Janos, Leo 1933-2008 (Leo Herbert Janos)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 3, 1933, in New York, NY; died of cancer, January 11, 2008, in Los Angeles, CA. Correspondent, speechwriter, and author. Janos spent most of his career putting words into the mouths of others. He did it so well that he earned a certain amount of recognition in his own right, and he may have elevated the craft of ghostwriting—which he referred to as collaborative writing—to a level worthy of some respect. Toward the end of the Cold War, Janos began his career with the U.S. Information Agency as the editor of a magazine intended for distribution in the Soviet Union and allied countries. He honed his skills as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s and was a correspondent for Time from 1968 to 1978. Janos's first book, Crime of Passion (1983), relayed the chilling account of Geoffrey King, a seventeen-year-old who killed his mother and grandmother, then stabbed himself in the chest thirteen times while under the influence of LSD, only to survive and be sentenced to a prison for the mentally insane. After the book's publication Janos operated as a freelance writer until he produced the collaboration that validated his belief, as he once expressed it to CA, that ghostwriting "offers a genuine challenge" in terms of "character development, structure, … and so on." The collaboration was Yeager: An Autobiography (1985). Critics singled out Janos for special mention because of his seamless contribution to the organization, flow, and engaging treatment of the story line of the book. Its subject, Chuck Yeager, the first aviator to exceed the speed of sound, was most impressed with his collaborator's talent for turning colloquial speech into professional commentary while retaining the flavor of the original words. Janos also collaborated with aircraft designer Ben R. Rich on Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (1993). Finally, near the end of his life, Janos turned his attention to a solo effort—his own memoirs, which remained unfinished at the time of his death.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, January 15, 2008, sec. 2, p. B12.

Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2008, p. B9.