The ghost writer

One night in the spring of 1993, the writer Armistead Maupin received an urgent phone call from a woman named Vicki Johnson. She sounded despondent. For months, Maupin, the author of the Tales of the City novels, had been talking on the phone with Vicki's adopted son, Anthony Godby Johnson, several times a week, and had come to consider Tony a close friend. He was funny, kind, sensitive and smart. Although he was only 15, he had written a harrowing memoir about being abused, both physically and sexually, by his parents and their friends, and then being rescued by his new mum, Vicki, a social worker from New Jersey. Maupin had read the galleys of the book, A Rock and a Hard Place, and had been deeply moved by it. He wrote a blurb for the book jacket and got in touch with the author, knowing that they didn't have much time to become acquainted: Tony revealed in the book that he had contracted Aids as a result of his abuse, and his health was deteriorating rapidly.

I visited Maupin recently at his home in San Francisco. He told me that when Vicki Johnson called that evening she had said that Tony might not live through the night and was asking for Armistead. "I waited with tremendous anxiety as she passed the phone to him," Maupin said. "Tony's voice was small, and he was breathing with great difficulty. I thought, `My God, this child is going to die while I'm talking to him.' We started talking about death, and I told him about my mother's funeral, the most horrible day of my life, and how I looked up and saw that one of the gravediggers had a T-shirt on that said `Virginia Is for Lovers'. Tony laughed, and afterwards he often referred to that moment. I told Tony, finally, that I loved him. He said it really helped him, and I felt heroic. I went to sleep feeling that I alone, my voice, had made that kind of difference in a child's life."

The first thing I'd noticed in Maupin's house was a photograph of Tony in the living-room. A handsome boy with brown hair, blue eyes and a wide, wary smile, he held a pencil in his hand as if caught in the act of writing. That photo is in many other homes around the world, for Tony Johnson has an extraordinary ability to connect with people and become an important figure in their lives. Through letters and phone calls over the past 10 years, Tony has befriended a wide array of people, from writers, television personalities and pop stars to a New Jersey priest and an Israeli rabbi, blacks and whites, gays and straights, ex-nuns and lonely old men.

A Rock and a Hard Place, which was published in 1993, is now in its fifth paperback print run and Tony has become a symbol of modern victimhood, his body torn apart by the most appalling end-of-the- millennium traumas - child abuse and Aids. Their depredations eventually robbed Tony of his left leg, his spleen, a testicle and the sight in one eye. Yet even as he became bedridden from recurrent pneumonia, his character sparkled. "I'm going to start smoking to even out the cough," he'd say to friends. At times angry, at times bewildered, Tony always brimmed with the passionate moral authority of doomed youth. Pay attention to those in pain, Tony said. Listen to those who are different. Hug those you love. To the faithful friends who continue to communicate with him, Tony is nothing less than a magical boy.

Armistead Maupin, 57, exudes goodwill and a sense of mischief. But as he discussed how he began to have doubts about Tony and his story, he looked miserable. As the months and years passed, Maupin explained, he couldn't help wondering how Tony kept on living, even as he kept on almost dying. He didn't understand why Tony would never allow his friends to meet him. He couldn't help wondering and hating himself for the thought that Tony might be too good to be true.

The first public record of Tony Johnson is a beguiling letter he wrote in August 1991 to Paul Monette, a US National Book Award- winning writer and gay activist, who himself had Aids. In it, the 13- year-old Tony, who was then calling himself Anthony Robert Johnson, said that he too was very sick, and that in the hospital he had bartered sports magazines for Monette's books Love Alone and Borrowed Time: An Aids Memoir. In a looping cursive Tony wrote, "I just wanted to say, Mr Monette, that I'm glad I traded with that guy in the hospital... I hope you're doing good. I also love the way you write. I sat with the dictionary to read your book but I learned lots of new words." He included a photo and signed off, "Your friend, Tony."

Monette's companion, Winston Wilde, was there when Monette received Tony's letter. "Paul wasn't going to reply because he thought the letter was a little strange," Wilde told me recently. "I said, `How can you not answer this kid? He's dying!' So Paul wrote back." Wilde, a psychotherapist, said, "That's a real regret in my life. Before I knew it, Paul and Tony were talking on the phone every night for hours."

Monette later wrote that because Tony was dying, and because he was "so disarming, so ebullient, loved to laugh so much", he became one of the few people who "could really understand what I was on the brink of". The more Monette heard of Tony's story, the more convinced he became that Tony should write it down. He referred the boy to his agent, Wendy Weil, and to his editor at Crown, David Groff. When Tony hit an impasse writing A Rock and a Hard Place and worried that no one wanted to hear an obscure boy's tale of woe, Monette urged him to remember that "the greatest human testament we have from the Second World War was written by a 14-year-old girl".