The Dan Brown Enigma

by Graham A Thomas

  Clearly this was something that has stayed with him, because at their core each of his novels is a treasure hunt: the protagonist is following a series of clues to figure out the mystery and save the day.

  Writing came early to Brown. He was just five years old when he wrote his first book, The Giraffe, The Pig and the Pants On Fire. ‘I dictated it to my mum and I did all the illustrations,’ he recalled.

  When Brown was nine years old he went to Washington D.C. with his parents and was fascinated by its museums. What he saw there also stuck with him and as he grew up his interest in art and architecture also grew. This fascination for the country’s capital would later show itself in the backdrop for The Lost Symbol.

  Science and religion were bedfellows in the Brown household and as he grew up young Dan was torn between the two. ‘I was lost from day one,’ he said. ‘Where science offered exciting proofs of its claims, religion was a lot more demanding, constantly wanting me to accept everything on faith. Faith takes a fair amount of effort, especially for a young child in an imperfect world. So as a boy I graduated towards the solid foundations of science but the further I progressed, the mushier the ground started to get.’

  Brown, who was raised Episcopalian, was very religious as a child but around the ninth grade he began to look beyond religion, studying astronomy, cosmology and the origins of the universe. When he tackled a church minister about the contradiction between science saying there was an explosion known as the Big Bang and the Bible saying God made the earth in seven days, and asked which was right, the response was a letdown: ‘Nice boys don’t ask that question.’ That was the point when a light bulb went on in Brown’s head and he decided the Bible was not logical. He gravitated away from religion to science, which made far more sense to him.[2]

  Except it didn’t. The more he studied science, the more he saw that: ‘Physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. You start to say, “Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.”’[3] This interplay fascinated Brown and drew him to Leonardo da Vinci, a man who also believed that science and religion complemented each other. It was an interest that would eventually play a big part in The Da Vinci Code.

  As a child the Brown family lived on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy but by the time Brown attended the school there the family was living off campus on Nelson Drive in Exeter and Brown was a day student studying English and Spanish among other things. ‘While at Phillips Exeter and [later] Amherst College, I pursued advanced writing courses and was published in school literary magazines,’ he explained. ‘At Exeter, I chose creative writing as my senior project. At Amherst, I applied for and was accepted to a special writing course with visiting novelist Alan Lelchuk.’

  Brown also managed to get on to two exchange programmes, both for Spain. The first time was a two-month world tour with the Amherst College Glee Club in the summer of 1983 that brought him face to face with some of the great architecture and cultures of Europe. He fell in love with Spain when he first arrived and managed to get back again a few years later. After graduating from Amherst College, he decided that Spain was the place he wanted to be, so in 1987 he left New Hampshire for the sunny climes of Seville, where he spent the summer studying an art history course at that city’s university.[4]

  ‘This art course covered the entire history of World Art, from the Egyptians to Jackson Pollock,’ Brown recalled. ‘The professor’s slide presentations included images ranging from the pyramids, religious icons, renaissance painting and sculpture, all the way through to the pop artists of modem times.’

  These studies opened Brown’s eyes to the idea of art as communication between the artist and the beholder, and he discovered a new language of symbols and metaphor. He could suddenly see the hidden meanings in Picasso’s Guernica and its violent images have stayed with him ever since. ‘The course covered many other works that resonated with me as a young man, including the horror of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son and the bizarre anamorphic sexual nightmares of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.’[5]

  Brown discovered, too, that there were dark qualities to Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which inspired him to find out about that painting and Da Vinci himself. He recalled: ‘I remember the professor pointing out things I hadn’t seen before, including a disembodied hand clutching a dagger and a disciple making a threatening gesture across the throat of another.’

  It was not just the art course that influenced Brown greatly but the country of Spain as well. Years after taking that course, the architecture and streets of Spain became the backdrop for much of the action in his first novel, Digital Fortress.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  ROCK MUSICIAN

  Over the course of the ten years after college, I wrote and produced four albums of original music. I met my wife, Blythe, through the National Academy of Songwriters, where she was the Director of Artist Development. Blythe, like me, loved art. She also was a very talented painter. Despite the Academy’s best efforts to promote me, my music career never really took off.

  DAN BROWN

  Although Brown had been writing since he was a child, it was music that beckoned when he graduated from Amherst College in May 1986. He’d been taking piano lessons since he was 10 and now he wanted a shot at writing music. ‘I had two loves,’ he said, ‘writing fiction and writing music.’

  Singing with the Amherst College Glee Club enabled him to sign up for a world tour which took a few months and covered more than a dozen countries. ‘I would never have seen those countries otherwise,’ he said. ‘It was amazing.’ Indeed, this exposure to new cultures was the most important part of the trip for him.

  Brown doesn’t do anything by halves. When he graduated from Amherst College he decided to make his mark on the world of pop music, and stayed in Exeter to teach himself the basics of composing and recording music. He could have gone totally unprepared to the West Coast with a dream, as many people do. But he didn’t. His education had prepared him to be confident enough to try all kinds of things and to be a well-rounded individual who could be competent at almost anything. So Brown purchased some recording gear, bought a synthesiser and set out to become a singer-songwriter.

