Fiction with a Dose of Reality
CNN’S JAKE TAPPER TALKS ABOUT HIS LATEST NOVEL AND REAL-LIFE PARALLELS
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
July 24
Elliott O'Donovan
CNN ANCHOR and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper is the best-selling author of six books, most recently All the Demons Are Here, which will be released in paperback on July 2. His debut novel, The Hellfire Club, and its sequel, The Devil May Dance, were New York Times bestsellers. And among his nonfiction books is the 2012 bestseller The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, the story of the Battle of Kamdesh, when over 300 Taliban fighters attacked 54 U.S. troops. It was adapted into a film in 2019. Tapper will be in conversation with me by Zoom at noon on Tuesday, July 9, for the Berkshire OLLI Distinguished Speaker Series. He took time out to chat from his office in Washington, D.C.
Are you familiar with the Berkshires? Yes, of course. My stepsister Becky and her family live there, in North Adams. Also, my good friend, Liz Banks, is from the Berkshires.
Yes, Elizabeth Banks is from Pittsfield. It’s great to know you have visited the Berkshires and are familiar with this area, and I’m looking forward to our talk for Berkshire OLLI’s speaker series. What got you into novel writing? Fiction has always been my first love; it's just that nonfiction is where I ended up being more successful. The Hellfire Club was a way to talk about a phenomenon that I've seen as a journalist, which is people coming to Washington to do good, and making little compromise after little compromise until they are up to their neck in alligators.
These are several of Jake Tapper’s books, including the latest release, All the Demons Are Here, which will be available in paperback on July 2.
Most of your books are in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Why does that backdrop interest you? I'm a big Eisenhower fan, so the McCarthy-Eisenhower era seemed like an interesting era to be written about. I hadn't seen it explored and exploited for the purpose of talking about what is happening today while looking through the lens of what happened in the ‘50s. That first book, The Hellfire Club, was successful enough that I was able to do a sequel. While doing publicity for that first book, I stumbled on the story that ended up being the spine of the second book: Robert Kennedy ended up canceling a trip that his brother, President Kennedy, was going to make to the Sinatra estate in Rancho Mirage because of Sinatra's ties to the mob. When I found out about that, I said, “Oh, my God. There’s my second novel.” It was just so ripe with so many things going on in Hollywood that were worth exploring in terms of misogyny, #MeToo, and Epstein. It just seemed like that would be an interesting era to write about. And because I had done the ‘50s and ’60s, the ‘70s made perfect sense for the third novel, All the Demons are Here.
Some of the content is pretty seedy. Is that how it really is? Obviously, the Epstein-esque event on Tom Sawyer Island, I made up. But I didn’t make up the idea of that kind of decadence and depravity. I just thought it would be a good topic or a good theme for bad guys. By using Tippi Hedren and Janet Leigh and others, it was a way to talk about misogyny today in Hollywood, while looking at what happened in the ‘60s in Hollywood.
How extensive was your research? I was a history major at Dartmouth, so it’s always exciting for me to dive into any particular era to find out as much as I can. I go to abebooks.com because a lot of the best books on a particular subject will be the obscure, out-of-print ones. There was one written by Sinatra's valet. I also go on to newspapers.com and read newspapers from the era in their original newsprint. It brings me pleasure to do that kind of research. Whether I'm working on nonfiction or fiction, that kind of research is part of the joy and part of the process.
Have you explored screenwriting? The Outpost was turned into a screenplay and made into a movie. I have not yet written a screenplay. There’s a team in Hollywood that is interested in turning The Hellfire Club into a streaming series that is being worked on right now. When I write a book, I get to hand it in and it becomes a finished work that's on the shelves. With a screenplay, I think it would just drive me nuts to have written something and then have it not be produced, which is what happens to most screenplays.
What’s the current status of the streaming series? Christian Slater is interested in playing Charlie, and we're talking to a streamer and a production house, but we're not making any announcements yet.
Most of the background of your books are historically accurate, is that right? Yes, with lots of liberties taken. But, generally speaking, there's a construct of the history of the era that I tried to stay within.
