KEY POINTS:
It's been a tough month for this columnist. One of my ghostwriters has moved to Australia as he has a job keeping koala bears out of hotel resort swimming pools. Apparently, once they get wet they expand like tampons and can frighten the vacationers, not to mention block
the pool's filter system.
Another ghostwriter has been let go for sexual misconduct in the home office, and sadly, my most-cherished and senior ghostwriter passed away unexpectedly last week.
Ted "Wilson" (obviously not his real name) had been a freelance ghostwriter since the early 50s. In that time he has probably worked for every major publication in the country, and legend has it that he has ghostwritten for most of New Zealand's top writers, most recently Paul Holmes, Bill Ralston, Wendyl Nissen, Jim Hopkins, Raybon Kan, Deborah Coddington, Joe Bennett and, of course, myself, to name just a few.
His ability to change his style, perspective, tense and sex at the drop of a hat gave him the edge that enabled him to work for so many eclectic personalities. Many people even say that Ted wrote the bulk of Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy.
I don't mind telling you that it was Ted who wrote all but one of the 17 columns I have dedicated to Big Foot, although Ted would be the first to admit that they weren't really his greatest work.
In fact it was Ted "Wilson" who wrote Paul Holmes' column last week. I know this because that's why he couldn't write mine.
Ted was a mercenary, a literary gun for hire, an alphabetical assassin who never suffered writer's block like the rest of us. He worked around the clock and could get by on half an hour's sleep a day, less during daylight saving. Some say that it was probably this huge workload that ultimately led to his death. But most experts would disagree as the autopsy report conclusively showed that he drowned in what appeared to be large bowl of chili con carne. Those findings were challenged and later tests revealed that it was, in fact, chicken chasseur.
Ted would never take credit for his own work, but would accept cash so that we could claim credit for his, and it was this modesty and dedication to remaining anonymous, that ensured he was the most sought-after ghost writer in Australasia. To be brutally honest in a lot of cases, if these big names had written the bulk of their own material, they would have been shown the door a long time ago.
"Unofficially" Ted has picked up 14 columnist awards at the Qantas Media Awards in an array of different categories. In many cases he even wrote the acceptance speeches for the phonies who went up to claim the awards on the night.
For obvious reasons, Ted never had a mantlepiece covered in awards.
Knowing Ted, he would have gained enough satisfaction from simply knowing he had conned the New Zealand public into thinking that most of what they read had been written by many different people.
After the funeral I was reminiscing about Ted with Bill R and Paul H, and we laughed about the old days when we had to meet Ted in a Wilson's carpark to pick up our columns.
Ted was our "deep throat" and in retrospect I think it was these carpark exchanges that were the inspiration for his clever codename Ted "Wilson".
It was real Woodward and Bernstein stuff, but once email came along all that changed, and we met him in the car park only if we needed some hot electrical appliances.
Bill Ralston and I laughed how, on more than two occasions since Bill has been writing for the Herald on Sunday, our columns have been mixed up and the readers didn't know the difference. Neither did the editor, for that matter.
But it was these little slip-ups that made us all begin to question Ted's health, more specifically the state of his frontal lobe, the part that controls short-term memory, smell and erections.
Ted was 76 when he died. He had had probably written three or four columns, essays or a recipe for Woman's Weekly every day since 1956, and there will never be another writer like him.
Without Ted to help me, I literally can't express in words how much he will be missed by New Zealand's writing community.
