Shane Warne, Demi Moore, Slash: Best celebrity memoirs to read in lockdown
From private battles with addiction to salacious love affairs, these page-turning reads lift the lid on the personal lives of some of the world’s biggest stars. 32 DAYS TO GO.
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Six weeks stuck at home seems like a lifetime right now, but we’ve got you covered for daily entertainment.
Lockdown Life, a digital subscriber special, will give you a five minute brain break each day from coronavirus and arm you with some handy tips as well on keeping the family busy with movies to watch and bike rides to enjoy, and the adults well stocked with wine and recipes ideas — just to name a few.
So keep an eye out each lunchtime online.
Today we share some the best page-turning, celebrity memoirs to read.
You have to read this.
Sex, drugs and rock and roll; spice up your COVID-19 down time with some of the wildest celebrity memoirs. With weeks to go of this latest lockdown what better time to settle down with a good book, or rather a book full of star-fuelled tattle, raucous behaviour and royals behaving badly.
The best celebrity memoirs, autobiographies or biographies pull back the curtain on an A-list lifestyle and tell the stories from a time when bad behaviour was a feather in your cap.
There are plenty of titles to choose from but here are ten of the best – and full disclosure – I have read and own them all!
DEMI MOORE
Inside Out
From an undesirable childhood with an alcoholic mother to running with the Hollywood Brat Pack, celebrity marriages and scaling the peak of filmdom to become a box office queen and the highest paid actor in the world in the 90s, Demi Moore has lived a big life.
Inside Out is brutal with its truth, covering Moore’s addictions and failed relationships to her body image issues.
It also celebrates her screen successes such as St Elmo’s Fire, About Last Night, Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Charlie’s Angles.
Her marriage to Bruce Willis might not have lasted but their friendship has. Her marriage to her third husband, Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior, just sounds like a bad decision from the word go.
Breaking your sobriety to be a cool girlfriend, agreeing to threesomes and accidentally overdosing at a party; well there are three pretty good signs that it is time to exit that relationship.
ELTON JOHN
Me
This is gossip heaven from the man who knows everyone and has done everything.
You want names? Try this for a sample of those mentioned
in the book: Princess Diana, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, David Bowie, Gianni Versace, Rod Stewart, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan, the list goes on.
This is a tale of the madness of celebrity and addiction, of love, human frailty and fame, and more than anything a celebration of extraordinary talent.
Elton tells the good and the bad moments with an irresistible self deprecation.
Among many quotable stories, Elton recounts staying at a London hotel while renovating his home.
Those were the days before he kicked drugs, so calling his record company and demanding they do something about the wind that was keeping him awake seemed perfectly reasonable.
“I absolutely was crazy and deluded enough to ring the international manager of Rocket and ask him to do something about the wind outside my hotel room. To his lasting credit he gave my request very short shrift.”
A great read.
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES.
Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton
The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell
When it comes to a good, gossipy celebrity read the world of Diana, Princess of Wales never disappoints.
Her death in a car crash in a Paris tunnel with her lover Dodi Fayed in August 1997 launched an industry of memoirs connected to her life.
One book is not enough when it comes to Diana, so here are three to get you started.
Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story predates her death and is extraordinary as Diana provided Morton with the content via secret tape recordings.
She is an angry, wronged, frustrated woman ready to blow up her gilded cage.
At the time of release the impact of this book was seismic.
Diana’s devoted butler Paul Burrell poured his heart and plenty of royal secrets into this memoir A Royal Duty.
He famously claimed in the book that the Princess had nine secret lovers including a Hollywood actor, a novelist, a sporting legend, a musician, a politician, a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a billionaire businessman.
Journalist, editor and author Tina Brown wrote what is arguably the most comprehensive and balanced biography of the princess.
Brown knew Diana and her book notes her failings and foibles as well as her strengths and achievements.
It is a great read written by someone who,
while she knew her subject, did not have stars in her eyes.
ANDRE AGASSI
Open
Sporting autobiographies don’t come any better than Open by tennis great Andre Agassi.
