 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
 illary Clinton once called a campaign aide a "fucking Jew bastard." Anna Wintour has daddy issues when it comes to powerful men. Jerry Seinfeld is, of course, some ambiguous form of gay.Jerry Oppenheimer has given us these gems via his unauthorized celebrity biographies, one after the other, in which he meticulously carves household names into quivering bite-sized chunks for us to devour.
Do your subjects know you're writing an unauthorized biography about them? Usually I send a letter telling the person they're going to be the subject of a major biography. I say that I'd like the opportunity for an interview. Usually they reject that, or give no response. Has anyone ever sat down and talked to you? No. With the Hilton book, Paris was in New York last summer at Macy's hawking her perfume. I introduced myself to [her parents] Rick and Kathy, and told them I was writing a biography on the Hilton dynasty. I especially told Kathy that I was really focusing on her mother, Big Kathy, and on her own life to show how Paris developed. And while she was very friendly, her reaction was, "Well I hope it's going to be a nice book," and she declined to be available for interviews. You describe her family as so messed up, it almost makes Paris seem sympathetic. The context of her family roots make her sympathetic. Her grandmother and her mother were both celebrity obsessed, star obsessed, fame obsessed, and Paris kind of had no chance to do anything but what she's doing today. She's quite successful in terms of the revenue she's generating, but had she been brought up in a differently, she might be the veterinarian she hoped to be when she was a child. She always loved animals. She tried to sneak her ferrets into the Vegas Hilton. But from the day she was born, her mother called her a star — that was her nickname. How much do you think she actually had to do with the release of the sex tape? It's impossible to prove if she had a role in doing that. Certainly her parents issued a hard-hitting statement denouncing the video, but in the end, they're very proud and happy with everything she's done. Why do you think Paris and Nicky have such different public roles? Nicky is the only one of the two who's had a marriage thus far. Paris pursued Paris Lastis and Stavros Niarchos III unsuccessfully. I know her parents were behind such marriages because they'd bring big money into the family. In the end, I think a corporate decision was made to keep Paris in the spotlight and have Nicky go into the background. Has anyone ever done anything to stop you from writing? My publisher received several letters from an attorney for the Hiltons. Martha Stewart made similar attempts. It's typical with celebrities or iconic figures. They'll tell people not to talk, they'll have a lawyer write a letter — it's routine. The goal is to have a chilling effect on the author's work. I remember Barbara Walters was very friendly with Liz Smith and Cindy Adams. They wrote columns where they had little items saying Barbara Walters is furious with this book and friends shouldn't talk. They passed along that sort of thing, which again is kind of ironic since Barbara Walters' main job is to elicit tears and emotion from everyone she interviews and claim she's a journalist. I read Liz Smith wasn't talking to you because she was angry you quoted her as saying she loved Barbara Walters. Yeah, I spent some time interviewing Liz Smith about Barbara Walters. She wasn't misquoted. Do you make enemies in your line of work? Are people always pissed at you? Probably my books are upsetting because I delve into areas of [celebrities'] lives that they wouldn't want the world to know about. I wouldn't expect them to be celebrating the publication of another Jerry Oppenheimer biography. Is someone going to write a biography on you? I doubt it. I have a boring life. It's difficult work, a lot of leg work. I wish I could just make it all up and write novels.
