The man ghostwriting Prince Harry’s autobiography has a complicated family life of his own

Boo!

Halloween may be behind us, but the ghostwriters still roam among us.

One, in particular — J.R. Moehringer — is already getting his share of attention for the famous dude he is channelling in print. A certain ginger royal. Last seen in Montecito. Perhaps you may have heard of him.

When Penguin Random House teased the cover for Prince Harry’s upcoming autobiography the other day, it was not lost on some bibliophiles that the very stark image on its front is rather reminiscent of the Andre Agassi memoir that Moehringer also most famously ghost-prosed: both boast stark close-ups of their subjects (almost National Geographic-y in style); both have punchy one-word titles (Harry’s “Spare” to Agassi’s “Open”).

“I am writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become,” Harry said when his book deal was first announced last year ($40 million for a three-book deal).

Moehringer was not expressly mentioned then, nor has he been since, although his involvement is an open secret in publishing circles. A fairy god-author. A wordy wraith. Not that there is anything especially unusual about that. As Publishers Weekly pointed out in a piece about ghostwriters recently, “For as long as celebrities have been writing books, others have quietly helped them do it. It’s highly specialized work that requires a blend of skills … the best collaborators are equal parts editor, reporter, writer, mimic, and shrink.”

I mean, even Michelle Obama had help with her 2018 bestseller “Becoming” (though her aide, Sara Corbett, calls herself a “book consultant”). Royal watcher and author Elizabeth Holmes put it into context recently when she shared on Instagram: “It’s not unlike working with a stylist to get dressed for an event (for celebrities). These are things you could do yourself but most likely benefit — considerably, in some cases — from professional help.”

Me, I have been most intrigued by the selection of Moehringer — a one-time L.A. Times journalist — in what it means for the tea leaves of the Harry-Charles relationship, now that the latter has ascended to King. The Agassi book, after all — one of the best celebrity memoirs of all time, in my opinion — was heavy on father-son dynamics, almost Greek mythological in its spectre of a dad who demanded too much. No wonder Buckingham Palace is said to be on tenterhooks until the Harry book comes out on Jan. 10.

Then there is Moehringer’s own complicated family life — loss of a parent, multi-generational trauma, addiction, etc. — which he deftly captured in his own bestselling memoir, “The Tender Bar.” The one that was made into a movie last year by George Clooney (and, indeed, the scuttlebutt is that it is George who recommended the writer to Harry. He and Amal are friendly with the Sussexes and even attended the Harry-Meghan wedding … remember?).

“Choosing a book is like choosing a mate,” is what the ghostwriter himself once stated. “We want to think there is a choice, but something else is at work and if not fate, it’s something for which we don’t have a word.”

It got me reflecting on other notables and their books. To ghostwrite — or not to ghostwrite? Ozzy Osbourne, for one, definitely did. Talking about his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” — a rocker classic — he once explained the process this way in an interview: “Believe me, I didn’t sit down and put pen to f—ing paper. I’d still be writing the first page. I got a ghostwriter, Chris Ayres, and he was relatively easy to work with. I have a thousand and one stories, so it went pretty quickly. We actually had enough for two books.”

Keith Richards was also more than up front about his ghostwriter, James Fox, when it came to his monumental 2010 memoir, “Life.”

The latter — who is very in demand and has gone on to collaborate on books with a variety of British luminaries — once elaborated: “I’m very attuned to the way people talk, which I think goes back to my childhood. I had a very bad stammer when I was 12 or 13; my time was spent observing people talking because I couldn’t. I loved how everyone had their idiosyncrasies. I still love that now … Keith has great cadences that just fit into prose. I read Keith’s book back to him out loud before we finished it, and he was listening to the sounds of the sentences, not the facts, taking a musical view. The sounds are what writing is really about.”

The non-ghostwriter club is a smaller one, but it does exist. One of the most consequential celebrity autobiographies is still “Me: Stories of My Life” by the iconic Katharine Hepburn, which she famously wrote alone. I reread it a couple of years ago and what struck me is how much it sounds like her: matter-of-fact, unflinching. Another legend, Jane Fonda, has also denied using a ghostwriter for her 2006 memoir, “My Life So Far,” claiming she sometimes wrote “barefoot, with a down parka over my pajamas, hair akimbo, shivering with cold, teeth chattering, tears running down my face.”

Likewise, Rob Lowe, who says he “wrote every comma, for better for worse” of his memoir “Stories I Only Tell My Friends” (mostly for better, I reckon — it is easily one of the best celebrity memoirs in recent times).

“Funny, self-deprecating and addictive,” is how the New York Observer summed it up in 2011, adding that it might contain the best account of the high priest of pop art on record (a fascinating sequence of a dinner with Andy Warhol). Add to that: knife-sharp descriptions like that of Francis Ford Coppola (“Sometimes Francis sounds a little like Kermit the Frog but with a deeper register”) and also Tom Cruise (“He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before”).

Talking head Kelly Ripa is another one who ventured it alone. Just out with her own book this fall, “Live Wire” — a glib autobiography in the form of personal essays — she recently explained: “I keep saying it’s like giving birth, only it takes two years and there’s no epidural … like it’s slow contractions happening every five minutes and nobody’s offering me pain meds. And it’s much harder than I thought it was going to be. I wrote the book myself, which in hindsight, I never understood why people used ghostwriters or cowriters, and now I’m like, ‘Oh, I totally get it’ because they suffer and you don’t suffer. But I had to do it the suffering way.”

Fortunately, Harry, for one, has someone to suffer with. Hashtag blessed. The “Spare” has a spare.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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