Paul Thomas: Celebrities dish up dirt

It's been a rewarding few days for aficionados of payback, juicy gossip and celebrity cat-fights.

First there were the excerpts, hand-picked for their venom, from David Lange's autobiography. Then we had Marilyn Monroe, supposedly live from her psychiatrist's couch. In fact when you read the small print, it turned out to be at several removes from the horse's mouth but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

With its blanket dismissals ("Dear God! What a terrible lot of people they were!" Lange splutters about his Cabinet colleagues) and withering put-downs ("Russell Marshall was shallow, shabby, endlessly self-seeking") our former Prime Minister's haughty, disdainful tone gave off a faint echo of an even harder marker.

Eventually it came to me. The dust-jacket of The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, a 300,000-word toe-crusher published in 1976, is dotted with words such as "ruthlessly candid" and "malicious". This is one instance when the hype barely does justice to the reality.

How's this for superciliousness? "We went on to Lords where the cricket was slow and the crowd almost entirely made up of shits." What on earth would he have made of the howling mob on the Eden Park terraces?

The great novelist stays with some people called Blezard who live near Tring, repaying their hospitality thus: "Ruth Blezard is a fat woman with ugly hair and a puzzled expression in her eyes. Her father is paralysed through evil living; her mother a fool."

Dissoluteness takes various forms, although the common factors are drink taken in prodigious quantities and mild depravity.

For all its back-biting - and, of course, historical significance - the Lange autobiography appears to lack this sort of sensational material.

For that we must go to the Marilyn tapes, where we learn she had to act up a storm to get then-husband Arthur Miller to take a carnal interest in the sexiest woman in the world. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has sat through Miller's interminable, windy play Death Of A Salesman.

Marilyn had a one-night stand with Joan Crawford and decided that was quite enough of that, which made Crawford spiteful; she tried to dump Bobby Kennedy via a third party - his brother, who happened to be President at the time.

She also claimed to have read all of Shakespeare, which might explain why she was always late on to the set.

The increasingly common practice of putting real historical figures into works of fiction has dire implications for the reputations of famous dead people, given the fiction writer's freedom to embellish and the fact that you can't defame the dead.

Devotees of skank and scuttlebutt owe it to themselves to read James Ellroy's magnificently lurid American Tabloid, which dishes a mountain range of dirt on American celebrities and public figures en route to illuminating JFK's assassination.

An FBI surveillance of Marilyn records that in a six-week period she "entertained" six showbiz figures ranging from Yves Montand to David Seville, two off-duty marines, four pizza delivery boys, a disc jockey and plucky bantamweight Fighting Harada. This, too, might explain why she was always late on to the set.

New Zealand has its own sub-genre of the score-settling, spill-the-beans memoir: the sporting hero's ghost-written life story.

Like the political memoir, it largely involves putting in black and white what the author used to say about people behind their backs and as we know, that's rarely flattering. The shared theme is revenge on those who stymied the author's grand ambition, whether it was to build a better New Zealand or win the World Cup.

Coaches are lashed either for nannying man-management or brutal indifference, derided for either being obsessively technical or complacently old-fashioned. But if you can be bothered reading on, you'll eventually track this river of bile to its source: the fateful moment when the coach told our hero: "Sorry, mate, you're dropped."

One senses the reading public is growing weary of these self-serving stocking fillers. There's also the law of diminishing returns: we've heard it all before.

Who needs to read Justin Marshall's book when, for the past few years, he's been whining like a high-speed drill about anything and everything in the game of rugby that isn't entirely to his satisfaction?

But maybe these sporting men of letters have another motivation. When he was manager of the Black Caps, John Graham was stunned to learn that one of our leading cricketers hadn't read a book in his life.

Perhaps, like Elle Macpherson, our sportsmen only read books they've written themselves.