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.
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