  He toiled away for several months, learning everything he could about recording and all things related to making electronic music. Experimenting with the synthesiser, he discovered that if he played the keyboard using a certain combination of settings, he could make a noise that sounded like a frog croaking. Using this idea, he composed a piece that sounded like a whole pond filled with frogs and called it ‘Happy Frogs’. The floodgates had opened and he began experimenting with other animal sounds, coming up with such pieces as ‘Suzuki Elephants’, ‘Swans in the Mist’ and ‘Rats’. From this he created an entire cassette for children called SynthAnimals.[6]

  Through dogged determination Brown went round to all the local music and record shops in Exeter and got them to take copies of his work. Some of the local papers did short pieces on it but sales were in the low hundreds.

  Yet for Brown this was a success. It was a good exercise in recording, producing and distributing his own material. Now it was time to step up to the plate and make music for adults. Using a backup band of two of his friends who played keyboards, guitar and bass, as well as adding backing vocals, he recorded his first album, Perspective, and released it via his own record company, Dalliance, in 1990.

  Although the CD sold only a few hundred copies locally, Brown was happy with the result. He categorised it as being Top 40 but with a twist: the music was lyrical and the songs tried to tell a story. Perspective was good enough to show the producers and distributors in Hollywood what he could do.

  So in the spring of 1991, like so many aspiring musicians over the years, Brown moved to L.A. He knew his music was good but it needed to be improved; he also knew that meeting people who could kick-start his career was even more important.

  Once in Hollywood, he took an apartme
nt at the Franklin Regency, a low-rent apartment complex ‘whose hallways overflowed with unusual individuals – aspiring rock stars, male models, drama queens and stand-up comics.’ Some of these characters would later be found in his first published novel.[7]

  Brown knew he couldn’t just walk in the door and expect a million-selling album – he had to work hard at it. He also had to make ends meet while he spent every available moment on his music, so he got a job teaching Spanish at the Beverly Hills Preparatory School. Juggling his day job and his evening/weekend job of working on music would become a routine that lasted for several years.

  Once he was settled in, Brown contacted an organisation that distributed material from independent artists through a catalogue that went nationwide. This organisation was called the Creative Musicians Coalition and Brown sent in a copy of SynthAnimals to see what reaction it might get. To his surprise the owner, Ron Wallace, put it into the catalogue.

  While this was a positive step, Brown knew it was just a tiny one on a very large ladder. He had to get his foot in the door of the influential crowd and then behave as if he was a bona fide member of it. This was one of the many lessons he’d learned in his private-school education: to believe in himself enough to fit into any environment and thrive by making friends and building business relationships. He felt that once he was in that crowd, the natural instinct of the established members to protect or nurture a new person would kick in and he would be accepted.

  So he looked around and joined the National Academy of Songwriters, that boasted famous members such as Prince and Billy Joel. The Academy’s purpose was teaching songwriters the ins and outs of the music business as well as providing guidance in musical technique. Keen to get on, Brown attended many courses and workshops and spent much of his time at the Academy as he felt increasingly comfortable there. He struck up friendships with some of the students and the staff, one of whom was Blythe Newlon.

  In her book The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography, Lisa Rogak tells us that as Director of Artistic Development at the Academy, it was Blythe’s job to provide him with advice and guidance on how the business worked. Blythe helped him hone his musical style and also showed him the technology involved in making modern soft rock music, which was his style.[8]

  Suddenly, however, Blythe stepped outside of her day-to-day role and took Brown on as his manager, something she had not done with any of the other songwriters who were members. The staff at the Academy were supposed to be impartial and Blythe’s direct involvement on Brown’s career was frowned on by her colleagues, but that didn’t stop her. As Brown’s manager, she began arranging bookings as well as setting up meetings and auditions with the great and the good of the music industry.

  The first thing she did for her new protégé was book him into the Acoustic Underground, the talent showcase run by the Academy at the club At My Place in Santa Monica (and later at The Troubadour in West Hollywood). Most people had to audition for this, but Brown didn’t, as Blythe was his manager and co-producer of the event.

  Blythe’s co-producer was Paul Zollo, who also hosted the event. The editor of the Academy’s magazine SongTalk, which was published and distributed to the membership, he was also the author of two books, Conversations with Tom Petty and Songwriters on Songwriting. The latter was a compilation of interviews that had originally appeared in SongTalk and had received a lot of attention from the press when it was published in 1991. Zollo worked in the office next to Blythe and was used to seeing Brown come and go. When Zollo came in to tell people about the press coverage for Songwriters on Songwriting, Brown’s ears pricked up. So that was it. Now he understood that getting a lot of positive attention in the press was key to getting ahead in the music business.

