Fourteen months ago, when word broke that Jerry Oppenheimer was setting out to do a biography of the Hilton clan, an item appeared in the New York Post’s Page Six: “Kathy Hilton has told friends, ‘If anyone participates in the book, they will be banned from the family.'” The item went on to say she even “threatened several people, telling them, ‘I can make your life very difficult [if you help Oppenheimer]. I am a very powerful woman.'”
No one’s saying just who leaked to the Post, but Oppenheimer, who later got the book excerpted in Page Six: The Magazine, acknowledged the snippet of gossip was like manna from heaven for him. “It did a 180 on her and came back to bite her in the ass,” is how he put it, sitting in a Japanese restaurant in Westport, Conn., near his home. “People just came out of the woodwork, saying, ‘this b—- is so arrogant to claim she has the power to hurt people.'”
If she even said it to people, that is.
Oppenheimer, 63, began chuckling, then launched into an equally self-serving story about Martha Stewart, about whom he also wrote a biography. During his research for that book, he showed up at the 92nd Street Y one night to watch Charlie Rose interview Stewart. “She was another one of my targets,” he said. “And the audience was able to put questions on the coffee table, so I placed mine, and he did pick it.”
And the one question he most wanted to ask her was, naturally, about himself. “It was something like, ‘How do you feel about this book being written about you?’ And she began really stuttering and stumbling. She just got so mad,” he said.
This brought another big smile to Oppenheimer’s face. He’s bald, paunchy, and was wearing round glasses and a brown corduroy jacket. The effect — or affect — was quasi-intellectual. He is obviously well practiced in telling jokes about the subjects of his books, and if you don’t laugh at them yourself, he does it for you. This is a guy who likes to see his subjects squirm.
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In his 20 years as a serial tormenter and perennial runner-up to celebrity biographers Kitty Kelley and Ed Klein, he’s written seven tabloid-esque biographies, all of them unflattering to their subjects in the extreme. The titles are meant to tantalize. After “Idol: Rock Hudson,” about the actor who had just died from AIDS, he wrote “Barbara Walters: An Unauthorized Biography”; “Martha Stewart: Just Desserts”; “The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Ethel Skakel Kennedy: An American Drama of Power, Privilege, and Politics”; “State of a Union,” about the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton; “Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon,” and “Front Row,” about Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue. Not surprisingly, given the genre he specializes in, all of his subjects slammed the door on him. But they could not get all of their underlings, ex-lovers, enemies, envious competitors and childhood friends to do the same.
Now he’s written “House of Hilton,” a genealogy that aspires to explain how a hotel magnate’s dysfunctional family produced an airhead heiress who succeeded in making American celebrity culture all about Paris. The book, published by Crown, comes out Tuesday and pins much of the blame (or the credit, the two being one and the same) on Paris Hilton’s mother, “Little Kathy,” and her grandmother, “Big Kathy.”
“It’s a continuum of wildness and exhibitionism and desire for fame and celebrity,” said Oppenheimer, who talks like his own press release. “I’ve actually come away from this book feeling sympathy for this girl [Paris]. It seems she didn’t have a chance coming out of this line of ambitious, driven stage mothers.”
Of course, if there ever was a just-be-sure-you-spell-my-name-right celebrity, it’s Paris Hilton, and she’d probably be happy to take her place alongside Barbara Walters and Martha Stewart as a target of this kind of takedown. “I do enjoy writing about powerful women,” he said. “I think they’re more interesting than powerful men. I’m not sure why.”
Some would argue (and The New York Times critic Janet Maslin has) that Oppenheimer is something of a misogynist. His former agent, Robert Gottlieb, offered an alternative explanation. “More women buy celebrity biographies than men, so it would follow that the majority of subjects would be women. That’s not a new phenomenon,” he said. (Gottlieb’s other big client is Ed Klein, he of the famous “biography” of Hillary Clinton, that among other things, insinuated she was a lesbian whose daughter was conceived when her husband, the future president, allegedly raped her.) Gottlieb continued: “Go back to Kitty Kelley’s biography on Elizabeth Taylor. Or look at all the books about J.F.K. Jr., which came out because women are attracted to him. All of it is designed for the women’s market.”
Whoever is buying these books, there’s no question that female subjects tend to sell better than male ones. Oppenheimer’s biggest seller was Martha, his biggest flop, Jerry Seinfeld. “I thought because 39 million people watched his show, there would be real interest in a book, but it turned out people just liked the TV show,” he said. And inevitably, pinning the blame on his subject, he said: “He wasn’t a terribly interesting guy.”
