Michener and Me: A Memoir

Beloved novelist James Michener, who died in 1997, was an odd and secretive man. Silverman, his close friend of 50 years, didn't know of his first marriage until the author's second wife, Vange, announced to friends that his divorce had come through and they were headed for city hall. Both men grew up poor and fatherless in Pennsylvania (Michener was raised by a penurious widow who may not have been his birth mother), first meeting in 1947 at a group for liberal WWII veterans. In most respects Michener and Silverman, a gregarious swimming-pool manufacturer, were a study in contrasts. Here, Silverman explores but never fully explains the contradiction between Michener the expansive populist chronicler and Michener the reticent, closely guarded, frugal multimillionaire. Nor does he delve into the meaning of some of Michener's stranger behavior (he owned several homes, for example, but didn't set foot in some of them for years at a stretch). The two friends discuss everything from censorship to politics (the author of Centennial and Hawaii ran for Congress in 1962 as a Democrat in Republican-dominated Bucks County, Pa.), but not much on a personal level. Silverman, a founder and chairman of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., also tells how his own request that Michener donate $1 million to the museum led to an impasse in their friendship. The writer issued the check but, resenting having been put on the spot, refused any contact with his friend for a brief period. The conflict was never addressed; Michener called one day and the friendship simply ""took up where it had left off."" For all his eccentricities, Michener was clearly quite dear to Silverman. In this candid portrait, he emerges as a true citizen of the world. Photos. (Sept.)