How did you come up with the characters of U.S. Senator Charlie Marder and his wife, Margaret, in The Hellfire Club and The Devil May Dance, as well as their children Ike and Lucy Marder, who are the main characters in your latest novel, All the Demons Are Here? Are they based on anybody? I wanted the main character to be married. I read a lot of thrillers and detective books, and it's often some hard-boiled single man, and that's not my lived experience. I've been happily married since 2006. I like fiction where there’s a couple that you like, and you root for them. It appeals to me, and it’s not done as much as it could be. I threw myself in and I thought, “Well, Charlie is a historian. That’s maybe what I would be if I weren't a journalist.” Margaret is kind of like my wife, except my wife isn't a zoologist. Lucy is a journalist, and of all the characters, she's the one that’s most like me. Ike [her brother] just seemed like a good opportunity to write about veterans, which is an issue that I cover a lot. Charlie's obviously a World War II veteran in an invented foray into Lebanon. It was just a way to get at the story I wanted to tell, which had to do with Evel Knievel and motorcycle riding.
That was wild. You really got into the head of Evel Knievel in All the Demons Are Here. A lot of the quotes were actually things he said. I did not know a lot about Evel Knievel when I started writing the book, but I saw a documentary and read a few books. I tried to really capture him— what he was actually like, his larger-than-life characteristics, and why people found him so appealing, while also capturing that which personally did not feel particularly appealing. He’s a quintessential ‘70s character that you couldn't invent, and he's also such an archetypal American figure—the off-putting showman. They've lived throughout the time of this country. Whether it's P.T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill, Muhammad Ali, or Donald Trump, there are always larger-than-life salesmen and showmen who can put butts in the seats and appeal to the masses. He was fun to write about.
I kept thinking of Donald Trump when I was reading about him. There's a lot that they have in common. It’s funny because I don’t know anything about motorcycles. I know a little, but I've never driven one. I rode one once in college. My dad's a pediatrician and my mom’s a nurse, and it was drilled into my head from a very early age that it’s a good way to be killed. My parents called them “donor cycles” because of organ donations. I hired a writer who was a motorcycle expert and enthusiast, Mark Gardiner, to help me. I would send him chapters and say, “Please make this sound like Ike knows what he's talking about.” He would help me with that. After we were done with our business, and I paid him for his consulting, and he is credited in the book, he sent me a link to a piece he had written comparing Evel Knievel and Trump that I didn't even know he had written. There is a similarity of bombastic, larger-than-life figures, appealing to half the country and not-necessarily applauded by the editorial-staff at The New Yorker quality to Evel Knievel and Donald Trump that is just there. There is that through line.
As a journalist, I was really drawn to the story. It was a book that I didn’t want to put down. Thank you. That’s really nice of you to say. I wanted to write about journalism in a way that wasn't lecturing, that was fun, and that also got into the tensions between wanting your stories read and wanting to be a good journalist, which some editors might see as a conflict. I also wanted to get at Murdoch, that’s where the Lyon family comes in. What Rupert Murdoch was doing to journalism starting that year in 1977; I thought that would be interesting.
That was well done. Do you consider yourself a book author or anchor/correspondent first? I consider myself a journalist first and a fiction writer second. Fiction is fun to dabble in. I think it's a lot harder than nonfiction. If I had to leave journalism to become a fiction writer, I could do it, and I think it would be fun. But I think I'm best and most experienced at journalism.
You said that you were fascinated by the McCarthy era and how it had parallels to what's going on right now. What are those parallels? I think the obvious parallels are a major political figure that so many people are terrified of, where there are very few people in his party or the other who are even willing to remotely stand up against him, even if they think he's wrong about things. I think that was an obvious parallel in Donald Trump. Joe McCarthy's protégé was Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn's protégé was Donald Trump. That's just a historical fact—that through line exists. He has a lot of the techniques and a lot of the qualities of Joe McCarthy in terms of his ability to get attention, to make outlandish claims, and to be so intimidating that people are afraid of challenging him. For the record, there were communists in the government. It wasn't like McCarthy was 100 percent wrong and there was nothing to say about it, but he exaggerated the threat, and people were terrified of challenging him.
In writing these books, there’s a fine line between telling a story and turning people off. I didn't want to lecture. I wanted to be compelling. When I did the first draft of the first book, The Hellfire Club, I was just getting comfortable with the idea of using real people in fictitious settings. When I did the second draft, I inserted Joe McCarthy into the book more than I had in the first draft. And if I had done one more big draft of it, I probably would have had even more McCarthy and less Estes Kefauver. By the second book, Sinatra is a major character. By the third book, Evel Knievel is a major character. If you’re going to do it, do it and have fun. As a journalist, that was something I had to get comfortable with, because I do deal with nonfiction day in, day out. I was a little squeamish at first.