Oppenheimer would not say the same for his female subjects, whom he universally called “fascinating,” a backhanded compliment that mainly conveys there is loads more dirt to dig up on them. Kathy was a “gold digger,” his sources claimed. Martha was “raging,” “furious” “seething.” Walters was “aggressive and “rude.” Wintour was “brusque,” “snarky” and a driven “perfectionist.” (Indeed, if there are 100 words in Webster’s Thesaurus that one could substitute for cold, Oppenheimer surely used at least 99 of them on the “icy editrix.”)
As with the genre itself, there are some elements of truth in what Oppenheimer writes. But then he fails to add dimension to his subjects’ gossip-column personas. Oppenheimer assumes the role of prosecutor, fringe characters become star witnesses and the subject winds up the defendant. Not surprisingly, the good things worth saying about his targets are left out, or parenthetically suggested.
“I don’t try to do a number on them,” he said. “With Martha, I spent months trying to find people who would give me another take. I tried with Little Kathy and Big Kathy. It was the same thing. People just opened their doors and said, ‘Finally!'” He let out another laugh. (This explanation is the common line taken by celebrity biographers, the one they always use when asked to respond to the claim that they’re practitioners of the hatchet job.)
In his book on Hillary and Bill Clinton (“It’s really more about Hillary than Bill,” he noted) Oppenheimer recounted an anecdote supposedly told to him by Paul Fray, who helped run Bill Clinton’s first race for Congress. Hillary, in a fit of anger at him, allegedly yelled: “You f—king Jew b—–d.”
It’s a sexy anecdote for a biographer to have, but how well sourced is it really?
Here are a couple of things about Fray that Oppenheimer failed to mention in the book: His license to practice law was revoked after he took a bribe and altered a court document. He had a brain disorder and was, for a time, addicted to phenobarbital. Gail Sheehey, who’d also written a book on the Clintons and was willing to hang certain parts of her testimony on Fray, nevertheless decided to leave that one out. When controversy erupted over the book, she chimed in, calling Fray “kind of flaky.” In the book, Oppenheimer claimed the remark also was heard by Fray’s wife and a guard. But it later turned out the guard might not have been inside the room when the remark was made, after all. “I think I had him outside the room and he was inside, or I had him inside the room and he was outside,” Oppenheimer recalled. “I don’t remember. But I stand by it completely.”
Stand by what?
“I don’t think Hillary is an anti-Semite, ultimately,” Oppenheimer added.
This is, of course, the celebrity biography’s other stumbling point: There’s inevitably a straw that breaks the camel’s back. The same thing that gets the book a headline on the Drudge Report or in Page Six inevitably becomes a reliable indication of the book’s ultimate unreliability.
“Having written one of those books myself and having read the vast majority of them, there’s some fairly obvious things these books have in common,” said David Brock, a Washington based, former right-wing ideologue who wrote a story for the American Spectator Magazine based on Arkansas state troopers alleging Bill Clinton’s hypersexual activities, and then followed it with a critical biography of Hillary. Today, he has come out of the closet, has broken with his old ideology and devotes his life to the right-wing media conspiracies on a highly successful Web site he founded, MediaMatters. “They need a headline to generate a big sale; there’s a market pressure to print a rumor that may be embellished or not totally locked down,” Brock said. “You need to build buzz and publishers are notoriously lax about checking the facts. Then the sensational allegation in Oppenheimer’s book gets leaked to Drudge, activates the right-wing talk show machinery, hits the tabloids and sells a lot of books.”
According to a former colleague who knows him well: “A lot of what Jerry writes is based on what he thinks will sell. It’s a tabloid mentality.”
And, of course, that’s where he made his mark. After an auspicious start as a reporter at the Washington Star in the Seventies, he went to work at ABC News briefly, then settled in for a stay at the National Enquirer in its Washington bureau. “It was a great training ground for young journalists and a great place for veteran journalists,” Oppenheimer said. “Shelley Ross was an editor there and went on to become the producer of ‘Good Morning America.’ Judith Regan was an articles editor there. They were advertising in the Harvard and Yale newspapers offering $60,000 to graduates. It was my high-paying journalistic welfare department and I have nothing bad to say about my experience there.”
The Enquirer later excerpted the Martha book.
Still, it bugs him when his subjects (and others) cite his Enquirer experience as evidence that he’s disreputable. “It’s annoying,” said Oppenheimer. “It’s sad. I hate the term ‘unauthorized biography’ because independent/unauthorized biography is investigative reporting. And it’s a much truer portrait than a bull—- celebrity memoir written with a ghostwriter. From journalism to book writing, I’ve always walked a tight wire. Investigative reporting in newspapers is dead today. I work my ass off and track people down and get doors slammed in my face. That’s the kind of journalist I am.”