  With Blythe working hard to get his career off the ground, Brown soon got a chance to record his second CD, using some of the best musicians in Hollywood. Blythe paired him with one of Hollywood’s top producers, Barry Fasman, who had won the British Record Producer of the Year back in 1982. Fasman did not come cheap, nor did the studio musicians hired to back Blythe’s friend.[9]

  Brown did everything he could to raise the money. According to Rogak, he went into ‘overdrive’ to ensure he could meet the bills needed to get the CD done and distributed. He begged and borrowed from everyone he knew, working as many hours as he could tutoring students outside of his teaching.

  But Ron Wallace thought the Academy were supporting Brown directly and couldn’t understand why they would when they represented so many other members. ‘Why would they put the money into him?’ Wallace wondered. ‘I guessed that maybe somewhere, sometime, there was a sugar daddy involved.’ Instead it was Brown working like a man possessed that raised the cash for the CD. [10]

  Throughout this period Blythe had become more to Brown than a friend who was helping him with his musical career. Love had found its way into their hearts and they were a couple, but they kept their passion for each other as quiet as they could. Blythe held an important position at the Academy and as she was guiding Brown’s musical career, she could have been open to accusations of misuse of her influence and position.

  Then there was the age difference. She is 12 years older than Brown and even today, when an older woman gets involved with a much younger man, it doesn’t seem right to many people. When Dan and Blythe got together in the early 1990s there were many disapproving stares, so this could have been their main concern. [11]

  As the final mix and mastering of the album took place Blythe fired out press releases to all the magazines and newspapers interested in new talent. She set up interviews with reporters, got articles in the trade press and did her best to get him an agent. ‘Brown was being moulded and promoted as a brainy but sensitive young singer who had a bit of the tortured soul about him.’ [12]

  In due course the CD, Dan Brown, was released on his own label, DGB Music. In a press release to the trade Blythe wrote that the National Academy for Songwriters had decided to take a hands-on approach to managing Brown’s career. One has to wonder how much of the Academy was actually involved in this production, or if this was just Blythe working through the Academy.

  Dan Brown has elements of smooth dinner jazz, lush arrangements and professional instrumentation. The songs are full of intelligent lyrics and romantic and spiritual imagery. Already he was experimenting with themes that would appear in his novels. ‘Birth of a King’, for example, could be Brown’s first attempts at writing something around the search for the Holy Grail. The lyrics are full of mystical symbolism and talk about a traveller arriving from a distant land to give the listener power and majesty.

  Despite all this effort the album didn’t sell. The main reason, according to Rogak, was because Brown didn’t want to be up on stage. He was content to be making the music but didn’t want to perform for people. He didn’t want to be in an industry where his image had to be created or moulded so he could be classified and indexed in a specific genre. ‘The problem was,’ Rogak states, ‘that his music was pop, and it put him in a position where he had to be a Barry Manilow in order for his music to be heard.’

  Could it be that he resented people less intelligent or educated than he was telling him how he should behave and look, and what was best for his music career?

  Before the CD was out, Brown was already working on the next one but he was growing tired of Hollywood. His educational background and the values instilled in him by Phillips Exeter and his parents meant he behaved differently than most people trying to make it big in the music industry. He wore a shirt, tie and jacket to meetings with producers and agents, making him stand out like a sore thumb. Most of the successful people he needed to talk to were self-made and many had dropped out of high school. Long hair, jeans, drugs, alcohol abuse, poor education – they were the embodiment of everything that Phillips Exeter was not. The only way for him to deal with such a gulf was to spend as much time teaching as he could. ‘With all the Hollywood hype, classrooms have a way of
keeping you grounded in reality,’ Brown said. ‘Everything I’ve accomplished in my life I owe to my education.’ [13]

  But he did one thing in Hollywood – he learned to speak the language of the music business by making everything positive and by exaggerating or spinning the various realities to suit the occasion. This talent for exaggeration and for putting his own unique interpretation on facts would become a trademark of his fiction. Perhaps the core of the mystery of Brown’s writing can be seen in a statement by Lisa Rogak: ‘His propensity for stretching the facts while steadfastly maintaining he spoke nothing but the truth would later provide significant fuel for his most rabid critics.’

  In 1993 Brown suddenly announced to his friends that he would be moving back to New Hampshire because he’d secured a publishing deal in New York and he’d be going back for a year to write. In truth, the deal was for a very small humour book, but Brown headed back to Exeter. Once there, he began teaching English and creative writing to students at Phillips Exeter Academy, supplementing his income by teaching Spanish to sixth, seventh and eighth grade pupils at the Lincoln Akerman School, a bicycle ride away in Hampton Falls. Blythe went with him. Four years later, at Pea Porridge Pond near Conway, New Hampshire, the couple were married.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  ONE DOOR CLOSES, ANOTHER OPENS

  And so Brown came full circle. The couple arrived back in Exeter where Brown immediately felt at home. His memories of growing up here were good ones. He was home again in the bosom of his family and friends.

  Living in the Franklin in Hollywood, Brown had been exposed to many different characters right on his doorstep, from rock stars who still hadn’t made it to stand-up comics and everything in between. These were people he would never have met back home in the conservative society of Exeter. From this natural source of material Brown decided to put together a list of some of the most bizarre people he’d seen.