Yeah, there's one or two or three in every book. Suddenly, you hit a piece of absolute gold, and you just spend the next three months pursuing that area. When I started the Hilton book, I certainly knew a bit about the Hilton side of the family, but then people started asking, "Are you familiar with Big Kathy? She's Paris's grandmother and she's really a piece of work." She was unbelievable to read about. Was she the one who tried to drug her lover's wife? Yeah. She also crushed her ankle in the car door. It was she who put the screw in her stepdaughter's cheeseburger, fed dog food to the sick mother-in-law and who was promiscuous during her marriages. She was just a larger-than-life, really curious persona. She was sort of like the Rhoda Penmark character in The Bad Seed. Do you think that Paris has inherited any of that? I don't think so. This behavior of Paris's grandmother was so off the wall, and I have not seen any of that in Paris's behavior. She seems to have this mean-spirited attitude towards certain people, but that goes back to a sort of schoolgirl nastiness, combined with the fact that it generates a lot of publicity for her. There was that great photo of her and Britney Spears [in the New York Post]. They're arm in arm going to a Hollywood nightclub, and Britney is of course is hanging out of her dress. I read it and I thought, you know Britney is getting a hell of a lot more publicity today because of the K-Fed situation than Paris is, and Paris probably feels that hanging out with Brit is going to score more publicity for herself. And maybe Britney feels that being with Paris — well, I don't know if she thinks hanging out with Paris is going to help her image, but it's certainly going to generate more publicity. As this picture shows, which is practically an entire page. She does seem to cycle through friends. Yeah. I spoke to members of Paris's management team, and one of them told me that Paris's great expertise is pursuing and getting men, and generating publicity for herself. And that's why everyone signed on — and when I say signed on, I'm talking about all the companies that have her name on their products. She's making a lot of money on endorsements, her perfume line, her jewelry line, her book was a New York Times bestseller. She's been getting as much as a million dollars — or at least she claims she's made that much — for a personal appearance. She's kind of the culmination of everything Little and Big Kathy aspired to, even though she hasn't married rich yet. Both mother and grandmother had to marry rich because they were powerless in a way, but I wonder if Paris obliterates the need for that? I don't know. I hate to sound like a tabloid, but Paris hasn't been very successful with men. And because of her infamy she might have difficulty landing the kind of guy her mother would like her to land. Little and Big Kathy struck me as not only power obsessed, but also kind of asexual. Instead of using sex for pleasure or procreation, they used flirtation or even pregnancy to get what they wanted. Exactly. Paris does the same thing. She's suggested that she's not really the sexy person the world thinks she is, that it's all an act. One California disc jockey who interviewed me literally opened up with an audio track from the x-rated video. I think I've only seen that video once. The guy she's with is asking her to go down on him, and she's like, "Eww, I don't want to do that." It was really bizarre. In the book I talk about how Big Kathy arranged for "sex lessons" for Little Kathy, with a guy in a van outside their house. And in a Blender interview, Paris says her mother gave her sex lessons, and one of the things she told her was to not perform fellatio because it puts holes or craters in your cheeks. Your book on the Clintons is probably among your most controversial. What caused great controversy was that I devoted more time looking into Hillary Rodham's roots and discovered this string of anti-Semitism that ran through the family, and also the "fucking Jew bastard" quote, which surfaced during her Senate campaign. She called a press conference and was crying, and Bill came out of the Camp David Accords to say that she might say "fucking bastard," but would never denigrate Jews. This wasn't timed. I did not go into that book with any kind of political feeling about them one way or the other. I viewed them as Washington's Hollywood-style couple. How do you get people comfortable talking to you? There's no magical elixir to it. I introduce myself and say I'm writing a book. Most people cooperate. I try to stay away from people who don't want to be named. I'm not looking of people who have an axe to grind, but many of the people I write about have caused these issues for themselves. Martha Stewart, for example, made a lot of people mad. I also read that you were taking a survey about who your next book should be about. Any ideas yet? With all the celebrity television shows and the celebrity magazines and internet gossip and blogs, we're inundated with this whole culture and mentality. It's increasingly difficult to find an interesting subject who isn't just a flamboyant celebrity to write about. I thought Martha Stewart was a great subject around that time when I wrote that book. She was well known, but I was the only one who saw her as a subject for a serious biography. That's ten years ago. In that decade, the world has changed so much in terms of media inundation. It's difficult to find a subject who the public is not burnt out on and will spend $25 to read about. n°
©2006 hooksexup.com and Catrinel Bartolomeu. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| featured personal | ||
| partner links | ||
 Fark.comIt's not news, it's Fark.com  BuzzfeedPuppies, Photoshop disasters, viral videos and more. 
 Hendrick's a Most Unusual Gin |
||
| sponsored links | ||