So I knew this book would be trashy, but I didn’t expect it to be actual trash. I’m gonna finish it, but I hated this book enough that I couldn’t wait to be done to start my review. (Edit: I finished it. It also states that Jack Nicholson got his break playing the crazed dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors – he was masochistic, but it was the dentist who was crazed – and credits Yeardley Smith as the voice of Bart Simpson when she’s actually Lisa in the show. This takes seconds to google, Robert Schnakenberg)
This is some sub-National-Enquirer level writing. There are so many obvious inaccuracies and rumors that I can’t believe anything in this book unless I already knew it as fact from before.
For instance, Orson Welles’ entry mentions a supposed prank he pulled at a pool party where he put a chemical that turned red in contact with urine and embarrassed all the guests.
That. Did. Not. Happen.
That chemical doesn’t exist. This is the sort of urban legend kids pass around to scare each other out of peeing in the pool. Urine is mostly water. It would be essentially undetectable. That this was related as fact is infuriating. Tell it as a “there was a rumor that Welles…” if you feel it needs inclusion, but really, why? When this doesn’t stand up to basic logical consideration, much less research, why add it?
There are many such factual inaccuracies, and the sensationalistic writing style just highlights that this book is all sizzle and no steak. No one is overweight, they’re corpulent. No one is beautiful, they’re pulchritudinous. Everyone is treated as aberrant.
It’s an ugly, lying, hateful book. Zero stars.