‘Jackie and Me’
By Louis Bayard
Algonquin Books, 352 pages

‘Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood’
By Robert Dance
University Press of Mississippi, 344 pages

Biography is about the near and the far, especially when concerned with famous subjects. Reading about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, say, brings us into proximity with her even when the diligent biographer fails to deliver the goods: details about intimate experiences.

So, some of us turn to biographical novels that are not held back by the facts and thus can put us into the very moments of famous lives as they are passing by.  

I began musing over the synergy of biographies and biographical fiction, of how one leads to the other, as I read the beginning of Louis Bayard’s delectable novel, narrated by one of JFK’s pals, Lem Billings, who is watching Jackie in one of those weird juxtapositions that New Yorkers experience at almost any time:

“Of all places, the East Village. Miles from the Upper East Side, and there she was, sauntering down Avenue A in a linen skirt and black blouse. The Nina Ricci sunglasses clamped on like aviator’s goggles, the carriage nowhere more equestrian than when she stepped over the snoring, splayed drag queen…. I’m embarrassed to say that at the sight of her I did what every other New Yorker does. Stopped and gawked. As if she were some golden hind, yes, trotting out of a glade.”

Do the world-famous come to the city to be noticed or because, in a paradoxical way, they can be themselves behind their disguises? Biographies and biographical novels seek to penetrate such disguises, and writers like Mr. Bayard shrewdly exploit that desire for closeness in the way they construct their scenes.

Robert Dance also understands this dynamic of the near and the far, beginning his book with Garbo’s death in New York City at the age of 84; in retirement from the screen for 49 years, “she remained a vital, if peculiar presence in her adopted hometown…. An ultra famous public figure seeking a degree of anonymity and privacy in the teeming metropolis.”

Of course New Yorkers noticed Garbo. She liked to walk all over Manhattan and rode buses. Usually no one bothered her — perhaps protected by that line in “Camille” about wanting to be left alone. 

I cannot resist one more example of the near and the far from Mr. Dance’s fascinating book: On a Madison Avenue bus in the mid-1970s, an older woman sat down next to a young man, who thought: “Could it really be Garbo?” Without looking at her he said quietly, in German, “Is it You?” He waited. Thirty seconds later, he got his answer. “Ja.”

Such incidents capture how New York City, like biographies, can thrust you into the action — even if all you get is a “Ja.” Biographical novels aim to fill in the inevitable gaps in biographies Yet, for at least some readers, like me, biographies are preferable so long as they maintain some distance from their subjects.

Biographers run into problems when they are out of evidence and force the story. Explaining how Garbo stayed “almost completely apart from the social whirl of the Roaring Twenties Hollywood,” Mr. Dance continues: “How transgressive she must have seemed to those who cautiously watched her rise.” Perhaps. Others may have admired her aloofness. Who knows? The point is, “must have” tells us nothing and forecloses other possibilities.

I’m reminded of what Frank Sinatra said when a director told him how to do a scene. The actor/singer replied with one word: “Suggest.” So it is: Biographies are suggestive, not definitive. 

Sometimes the greatest achievement of a biography is to confront us with what we do not know, perhaps cannot know, but that we will continue to ponder nonetheless. What debilitates much biographical fiction is saying too much about the unknown. Certain novels do, of course, preserve the mysteries, creating narrators who cannot know it all or even get what they think they know wrong. 

With “Jackie and Me,” Mr. Bayard begins with a fallible narrator with whom we can identify. Especially with a title like “Savvy Sphinx,” Mr. Dance needed to leave a little more to the imagination.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews,” “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,” and “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag.”