He set a high bar for any sporting identity planning to put pen to paper with this book released in 2009.
Start with a guy who hated tennis who went on to become the world’s No1 player, add some Hollywood star power with him dating Barbra Streisand and marrying Brooke Shields, and then throw in unstable hairpieces, wacky on court attire, playing without underwear, a party lifestyle and some dabbling with crystal meth.
Agassi, of course, then cleans up his act, reaches his true potential on the court and wins the heart of Steffi Graf.
Only Agassi could have moments like this when preparing for the final of the 1990 French Open: “My tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic. Whether or not it’s slipping, I imagine that it’s slipping. With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay, like a hawk my father shot from the sky. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: ‘Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?’”
SLASH
Slash
The Guns N’Roses guitarist recounts his career in the band during a time in the ‘80s and ‘90s when music was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll.
This is a raucous and wild romp and frankly how Slash (real name Saul Hudson) survived his self destructive appetites and is still touring today is a miracle.
The hedonism and insanity of the band as they strived for fame, hit the jackpot with their Appetite for Destruction album and then fell apart through addiction and a life without limits, borders on exhausting.
Slash comes across as an extremely easy to like character even in his most messed up days.
And he certainly was messed up.
Sometime around 1989 he even ignored a warning from David Bowie that he was endangering his psyche and life with his junkie habits.
Finally came a bender to end all benders at a golf resort in Arizona where he lost his marbles and thought he was being chased by tiny demons.
In his efforts to escape his hallucinations he ran through a shower door, then through a glass sliding door, tore naked through the resort’s dining room, kitchen and lobby, before taking off down a fairway leaving shocked and disturbed guests in his wake.
He was finally found by police hiding behind a lawnmower in a greenkeeper’s shed.
Not surprisingly he was sent to rehab soon after that performance.
SHANE WARNE
No Spin
His extraordinary cricket talent has allowed Shane Warne to live a life best described as a boy’s own adventure.
He is one of the greatest cricketers to have ever played the game, a brand and a business.
He picked up a cool $2 million for appearing on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here.
He dated international beauty Elizabeth Hurley and calls the rich and famous, from all walks of life, mates.
And that is the key to his charm. Warne is a smart bloke who sees the positive side of everything and just has a crack.
This is a bold, honest autobiography that satisfies sporting fans and those with more of a taste for tattle.
BOBBIE BROWN
Dirty Rocker Boys
The name might not be familiar but anyone who grew up watching MTV or was a hair-metal fan would have heard of Bobbie Brown.
She was a rock music “video vixen” and starred as a roller skating Barbie-like creature in a hideous song called Cherry Pie by the forgettable band Warrant.
Her book however, better described as a groupie memoir, is gossip gold.
Brown was a club bunny on LA’s Sunset Strip dating the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Rob Pilatus from Milli Vanilli and Dave Navarro.
She married Warrant’s Jani Lane and was engaged to Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee and she hated her party girl, Playboy nemesis, Pamela Anderson.
“Wait, what happened? Last week, Tommy Lee was my fiance. This week, he’s married. To Pamela Anderson,” so goes the first line of the book.
“The world knew me as Bobbie Brown, fiancee of Tommy Lee, ex-wife of Jani Lane, cutie-patootie from the ‘Cherry Pie’ video on MTV. They’d yet to experience Bobbie Brown, wrathful, world-weary drug addict with no pride left to lose. I put on lipstick, a Wonderbra and some assless chaps. I was ready to hit the clubs.”
Welcome to a very different world!
BOY GEORGE
Take It Like A Man
Long before The Voice came Take It Like A Man, Boy George’s autobiography that was released in 1995.
This is a catty confessional where he names names and does not try to paint himself as an angel.
From his life growing up in a working-class Irish Catholic family, to discovering the London club scene where he worked as a cloak room assistant to international pop stardom the book covers off his love, affairs, career highs and lows, run ins with the law, and his horrible battle with drugs.
It is bitchy and brilliant and provides an enjoyable window into the UK pop world of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
He was only 33 when he wrote this autobiography and he had done a hell of a lot by that relatively tender age.
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