An article by Lisa Taddeo, called "The Last Days of Heath Ledger", appears in the April issue of Esquire, which hits newsstands next week, just some seven weeks after the actor's death. According to The New York Times, the piece "finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food. None of this is exactly true." The article is written in the first person, as if it were a diary of Ledger's last days. It is described as a "fictionalized" account of actual events, as well as a meditation on "the indignities of celebrity," though it's not altogether clear to what degree actual journalistic investigation played a part in its creation, or how much it was ever supposed to. The Times reports that "Ms. Taddeo, an associate editor at Golf Magazine and an aspiring fiction writer, spent four days in restaurants and cafes and parks near where Mr. Ledger died", but that when Esquire editor David Granger gave her the assignment, he "simply wanted a writer on the scene." Whether it was fiction or nonfiction or anything in between was not specified. And, apparently, he wanted it fast.
Granger, who says that he wanted a piece about Ledger because, in the wake of the star's death, “I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about,” calls the piece "an earnest effort." It's officially labeled as "fiction" in the magazine's table of contents and isn't headlined on the cover because, Granger says, "“I purposely didn’t want it to be seen as exploitative in any way." He also talks a good game about wanting to make fiction topical and "risky, though taking risks with subjects that you think inspired a baffling degree of "fuss" while being extra careful not to seem "exploitative" sounds like some kind of tightrope walk. (Granger refers to his magazine's mission "to make [fiction] as urgent as nonfiction,” which might tickle readers who remember when Esquire was a leader in the "New Journalism" movement to gain for nonfiction as the excitement and literary credentials of fiction.) He couldn't have known, back in January, that the results of his and Lisa Taddeo's efforts would be released into the teeth of one more flurry of media reports about made-up memoirs and literary hoaxes. Granger and Taddeo aren't trying to fool anybody, but they might want to give some thought about whether the magazine that published the breakthrough journalism of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and John Sacks is really adding luster to its reputation by venturing into the gray spaces between fiction and nonfiction to speculate that Heath Ledger may have departed this world with banana-nut muffin on his breath.