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Michener And Me: A Memoir
They were friends for over fifty years--James Michener, best-selling author, and Herman Silverman, enterprising businessman. They had many things in common: Each had grown up without knowing his father, and they were both practical men who made their own way in the world. Michener wasn't easy to know, and the two often disagreed, but they shared a sense of humor and a love of good conversation. As Michener moved into a glittering circle of celebrities, he brought along his friend, while Silverman provided a stable home base in Pennsylvania for the nomadic Michener. This is an intimate memoir of one of America's most celebrated writers, and a testament to a friendship that flourished for more than half a century.
- GenresBiography
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 8, 2020
A very insightful, and touching account of Silverman's deep friendship with James Michener. The book provides intimate details on Michener's personal life, values, and the experiences he and Silverman shared during their friendship of more than 50 years. I especially enjoyed the details about Doylestown, and the development of The James A. Michener Museum.
December 6, 2021
I recommend this book for people who want to learn how the American upper-middle class lived in the mid-to-late twentieth-century. Herman Silverman met James A. Michener at the outset of his (Michener's) career, in the late 1940s. They remained remained close friends and business associates until Michener's death in 1997. Michener was ninety. Before he died, he gave something like a hundred-fifty million dollars to various cultural institutions. One must not forget that a bestselling author at that time could live like royalty.
Michener, like his friend, lived quite comfortably in adult life, but it is clear that he never rested. Silverman was a the founder of a hugely successful swimming pool company and knew how to invest. Michener trusted Silverman to help him invest, purchase the many homes he successively bought, lived in and sold during his world travels, and the two even shared a failed business venture early in their friendship. They were, if you will, solid citizens who understood money.
Silverman's account strikes me as the work of an ethical man. He is not literary. By the same token, Michener never made a pretense of profundity. Had this been a book about almost any other hugely popular writer of that time, say, Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy, a book like this would ill-serve that writer. But there's nothing to get about Michener. So an account by a friend who was his financial advisor is almost the ONLY sort of book which would suit this subject. If you vacationed, circa 1974, to Florida or Maine, and you spotted to fellows and their wives, all in late middle-age, lining up for a tour bus, you have the exact picture of this friendship. Michener and Silverman were essentially Rotarians.
Michener ran for congress in 1962, well into his career as an established writer. (His book, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, was the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, and that premiered in 1949.) He lost, but he was made use of by the Kennedy Administration, which appointed him to head up a program for the distribution of food worldwide. The program failed, apparently due to bureaucratic hurdles, but Michener's reputation as the face of any given good cause was set. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford.
This book, though in many ways merely skin deep, is truthful about Michener's weaknesses, among them terrible stinginess of the sort a lot of self-made millionaires display and a tendency to be oblivious of social obligations. He and his first wife divorced. She had custody of their foster child. She decided to give it up. Michener would not take the child, who was returned to the home. After Michener's second marriage, he decided to take another foster child, but returned that child as well. Silverman does not make excuses for him, but he does not dwell on this, either.
Silverman's bond with Michener was partly due to their shared experience of growing up fatherless, but Silverman points out that Michener's childhood was Dickensian. Michener grew up in extreme poverty, moving, with his mother, to something like eight different houses in his childhood, all in or near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He never knew who his father was. His mother worked in a foster home and sometimes they lived there together. Someone once asked him if he had been a foster child taken in by someone he thought was his mother. (How someone asks that is another question.) He was firm that she was his mother. One day, in the last decade of his life, Michener asked Silverman to drive him around to the still-existing houses he'd grown up in and had Silverman take his piucture on the stoop. Silverman brought several jackets so Michener could appear in a different jacket in each one. The houses he kept moving into as a child were ones a real estate agent his mother knew would let them live in while the houses were between permanent occupants. This peripatetic existence seems to have informed his urge to travel the world. You have to have a certain temperament to uproot yourself year after year in your adult life. Of course, it paid off financially. He would live in a place, write about it, move, and write about the next place. By the way, he won the Pultizer Prize for TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC just before the rights were sold to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was his first book.
Oscar Hammerstein, like Michener and Silverman, lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Silverman and his wife would let Michener live on and off at their house. They were socialites, entertaining Broadway folk. They knew publishers and newspaper reporters. Sheer location clearly played its role in Michener's rise.