Does your knowledge of politics and the world somehow inform your novel writing? They’re separate. I recently made a metaphor that the defense team [in the Trump trial] was going to come at Michael Cohen like a hippopotamus. One of my co-anchors, Kasie Hunt, didn’t understand the metaphor. I said, “Those are vicious beats, hippopotami—they kill 500 people a year on average. Lions only kill 22.” She got a kick out of it. Writing for [the character] Margaret, a zoologist, I learned a lot of facts about animals that most people don’t know, like sharks are not as relatively dangerous as hippopotami. I said to Kasie afterwards, “That wasn’t me. It was Margaret in my brain, sitting there and lecturing me about what animals are actually dangerous and what are not.” So I used a metaphor that nobody understands.
Well, you’re teaching many of us something new. Yes, hippomatami are actually very dangerous, and you should be more afraid of them than lions. Anybody watching the Trump trial coverage today and going on a safari in the next five years will be armed with that information, courtesy of Margaret Marder.
Yes, because you never know when you’re going to cross a hippo. If you have a choice, going on a safari, lion over there, hippo over there, go to the lion.
Are you working on another book with Charlie and Margaret, or Ike and Lucy? I'm not right now. There’s a nonfiction story that I stumbled upon about a terrorist who was caught in Italy in 2011. The Italians told the U.S. government about it, and the prosecutors investigated him and concluded that he was a serious threat. They had two months to prove the case against him, or else the Italians were going to let him go. It was during the Obama era, so they couldn't just throw him into Guantanamo, because they weren't doing that anymore. The prosecutors had two months to find the crime, so it's about their sleuthing. It's called The Terrorist Detectives, and I'm writing it right now. It’s going to be published through a Simon & Schuster imprint called Atria, and they’re thinking it will come out in fall 2025.
How do you find the time to write? Any time I can steal, I steal it. The kids go to school at 7:35 in the morning. My daughter drives, so she takes them, but even if she doesn't, my wife will drive them. My first call for work is at 8:30, so that is a 55-minute period where I write every day. I try to have a rule of writing at least 15 minutes every day. For the last three novels, I've written Google Docs. For this nonfiction book that I’m now working on, I'm writing on Word. Whenever I’m done with a writing session, I email it to myself so I always have access to the chapter that I'm working on. I always travel with a laptop; I always take the train to New York instead of flying, and any chance I can get to write, I take it.
Do you prefer fiction or nonfiction writing? That's a really tough one. I will say that nonfiction is easier. You don't have to make any of it up. You're just deciding what facts to not include. I can't really judge, because I work in both. I got immense pleasure out of writing my three novels, and I will definitely come back to fiction.
Well, you know the saying with nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up.” When I wrote my Afghanistan book, The Outpost, there was a scene where the troops were driving in Afghanistan. They were listening to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and I included a bunch of the lines from that in the book. The editor and the lawyer made me take out all but one line. I said, “Why?” They said, “Because you you have to pay for the rights. Unless you want to give AC/DC $100,000 and come to a deal with them for quoting their song to that extent, you can only use one line.” When I wrote The Hellfire Club, I tried to do two lines, because it's so good atmospherically to have Sinatra songs in the background. The lawyers came in again and said, “You can only do one line—we went through this five years ago with your previous book. You can’t get away with it.” For The Devil May Dance, I wrote an entire Sinatra song. The lawyers called me again and said, “You put the entire song.” I said, “Yes, but I made it up. It’s not real. The entire thing is made up by me. There’s no actual music. Sinatra had nothing to do with it. You can quote the whole thing because I did it.” They were really tickled, and since then, I do that as much as I can. I did it in All the Demons Are Here, too. There’s a fake song, “All the Demons Are Here.” I forgot if I attributed it to AC/DC or Led Zeppelin, but I made it up.
The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents “Jake Tapper Talks About His Book All the Demons Are Here,” Tuesday, July 9, at 12 noon, online via Zoom. Tapper will be interviewed by Anastasia Stanmeyer, editor-in-chief of Berkshire Magazine. Register at berkshireolli.org.