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HIGH PROFILE: LAWRENCE GEORGE WRIGHT The afternoon after the Twin Towers fell, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, put out a conference call to the magazine's regular contributors, some of the brightest lights in American journalism. It was Tuesday. The New Yorker normally goes to press Thursday afternoon. If the deadline could be shifted to Friday, they would have almost three days to put something together. One of those writers was 1,500 miles away, in Austin. Lawrence Wright had already e-mailed his editor: "Put me to work." The New Yorker's 10,000-word account of 9-11 led off with a hair-raising tale of devastation and escape. Working from the office in his Austin home, Mr. Wright had managed to find a survivor, track him down to a Queens apartment, interview him by phone and – with the help of his wife, Roberta, who transcribed his interview – feed a steady stream of copy to his editor in New York. "One of the best New York reports we got came from Texas,"
says Mr. Remnick. Many roles There may be half a dozen Lawrence Wrights: There's the aggressive journalist and New Yorker star; the indefatigable investigative reporter who has written of the recovered-memory controversy and come back from Egypt with a revealing portrait of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, "The Man Behind Osama bin Laden." There's the novelist (God's Favorite), the children's book writer (City Children, Country Summer), the successful screenwriter (The Siege), the (less successful) playwright. And there's the Lawrence Wright who founded Texas Writers' Month and CAST, an organization devoted to bringing public statuary to the Austin area, who practices yoga, hikes the Rockies and plays keyboard for the blues band WhoDo. The music thing is relatively new. At age 38 – he's now 55
– Mr. Wright decided that by his 40th birthday he would play
"Great Balls of Fire" just like Jerry Lee Lewis. He had,
until then, never played a note in his life. "Let's just say his playing has improved," says best friend, former biking buddy, neighbor and fellow author (Gates of the Alamo) Stephen Harrigan. A reading family The Wrights were an improvement-minded family. Mother Dorothy was a voracious reader who marched the family off to the Lakewood library once a week to gather cartons of books. Dorothy Wright is probably the reason all three of her children became writers, says her son. "It was the only way we could get her attention." Father Donald had been born into a humble Oklahoma family and served with distinction in World War II. By the 1970s, he was chairman of Lakewood Bank & Trust and one of Dallas' acknowledged civic leaders. Progressive – as his son puts it, "in the manner of his day" – Don Wright created Beautiful Dallas, led efforts to dredge White Rock Lake and was deeply involved in efforts to beautify roadsides with wildflowers. Fresh out of Woodrow Wilson High School in 1965, a rebellious Lawrence Wright went to Tulane University in New Orleans, because, "You could drink at the age of 18 – a highly motivating factor for me." At Tulane, he fell under the spell of novelist Walker Percy, Alabama-born author of The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins , who was living on a duck pond near Covington, just across Lake Pontchartrain. Mr. Wright drove out in his red MG TF – the hero of The Moviegoer drives a red MG – and soon the two were sitting by the pond watching ducks, sipping bourbon and talking literature. Here was an actual, living author just shooting the breeze with a kid from Dallas. "He demystified the writing thing for me," says Mr. Wright. The car also had its effect upon a young woman who was always late
for archaeology class. Mr. Wright noticed her. At first, they were just very good friends. Just out of Tulane in 1969, facing the draft and back in Dallas, Mr. Wright almost enlisted in the Marines. Instead, he stepped out of the line of recruits just before the oath was administered, went home and rethought the war. Those were tense times in the Wright home, war-hero father and anti-war son battling at the dinner table. And both arguers. Even today, says Mr. Harrigan, "Larry can argue a position into the ground. The argument is never less than friendly, but he stakes out his territory and will defend it against all comers, and sometimes against all reason." The argument with his father, as the son tells it in his coming-of-age memoir, In the New World: Growing Up in America, 1960-1984, was less than friendly. Soon he applied for conscientious-objector status. The Dallas Selective Service Board, which did not confer CO status lightly, gave him two weeks to find some kind of alternative service. By then he was living in Boston with Roberta, studying publishing at Radcliffe. He flew to New York and went to the United Nations, where he got a list of American service organizations abroad. He picked the top name off the list and walked across the street to the offices of the American University in Cairo. The university needed someone to teach English. Could he leave for Egypt that evening? No, he said. But he could be packed and ready the next day. Learning the language The big white eraser-boards in his office, where he usually charts the outline and progress of whatever story or screenplay he's working on, are covered with looping lines of Arabic these days. Having learned to speak the language during two years in Cairo, he is learning to read and write it in preparation for a three-month reporting trip to Saudi Arabia. He has tackled the task in the usual Lawrence Wright fashion, says his wife. "When he says he's going to learn Arabic, oh, my Lord, we've got an Arabic teacher in the house eight to 10 hours a week." The two have been married since shortly after Mr. Wright went to Cairo. Once apart, both immediately realized that it was marry or never see each other again. Their letters crossed somewhere in the mail, and they met, and were wed, in Greece. After Egypt came reporting jobs for small civil rights publications in the South, a stint at Look magazine, where he wrote a profile of an astronaut that caught the eye of Bill Broyles of Texas Monthly . Then finally, the job he had wanted all along, The New Yorker. His articles, a number of which have been fleshed out in books, have in common an appetite for controversy and a "serene intensity" that Mr. Remnick says reminds him of Joe DiMaggio. Behind each piece is also an almost obsessive curiosity that, friends say, he gets from his father. (Before the elder Wright's death, last year, father and son had long since made up.) "I write about things I'm drawn to," he says. "If I'm interested in it, I think I can make other people interested, too." The subjects are like minefields: race, religious obsession, recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and, most recently, terrorism and Islam. His first successful screenplay, which in 1998 became The Siege, gave him a taste of terrorism. Produced by Lynda Obst, former New York Times writer and a Texas transplant, the story really was about U.S. overreaction to a terrorist plot. But Arab-Americans did not see it that way, and the movie's release was met by protests. There were also threats of violence. Then came 9-11, bringing to horrifying life all that was nascent in The Siege. As he sat watching that awful morning, Mr. Wright thought, "This looks like a movie. This looks like my movie." "Before Sept. 11, I felt I was kind of done with journalism," he says. "I felt I had used myself up as a reporter. I had made a resolution that I was only going to do things that were either important or fun." Terrorism certainly qualified as important. In the year and a half since, he has returned to Cairo, where his familiarity with the city and a network of old friends and acquaintances paid off in his intimate profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden's second-in-command. While he was in Egypt, the writer also sent friends a series of e-mails, a running account of his experiences and impressions. They were, says his former producer, Ms. Obst, "the freshest and most alarming dispatches from the Mideast." "Larry's diary and e-mails are better than some journalists' 10th drafts," says Mr. Remnick. In the same office where he is finishing his screenplay and learning Arabic, the shelves are packed with books on terrorism and on the Mideast – "I think I've read everything," he says – and with cardboard trays crammed with file cards. There must be 45 pounds of them, the notes he is hoarding toward the 9-11 book he is writing for Knopf. "I felt I was born to do the book," he says. "I know it's something I have to do." Mr. Harrigan, who lives just around the corner and has watched Larry Wright for years, agrees. "I think this book is going to be his crowning moment," he says. "All the skills he has, all the experience he has, all the obsessions he has, are going right into this book."
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