Anyway, Michener's letters to the Silvermans from abroad show he was a pretty shrewed political observer, and he was funny in his letters in a way he wasn't in his books.
I recommend this, as I've said. If I've gotten some details wrong (and I may have) you can easily obtain the book and read it in an hour and a half. And you won't have to wade through HAWAII.
Michener, like his friend, lived quite comfortably in adult life, but it is clear that he never rested. Silverman was a the founder of a hugely successful swimming pool company and knew how to invest. Michener trusted Silverman to help him invest, purchase the many homes he successively bought, lived in and sold during his world travels, and the two even shared a failed business venture early in their friendship. They were, if you will, solid citizens who understood money.
Silverman's account strikes me as the work of an ethical man. He is not literary. By the same token, Michener never made a pretense of profundity. Had this been a book about almost any other hugely popular writer of that time, say, Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy, a book like this would ill-serve that writer. But there's nothing to get about Michener. So an account by a friend who was his financial advisor is almost the ONLY sort of book which would suit this subject. If you vacationed, circa 1974, to Florida or Maine, and you spotted to fellows and their wives, all in late middle-age, lining up for a tour bus, you have the exact picture of this friendship. Michener and Silverman were essentially Rotarians.
Michener ran for congress in 1962, well into his career as an established writer. (His book, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, was the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, and that premiered in 1949.) He lost, but he was made use of by the Kennedy Administration, which appointed him to head up a program for the distribution of food worldwide. The program failed, apparently due to bureaucratic hurdles, but Michener's reputation as the face of any given good cause was set. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford.
This book, though in many ways merely skin deep, is truthful about Michener's weaknesses, among them terrible stinginess of the sort a lot of self-made millionaires display and a tendency to be oblivious of social obligations. He and his first wife divorced. She had custody of their foster child. She decided to give it up. Michener would not take the child, who was returned to the home. After Michener's second marriage, he decided to take another foster child, but returned that child as well. Silverman does not make excuses for him, but he does not dwell on this, either.
Silverman's bond with Michener was partly due to their shared experience of growing up fatherless, but Silverman points out that Michener's childhood was Dickensian. Michener grew up in extreme poverty, moving, with his mother, to something like eight different houses in his childhood, all in or near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He never knew who his father was. His mother worked in a foster home and sometimes they lived there together. Someone once asked him if he had been a foster child taken in by someone he thought was his mother. (How someone asks that is another question.) He was firm that she was his mother. One day, in the last decade of his life, Michener asked Silverman to drive him around to the still-existing houses he'd grown up in and had Silverman take his piucture on the stoop. Silverman brought several jackets so Michener could appear in a different jacket in each one. The houses he kept moving into as a child were ones a real estate agent his mother knew would let them live in while the houses were between permanent occupants. This peripatetic existence seems to have informed his urge to travel the world. You have to have a certain temperament to uproot yourself year after year in your adult life. Of course, it paid off financially. He would live in a place, write about it, move, and write about the next place. By the way, he won the Pultizer Prize for TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC just before the rights were sold to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was his first book.
Oscar Hammerstein, like Michener and Silverman, lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Silverman and his wife would let Michener live on and off at their house. They were socialites, entertaining Broadway folk. They knew publishers and newspaper reporters. Sheer location clearly played its role in Michener's rise.
Anyway, Michener's letters to the Silvermans from abroad show he was a pretty shrewed political observer, and he was funny in his letters in a way he wasn't in his books.
I recommend this, as I've said. If I've gotten some details wrong (and I may have) you can easily obtain the book and read it in an hour and a half. And you won't have to wade through HAWAII.
April 7, 2012
I pulled this off the shelf to take a break from cleaning and putting things away. I just could not put it down, and finished it the same day I started it. I was especially fascinated by all of the celebrities that made their homes in Bucks County, PA. Silverman was Michener's friend for more than 50 years, and his stories about Michener do much to illuminate the life and person of this great writer.
April 13, 2012
Helped my understanding of Michener and Doylestown. Easy read about the remarkable lives and friendships between Herman Silverman and James Michener. Pleasant memoir recalls fond moment and doesn't dwell on the sometimes moody and nearly always quirky personality of Michener.
July 28, 2009
Wonderufl book! It made me feel like I really got to know Michener.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews