Richard Gehman

Richard Boyd Gehman, born 20 May 1921 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and died 12 May 1972, was a prolific American author of more than 3,000 magazine articles (including over 400 features), five novels and fifteen nonfiction books.^[1] Gehman also wrote under many different pen names, including Meghan Richards, Frederick Christian, Martin Scott, Michael Robinson and F.C. Uffelman.^[2]

Biography

Gehman attended McCaskey High School in Lancaster and worked on several daily newspapers in Lancaster before joining the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II, serving four years as a writer for The Oak Ridge Times in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After the war he moved to New York City and began freelancing for Esquire, Life, Time, Cosmopolitan, Colliers, Argosy, True, Saga and Good Housekeeping magazines. Gehman was an original Contributing Editor at Playboy.

Maurice Zolotow once claimed that Gehman wrote an entire issue of Cosmopolitan using more than a dozen different pen names; the truth is that Gehman wrote two or three of the principle articles for one issue, each under a different name, plus a record review under the name “Megan Richards,” and possibly one other regular column. In those days Cosmopolitan used a graphic, diagonal cover banner to highlight special features. Cosmopolitan's editors had a mock-up cover made whose banner bore the legend: "The All Richard Gehman Issue."

Mark Evanier describes Gehman as "a prominent author of his day, specializing in celebrity profiles. He often got access to follow stars around for a few weeks so he could interview them extensively and report on what he observed...." ^[3]

Gehman married five times; his second wife, Susan Wiman, matriculated at Radcliffe at age 16; his third wife was Academy Award Winning actress Estelle Parsons from 1953 to 1958, and his fourth wife, Betsy Holland Gehman, also a writer, is best known as the author of Twins: Twice the Trouble, Twice the Fun. Gehman fathered many children, including Maxwell Perkins Prize-winning novelist Christian Gehman, English teacher Rob Gehman, actress Martha Gehman, journalist Abbie Britton, magazine writer and poet Pleasant Gehman, computer guru Chuck Gehman, fiction writer Meghan Gehman and poet Eddie Gehman Kohan, a co-creator of Will & Grace who blogs about the presidential food scene at ObamaFoodorama.

Credited with creating the phrase the "Rat Pack," Gehman was considered a "shadow" member of the group. Gehman appeared as himself in the Jerry Lewis movie The Patsy.

Among Gehman's fifteen nonfiction books are:

• The Day of the Locust (introduction to Modern Library Edition) (1950)
• Sardi's: The Story of a Famous Restaurant (1953)
• A Murder in Paradise (1954)
• Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (with Eddie Condon) (1957)
• How to Write and Sell Magazine Articles (1959)
• Let My Heart be Broken: With the Things that Break the Heart of God (1960)
• The Best From Cosmopolitan (editor) (1961)
• Sinatra and his Rat Pack (1961)
• The Tall American: The Story of Gary Cooper (1963)
• That Kid: The Story of Jerry Lewis (1964)
• Bogart: An Intimate Biography (1965)
• A Hell of a Life with Harry Richman (1966)
• The Haphazard Gourmet (1966)
• The Sausage Book (1969)
• In The Soup, In A Stew (unpublished)
• Playboy's Playboy: An Intimate Biography of Hugh Hefner (unpublished)

Novels:

• A Party at the Buchanan Club (1950)
• Each Life to Live (1952)
• The Slander of Witches (1955)
• Driven (1960)
• The Had (1966)

Musical Comedy:

• By Hex (1956) (with Howard Blankman and John Rengier)

Gehman taught writing at:

• The Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa
• New York University
• Columbia University
• Indiana University
• Pennsylvania State University
• Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College.

In the early 1960s Gehman was hired by TV Guide magazine, for which he wrote many articles focused on celebrities. Gehman believed that creative people were often emotionally insecure because of an unhappy childhood, and that those who became celebrities in the entertainment industry sometimes did so because their insecurity motivated them to succeed.^[4]

References