Loren Stephens found her way to LA from NY in a career and life transition. While there away from her Mom, she convinced her mother, ‘a grand dame’ to let her write her write her memoir. In doing so, she was sparked to launch an entire business writing other people’s memoirs.
Loren who is now “Hollywood’s Go-To Ghostwriter” founded two companies. ‘Bright Star Memoirs‘ geared toward helping entertainment and sports figures tell their life stories.
And ‘Write Wisdom‘, to provide support and guidance for ‘anyone’ interested in writing their life story. Every life is unique, but not everyone has the self-confidence or skill to tell their story without help. Not even celebrities.
Her latest celeb book out is a dazzling Hollywood memoir with Jeff Margolis who produced television’s most memorable variety series and specials over the past fifty years—from iconic variety shows of the 1970s to 8 Oscars!
“We’re Live in 5”, is the ultimate behind-the-scenes tour says Loren, with a foreword by Billy Crystal. It’s a tell-it-as-it-is with all the glamour you expect, along with a deeply revealing human portrait of working with larger-than-life personalities at television’s most dizzying and demanding heights. It’s also a great insider education for anyone aspiring to be an entertainment producer.
Loren Stephens own personal essays and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times; the Chicago Tribune and more.
A New York native, Loren’s love for the theater, film and writing is what really led her to Los Angeles. As an executive producer, she received an Emmy nomination for the PBS documentary, Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist, narrated by Burt Lancaster. Her debut historical novel, ‘All Sorrows Can Be Borne’, was originally published in 2021 by Rarebird.
Loren is a member of Greenlight Women, a dynamic and diverse community of women over forty in media and entertainment. She also serves as a National Commissioner of the Anti-Defamation League.
Enjoy this podcast of our warm insightful conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you’d rarther read than listen the audio transcript is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
0:00:00
And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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I don’t know why we have this song to introduce my ghost writer, but… I don’t know, it was what was in my head. This time it’s just about me.
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You could have done it a little better, Bobby. Good morning, everybody. I’m Debbie Nigro. I’m so excited to introduce you to Lauren Stephens, the Hollywood go-to ghostwriter. And I’ve always been fascinated with ghostwriters because they’re these people who are so humble. They’re like, no worries, we’ll tell your story and it’ll be your story and you can sell it and we’re just going to get paid and we don’t need any glory. Really? Anyway, fascinating gift to be able to help somebody bring their story to life because everybody’s got a story, but not everybody has the skills to tell their own story, not even celebrities. Lauren has two companies she founded.
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One is Right Wisdom, the word right for the masses, if you will, and she founded Bright Star Memoirs for the entertainment and sports world. Her latest celebrity book is out. It’s a dazzling Hollywood memoir with Jeff Margolis who produced a lot of TV and giant events like the Oscars and like crazy behind-the-scenes story. She herself has great writing credentials and a love for theater and her own debut novel and she’s a member of Greenlight Women, a dynamic and diverse community of women over 40 and media and entertainment. Lauren Stevens, you’re welcome to my show.
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0:01:40
Thank you, Debbie. So nice to chat with you this morning. I really appreciate the air time and getting to know you a little better and maybe you’ll get to know me a little better and what it means to be a ghost
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writer. Yes, Lauren, you’re a New York native but now in LA, is that correct?
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Right, right. I grew up outside New York City in Westchester County in Harrison, New York.
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Oh, you’re right in the listening area, right? Everybody, your old neighbors can hear you right now.
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Oh, I hope so. That would be so exciting. Yes, Harrison High School. Go Harrison! Go Harrison!
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By the way, Harrison High School just got a big cheerleading championship. They were in the news that they won first place in some division of cheerleading championship. You weren’t a cheerleader, were you, Lauren?
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Well, that’s a painful question. I was one of those girls who wanted to be a cheerleader and too much of a klutz. I didn’t make it.
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It was a sad day. I’m so sorry. Listen, I was a klutz too. My mother told me that’s why she sent me to dancing school as a little girl, because I was klutzy. But the dancing school cured the klutz it didn’t cure the chubby so I was a chubby cheerleader who wasn’t a klutz. There’s a
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0:02:56
lot of backstories now. But you had the experience of being a cheerleader I mean all the most popular girls as you know were the cheerleaders and they went out with all the football players and there you are so I was a little you know the little girl in the background, slightly chubby, slightly klutzy, but as time went on, I guess
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I evolved. I’d have been your friend, Lauren.
