Join a discussion with the author at the Oct. 11 Register Book Club – Orange County Register

As author Bob Spitz wrapped up his biography on Julia Child, he started to ponder who he might choose for his next biography. He was looking for someone with the cultural heft and impact of the chef and TV personality – or of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, subjects of previous books.

“I realized there was a thread all the way through them and that was that the subjects were beloved and that they had changed the culture,” says Spitz, who will talk about his new book, “Reagan,” at a public event held by the Register Book Club on Thursday, Oct. 11.

So he pored over lists of estimable artists, such as recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors of the National Endowment of the Arts, but nothing sparked his interest.

“Then my wife said, ‘What about Ronald Reagan?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Spitz says. “I’m a longtime Democrat. I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a Republican. I’m just not wired that way.

“And yet I realized the Beatles changed the way we listened to music,” he says. “Julia Child changed the way we lived. Ronald Reagan certainly changed the way Americans thought about their government.

“Reagan was a guy whose life framed the entire 20th century,” Spitz says. “When I thought about it, this was a man who lived a remarkable life. As someone who perhaps didn’t appreciate him beforehand, I felt that I could really learn something that would show me why he meant so much to so many people.”

So he began the work that would find him spending three years doing research, another two-and-a-half writing the book, and all of the time with an eye toward making his biography new and different and necessary for readers to pick up despite the many other books on the 40th president of the United States of America.

“There are two different ways I can answer that,” Spitz of how a biographer approaches an already familiar subject. “No. 1, I feel that a biography – in addition to being detailed – has to have a compelling narrative. And while I loved Lou Cannon’s books they’re basically policy wonk books, and ‘Dutch’ failed in a lot of different ways. Even though [‘Dutch’ author] Edmund Morris is a terrific biographer I don’t think he ever got a handle on Reagan.”

Spitz says he’d already been over this hurdle with his 2005 book “The Beatles: The Biography.” There were more than 800 books on the Beatles when he started that project, but once you weeded out the hagiographies, the fanboy books, the very narrowly focused slices of their career, there really weren’t that many single-volume biographies of the entire arc of the Beatles story.

His two models for Reagan were David McCullough’s “Truman” and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,” both of them big books that sought to spin a comprehensive narrative “with an eye for the audience, so that the audience gets swept up,” Spitz says.

The other thing that helped make his “Reagan” different than those that came before was the passing of time, he says.

“I discovered that when people age into their ’60s and ’70s they’re more willing to talk about their lives and the people they represented,” Spitz says. “They want to get their stories down. So many people haven’t talked before but they had an eye on their biological clock and said, ‘Well, this guy came along at the right time.’

“And also, Reagan had died, so they could talk more freely,” he says.

Nancy Reagan, before her death, gave Spitz unprecedented access to Reagan’s private papers, something he says she’d never granted another writer. Members of his administration such as Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter spoke freely about the Iran-Contra scandal while lesser-known but significant figures, such as the doctors and nurses in the emergency room where Reagan was taken after an assassination attempt, talked in great detail about how much more serious that moment was than Americans were led to believe.

Spitz says one of his happiest days came on a trip to France when he called actress Olivia de Havilland, with whom he’d been corresponding in hopes of an interview, and the now-102-year-old Hollywood star agreed to let him stop by her Parisian apartment for champagne and canapes and to talk about her friendship with Reagan during his time making movies.

“I felt this was such a valuable piece of information to add to the Reagan canon,” he says. “Not only to understand how his career was slipping away at this time, but also how the goings-on at the time of the Hollywood blacklist and the Screen Actors Guild (of which Reagan was president) shifted him away from being a Democrat to being a conservative Republican.”