Hollywood Hack: Adventures of a Celebrity Wannabe

Robert Kerwin loved being surrounded by celebrities. Cruise, Newman, Streisand, Hepburn, Nicholson, The Duke, Kojak and the Fonz. You name them, he knew them. Hollywood Hack is a heartfelt account of what extreme obsession with celebrity can do to ordinary people. As a celebrity profiler for hundreds of media outlets for more than twenty years, Kerwin tells the story of someone desperately needing to be Somebody, and believing celebrity is the answer. He wants badly to “arrive,” to be on the inside ... to rise out of a workaday existence and into the world of the rich and famous. Kerwin works his way up the celebrity ladder and becomes hooked by the allure and endless possibilities that seem to come with fame and fortune. Along the way he meets hundreds of celebrities, who are revealed as brittle and often wicked caricatures of themselves. An often hilarious and sometimes heartrending portraiture of celebrity, Hollywood Hack is peppered with pertinent anecdotes (including many confrontational scenes) about every star from Mae West to Tom Cruise and beyond; also it takes a good look at the inner workings of high-end celebrity journalism. Though brimming with household names, this is not another dose of cool, slick Hollywood trivia tell-all. The protagonist here is non-cool and non-slick; Hollywood Hack is about Us and Them.