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Oh, good.
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You are now. Oh, good. I would always have been your friend. Hey, did you go to school in Ithaca, New York?
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Is that where you went to Cornell, or is it my imagination? I did. I went to Cornell. I got my BA in English Lit and Government, it was sort of a double major. And then I went on to Columbia University, got my Master’s in international Affairs. And one thing led to another, I ended up in the mortgage banking business in Boston after I got married and I spent quite a few years in that field as kind of the only woman in the boardroom I used to like to say.
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Wow.
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Because it wasn’t a field that was populated with women at that point in time.
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So you’re a trailblazer.
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A bit of one and I had a boss who I guess was the real trailblazer because he saw something in me and promoted me to a position where I was senior vice president of the company and that was quite groundbreaking. And I traveled all over the country helping people get mortgages, large scale mortgages, mainly in hospitals. So my deals were in the eight to $40 million category. And I did that until I got so tired of getting on an airplane and I had a son,
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and it just all sort of didn’t work. And I realized that I needed to kind of change. That’s, stop there for a second, because I think people who are listening,
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many people I know along the way, have come to a moment where they realize, I gotta change. And you’re just sometimes not sure what that means. You just know it has to be something. Well, you know, when you’ve got, when you, when you’re
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having to get up at 530 in the morning, get on a plane, and be back by 11 p.m. at night, and you’ve gone across the country from Boston to San Francisco and back, it gets pretty tiring. Yes. And, you know, you just realize this is just not the way I want to live my life. And, you know, it’s, it’s, you have to be brave to make a change. As I did, I decided I would move across the country to Los Angeles. I lined up a job for myself here in the warmer weather. I used to say to myself, what am I doing living in Boston where it’s so cold?
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I know. I just got back from Florida. I’m like, what am I doing back here? You have to just pick your seasons. I just want to follow the Sun I swear that’s all I really want
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0:06:05
so yeah LA is gorgeous it is gorgeous although right now we’ve been having unbelievable floods I’m sure you’ve seen in the news it’s been quite horrendous I think we’re in in one of the worst flood seasons we’ve ever had out here but it will get better yeah I’m sorry about that for any anyone who’s thinking about, you know, making a change, give yourself the space to do it slowly. You know, you don’t need to jump right away, you have to kind of put the pieces together, figure out how you’re going to make a living doing something else, where you want to live. And, you know, once you’ve sort of resolved as many questions as you can, although you can’t answer everything,
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then you take your best shot. And nothing is irreversible. If it doesn’t work out, you can always do a 180.
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Okay, so I wanna know how you chose to be a ghostwriter. Where’d that come from out of left field?
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Well, this is kind of, again, this is for all your listeners. I wanted to write my mother’s life story. She was a very interesting woman. I was working in a different field at that point. I was in the field of fundraising for a major human rights organization, and I wanted to write her life story. She was getting on in years, and she was a really quite fascinating woman, an art collector, she spoke four languages,
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she was an opera singer, I mean she just had a lot going for her. She was kind of a grand dame and I asked her if I might write her book, you know, and she would put her name on the cover and at first she was a little reluctant and then someone else said to her, you know, you have the most interesting life story, so it’s always the messenger, isn’t it? Yes, yes, yes. I could say to her 20 times, mom I want to write your book and she’d tear me down and then this one person who she
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admired said you know, do interviews with her over the course of about a year. And then I, you know, would write chapters, send them to her, she’d make comments, and the end result was a book called I Turned a Key and the Birds Began to Sing, which was something she had said in the book and referenced her opera career and she got so much joy out of it. You know, she’d put it on her coffee table in the living room and any time a visitor would come, she’d show it to them and give them a copy.
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And I thought, you know, this is really interesting. Maybe I could do this for other people. Got it. And give them the same pleasure that I had given to my mother.
