Robert Lindsey, a journalist whose award-winning nonfiction spy thriller “The Falcon and the Snowman” was adapted into a movie starring Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton, and who ghostwrote autobiographies for former President Ronald Reagan and Marlon Brando, died on Dec. 19 in Carmel, Calif. He was 90.
His daughter, Susan McCabe, confirmed his death, at a long-term care facility.
For 15 years, Mr. Lindsey reported for The New York Times, starting in 1968 as a transportation reporter and then as the Los Angeles bureau chief starting in 1977. When he retired, in 1983, he was the paper’s chief West Coast correspondent, based in San Francisco.
Combining keen curiosity, dogged investigative skills and a gift for storytelling, he covered Hollywood (snagging the first full interview with the silent film actress Mary Pickford since before World War II), presidential politics (capturing Richard M. Nixon’s first, albeit brief, public remarks after resigning as president) and contentious subjects like the Church of Scientology and the darker side of the charismatic union leader Cesar Chavez.
Mr. Lindsey’s own early life could have provided enough grist for a Gothic novel. He turned those wrenching events into a memoir, “Ghost Scribbler,” published in 2012.
In it, he recounts his family’s history as Virginia gentry; its descent to what he describes as “trailer trash” in California; his father’s alcoholism and abusive behavior; his own high school persona as a teenage “greaseball” and brief stint as a manager for Salvatore Bono, who was then known as Sammy but would soon become Sonny; and his parents’ double suicide.
“The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage,” which was published in 1979, originated as an article that ran in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1977 under the headline “To Be Young, Rich and a Spy.”
At the urging of the author Jonathan Coleman, who was then an editor at Simon & Schuster, Mr. Lindsey expanded it into a book that was then adapted into the 1985 film starring Mr. Hutton and Mr. Penn.
The Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning espionage thriller recounted the treasonous theft of U.S. government secrets by two childhood friends, Christopher John Boyce, a C.I.A. contractor whose avocation was falconry, and Andrew Daulton Lee, a cocaine dealer known as the Snowman.
“There is nothing in their school records, or in the memories of their friends or teachers,” Mr. Lindsey wrote, “to indicate they were anything but two devout Catholic boys growing up in happy, warm families in one of the most affluent suburbs in America, living one version of the American Dream and facing nothing but the brightest of futures.”
The two were convicted in 1977 of selling satellite intelligence and codes to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In 1983, Mr. Lindsey published a sequel, “The Flight of the Falcon,” about Mr. Boyce’s audacious prison break in 1980, his subsequent spree of bank robberies and eventual recapture.
When it was published, The New York Times Book Review called “The Falcon and the Snowman” “one of the best nonfiction spy stories ever to appear in this country,” but said that the second book failed to “rise to the same heights as the first.”
In the late 1980s, Mr. Lindsey began juggling interviews with Mr. Brando, who hired him to help write an autobiography, and Mr. Reagan, for whom he had been drafted as a scribe by Alice Mayhew, an editor at Simon & Schuster.
“An American Life” was published in 1990 with only Mr. Reagan’s name on the cover. In The Times, Maureen Dowd praised Mr. Lindsey’s “selective choice of facts” and “cozy yet commanding prose style,” but added: “Mr. Reagan remains elusive, a winsome cardboard cowboy, a Rugged Individualist with big romantic dreams and even bigger blind spots.”
In his ruminative 2012 memoir, Mr. Lindsey recalled lamenting to Nancy Reagan, “I get the impression that the president is not especially introspective.” At another point, he brooded, “I’m trying to write the memoirs of someone who doesn’t have much memory.”
“Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me,” a tell-some memoir billed as “by Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey,” was published in 1994. Writing in The Times Book Review, Caryn James pronounced it “so weird that it’s wonderful.”
Robert Hughes Lindsey Jr. was born on Jan. 4, 1935, in Glendale, Calif., the youngest of three children of Clare (Schulz) Lindsey, the daughter of German immigrants, and Remembrance Hughes Lindsey Jr., a civil engineer from a wealthy Pennsylvania family that owned coal mines.
After attending San Jose State College (now San Jose State University), where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1956, he was hired as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. (His first byline was an article about a truck that stopped short, inadvertently dumping a load of horse manure.)
Mr. Lindsey married Sandra Wurts in 1956; she died in August. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Steven, and four grandchildren.
He credited his inspiration to become a journalist to the radio soap opera “Front Page Farrell,” starring Richard Widmark, which captured his imagination when he was home sick from school in the fourth grade. In the fifth grade, he started a student newspaper at his parochial school. In the sixth, he received a red-penciled “A” on one of his compositions. He was hooked, he said.
Mr. Lindsey was offered promotions by The Times, but chose to remain in California, eventually leaving his indefatigable daily reporting routine to write books, Mr. Coleman said in an interview, because he feared becoming “a washed-up relief pitcher.”
But even after Mr. Lindsey retired as a full-time journalist, he continued reporting — so much so that he kept his watch set to New York time.
“With a notebook and a great deal of curiosity, I traveled the world, top to bottom, from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole,” he wrote in his memoir. “I hung out with murderers, spies, a president, mobsters, generals, movie stars and scientists who helped shape our future. I watched history unfold and wrote about it.”
He added: “What could be more fun than being a reporter?”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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