‘Turn Every Page’: How a famous literary team has shaped history for 50 years

“Turn Every Page” is about the relationship between a writer and his editor. This might seem like a musty subject for a documentary. But what if the editor was Robert Gottlieb, who has worked with some of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century? It was he who convinced Joseph Heller to change the title of “Catch-18” to “Catch-22” because, among other reasons, it sounded funnier. 

And what if the writer was the legendary political historian Robert Caro? These men have collaborated since the 1970s, when Caro’s “The Power Broker” – his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the autocratic New York City urban planner Robert Moses – became an instant classic.

Since then, over a 50-year span, Caro has produced four volumes of his massive, multipart biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The fifth and final volume is apparently about one-third completed.

Caro’s slow-going thoroughness raises the unavoidable question that the men repeatedly and bemusedly confront: Will they both live long enough to complete the collaboration? Caro is currently 87, Gottlieb, 91. 

Not that the film, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert’s daughter, is some whimsical wheeze about two codgers trying to eke out a last hurrah. Both men come across as never less than spry. “Turn Every Page” is a testament to how the life of the mind is its own elixir. These men love what they do because they understand its importance. Caro’s mission in his books has always been to document the effects of power on the powerless. He gives a voice to marginalized people in society who are often bypassed in standard historical tomes. He takes so long because, as he says, “I want the books to endure.” 

Despite their long collaboration, the relationship between Caro and Gottlieb isn’t exactly a friendship. It’s more like an intellectual melding of two harmonious souls. They don’t socialize together and agreed only to be interviewed separately for the film. Both have voluminous egos and have stalked out of line-by-line editing sessions. But their fights are always at the service of the text. Gottlieb says some of his writers need help with plot construction – others with the proper use of semicolons. He sees his function as being in sympathy with what the author intended. He says, “When you try to change something into something that it isn’t – rather than make it better at what it is – tragedy lurks.”  

Caro writes his books in longhand before typing them up and scrunching the carbon copies into a tall closet at home. Writing is always difficult for him because, he says, “the only thing that matters is on the page.” But researching his LBJ books is his balm. (The only person he trusts to assist him is his wife, Ina.) He has joyously spent decades in the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, delving into its more than 45 million pages of documents and letters. To get a fresher sense of Johnson’s origins, he and Ina moved for several years from New York City to the Texas Hill Country.

Gottlieb describes Caro as a hidden romantic, an idealist. The historian’s disillusionment with Johnson’s vast, unsavory side is tempered by his understanding that all people are imperfect. Johnson stole, Caro maintains, the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas; he extended the Vietnam quagmire. He was also the president who pushed through the Voting Rights Act and the many reforms of the Great Society. Caro humanizes his subjects as a great novelist might. He wants to show how political power really works, not just as it appears in textbooks. He says of his readers, “The better informed their votes could be, the better our democracy could be.”

Would Caro’s books have been any less great if he and Gottlieb had never met? Who knows? But as this bracingly affectionate film makes clear, it was the gift of a lifetime for both that they did.

“Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” is rated PG for some language, brief war images, and smoking. The film is available now in select theaters. It will roll out in more cities later in January.