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Stop there for a second because just last week a very dear friend of mine who has had a very interesting life as well and is a real family guy said, I really want to write my story so that my generations of kids and grandkids that come understand who I was as a man and a businessman and we had this conversation and I’ve had it with many other people who I know would love as time goes on to capture who they’ve been on this planet, but either don’t know how or don’t have the time or don’t know somebody. So I just want to give you credit for the division
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you created the company called Right Wisdom, W-R-I-T-E, if anybody’s listening, Right Wisdom, which is the place you go if you need some support and guidance, if anybody is interested in writing their life story, and they’re right there to help you. But I noticed that you also do this, you’ve gotten so good at this, Lauren,
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0:10:06
you do it for a lot of celebrities, and the latest one is Jeff Margolis, who is just out this week, or is it my imagination?
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I said 13.
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Oh, cool. So, it just came out. Jeffrey Margolis, Jeff Margolis is iconic in the television world. He’s produced some of the craziest and most amazing variety shows all in the 70s, like, I don’t know, eight Oscars, all kinds of those big, fancy award shows and country music, it’s unbelievable.
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0:10:34
So this book is a behind-the-scenes tour. You said it’s a how-to for anybody interested in learning about the entertainment business or looking in on it, right? And Billy Crystal did the foreword, am I correct?
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Right, right.
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Cool, cool, cool, cool. So you sat there with him, or this went on for a year with Jeff Margolis, how did that happen?
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0:10:53
So Jeff lives now in Nashville, and I’m here in LA. I’ve actually never met him in person, and we’re best friends. Got it. It’s crazy, as you know, you can, you know…
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Be best friends with somebody you never met, I know.
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0:11:08
Exactly, and you listen carefully, and we mapped out sort of the overall arc of the story and what generally we wanted to discuss and what audiences we were going for. We had two audiences. One is the people who are just interested in the entertainment industry and the behind the scenes. You know, he didn’t want to drop the mic on people. He never said anything mean or nasty. Quite frankly, he’s one of the nicest, most gentlemanly person you will ever, ever meet. And one of his rules is always be kind. And he was that way in his book. You know, there were things he could have said
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that he didn’t say. And the other audience are aspiring producer directors. He wanted to share the tricks of the trade or the tools of the trade so that we had, you know, students, graduate students, and then the individuals who are curious about what goes on in Hollywood and who isn’t, you know. I mean, we’ve got, you know, all of our shows on television and on radios, you know, highlighting celebrities.
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So everybody wants to know, you know, how you get where you are. And with Jeff having kind of reached the pinnacle of success by producing and directing the Oscars, which is sort of the ultimate in live television, as well as the Special Olympics and tributes to I’m trying to think. Anyway, yeah, we got it. You know, everybody who’s ever anybody came to Jeff to do their tributes, Frank Sinatra was somebody who came to Jeff for a big 75th anniversary production and so on and so on. So we went through just generally the same process as I did with my mom. We did, you know, lots of interviews, everything was recorded and transcribed
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0:13:13
And then I went to work writing, you know basing the drafts on everything that I had collected in terms of what he had said to me and We just went back and forth till we finally had a manuscript that we felt was worthy of publication So that was really the process I think it took a little more than a year, maybe about a year and a half in total.
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0:13:40
So other people listening and who may be interested in doing this for themselves, I’m sure you have a sliding scale payment schedule so that people can afford to do this, but the average time we would take would be, invest about a year of time. Is that what you’re saying?
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0:13:54
At least, yes, I think so, a year. And you know, you never know what comes up. Somebody reads the draft and they say, oh my goodness, I forgot this, this, this, and this. And so that adds time to it. And I know I’m in service to them, although, you know, I do occasionally have to say one of two things.
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0:14:13
Okay, we’re running out of time here. I just wanted to let you know that I’m sorry we are running out of time. But if I may, can I just throw out that you’re going to be in the area soon. I’m so excited you’re going to be in Bronxville. I’m going to put up the information for anybody who is around on March the 7th. I’m coming. I’m coming. It’s all the literary great women in the publishing business. You’re going to be there. I’m looking forward to meeting you in person. Any women who are listening to the show or you know somebody who wants to get in like the inner circle of the coolest women in the publishing business,
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they’re going to be at this event at the Bronxville Women’s Club. It’s a non-profit organization, but like really highlighting some fabulous women. I’ll see you there, okay?
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0:14:52
Thank you so much, Debbie. I will look forward to meeting you in person. Thank you so much, Debbie. I will look forward to meeting you in person.
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In person. How about them apples? I’ll see you soon.
