book sales — they got us on the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It’s that extra push of getting yourself on television, radio and in print media that you have to take on and do.

How has the amount of press that you’ve been able to get affected your career and the trajectory of the novel so far?

The thing that has happened from the press that we’ve gotten is TV and film interest in the book as a property. So just from the limited, I mean it’s only been on the shelves three weeks? Four weeks now? We had a bunch of meetings with production companies in Los Angeles who are interested in taking the book and adapting it to television and film.

With film companies and TV studios vying for the property, will you be able to stay attached as the writer? Will Nicole stay attached in some way?

We’ll have a better shot of staying attached if we move towards television. It’s essential for Nicole to stay attached because there are no other fundraisers in the business who are telling these stories. They just don’t do this. They take 15 percent off the top of everything they raise; if they’re raising $95 million, they’re walking away with 14 of it at least, so why would anybody ever leave the business? It’s really essential to have Nicole in the room with you as the writer. TV moves so quickly, [and] you want the authenticity of the world. So yes, I think Nicole will stay attached as a consulting producer. I absolutely want to stay attached because I feel so connected to these characters that we’ve created. There’s nobody that knows those characters better than I do — I lived with them non-stop for almost two years! Plus, I’ve been writing dramatic material for 10 years as a playwright and television writer. It’s funny, after working as a dramatist for 10 years, now I’m being referred to as a novelist.

Is it Nicole’s decision which production company you go with? How much input do you have?

We present ourselves as a team to these companies. Nicole wants to keep me attached because she feels I’ve been very protective of her and her story. She’s comfortable with me and the way I handle the material. Ultimately, Nicole owns the project because she’s the one who has the contract with the publisher. But whatever ends up moving forward, I’m lucky enough to get 50 percent of the royalties. The story is based so much on who she is that we have to be protective of the material so that we can guarantee the authenticity of what gets put on the screen. Sometimes, unfortunately, you take it to Hollywood and authenticity goes flying out the window at the expense of dramatic action or —

Sex, drugs and rock and roll?

Yes, exactly. For TV the material will get sexier and dirtier, and it has to. That’s okay.

How else will the material change from the form it takes in the book if it moves to the screen, big or small?

The first half of the book is entirely flashback. It’s the story of how she got into the job that she’s in. For film and TV you don’t have the luxury of being able to go back 15 years and explore. So the book gets us to go inside her head, which you can’t do for film and TV. It allows us to go back to when she was kid and talk about how she ran for Little Miss Valentine and how that was her first Get Out The Vote experience. Those things are part of her back story as a character in television, but they’re not relevant to what you’re going to see on the screen. Half of the book gets tossed out as soon as we walk into the room for a TV meeting. So the second half of the book is what we’re looking at — a moral woman in an immoral world.

Many characters in the book are thought to be inspired by real players on the political scene — who on Capitol Hill and beyond inspired you and Nicole as you developed your characters?

I can’t legally answer that question since I signed a confidentiality agreement, but I would say anybody, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, who does a minimal amount of research about Nicole’s career will be able to figure out where the events took place, when those events happened, and who might have been in the room.

So for Nicole to do what she’s doing is really an act of bravery. She wanted to expose what’s happening when the guy at TJ Maxx writes his $50 check once a month and sends it in. She would look at those SEC reports and she would start crying because she knew where that $50 was going. It was going to build condos for other fundraisers in Sedona, Arizona, it was going to pay polling companies, it was going to buy a chicken dinner for a donor who’s given more money. It’s not going for politics or to the candidate you believe in. So at a certain point she said, “I can’t do this anymore and, in fact, I actually have to shine a spotlight on it and say, “Something here needs to change.” So what we hope we’ve done is create this little beach read of a book that actually turns out to be kind of subversive. At the end hopefully you say, “Wow! I don’t think I should write anymore checks because now I know where that money’s going.”

Do you think the people who are upset about the book, are so because they think the reader will be able to discern people’s identities or because, and I guess it could be both, now they need to change how they do their jobs?

The fundraisers have said to her, “You’re making our job harder. And you’ve told our secrets.” During our pitch meetings in Hollywood — Fundraisers just see this [Hollywood] as a bank, they don’t care what your politics are, they’ll take a check from you whether you’re on the right side of the aisle or the left side of the aisle. So, we had a meeting with a producer who was very active within the political fund-raising community. And when we walked out of the room I turned to Nicole and said, “That person’s a bundler.” And she started laughing — that’s a fundraiser term. I had said that he is someone fundraisers look at and say, “That person can get 50 people to write a check.” They’re considered a ‘bundler.’ It was so easy to reduce that person’s power with one word. And that’s how fundraisers talk about their donors. Revealing that in a book is damaging because donors like to feel like they have a personal relationship with their senators. And that personal relationship happens through the fundraiser. And if they knew the fundraiser was just seeing them as a financial dollar amount they probably wouldn’t feel so good about handing that check over. They consider it a personal relationship and it’s not. They’re just a dollar amount. It’s not true with every fundraiser, but for the most part it’s a business. I probably should not have told you that.

What’s next for Susan Johnston?

The book that I’m working on now is an examination of San Francisco socialite society, Knob Hill. Hopefully the next step is to move into television for Party Favors. We’d get to show a part of D.C. which is all about the parties, and the drinking, and the who’s sleeping with who, and who’s cheating on whom, and these are the people that you’re paying to run the country and they are just as flawed and just as human as everybody else. To see the money you’re sending in to these parties believing that it will help, turned into tuxedos and sequined gowns and parties that you’re not invited to. I also have a play, How Cissy Grew, starring James Denton from Desperate Housewives, which will be at the El Portal Theatre in Los Angeles in October, and then possibly adapted into a movie.

Susan Johnston’s five tips for being a good ghostwriter:
1. Learn how to be a good interviewer and listener. If you can get people to talk, and keep talking, you can get some really great stories.

2. Figure out what your platform is before you even write the book proposal. You will not sell your book unless you can convince them that you yourself can sell the book.

3. You need to know how involved you want to be with your material. For me I really loved this world, I liked Nicole a lot, and I wanted to stay attached. So when I came to the contract process I really fought to stay attached. But some ghostwriters just want to write the thing and hand it over and not have their name on it.

4. Make sure Hollywood knows it exists. Don’t assume that they’re going to find you. Make sure that every press clip gets forwarded to everybody in the industry. You have to let them know. Yes, some of them are doing their jobs and snooping around trying to find material, but why not just hand it to them? It makes it easier on everybody. So it’s like learning to do publicity within your own market, within your own trade.

5. Once the book is out on the shelves, your job is not over. You have about three months for the book to be successful before the bookstores start sending it back. So you have to do everything in your power to get as much press as you possibly can in the first three months.

Andrea Wachner is a Los Angeles-based TV writer.