KEY POINTS:
Who steals my purse steals nothing," the pernicious Iago tells Othello, "but he who filches from me my good name makes me poor indeed."
Once upon a time maybe, but in a society that barely distinguishes between fame and notoriety, reputations have become like cockroaches: immune to almost
anything short of a nuclear blast.
Elvis' legend emerged intact from Albert Goldman's hatchet job, still the template for the unauthorised slash-and-burn biography.
Ditto John Lennon; ditto Frank Sinatra and Jackie Onassis who got the treatment from Goldman successor Kitty Kelley; ditto poets and star-crossed lovers Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who had the consolation of being savaged in elegant prose.
Thus emboldened, famous people are now cutting out the middleman by authorising posthumous tell-all biographies in which their wives, lovers, friends, collaborators and offspring seek to outdo one another with the luridness of their anecdotes.
Recent examples are Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson compiled by his long-time patron, Jann Wenner, editor-publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, by his wife, Crystal.
Products of the swinging 1960s, the outlaw journalist and the rock 'n roller had much in common.
They were both substance abusers on a massive scale. After many abortive attempts, Zevon sobered up and remained that way for 17 years but Thompson couldn't quit or even pull back without undermining the Dr Gonzo persona which was integral to his success. Once Dr Gonzo went into rehab, the gig was over.
Both repaid devotion with relentless infidelity, domineering selfishness and occasional physical abuse. Both exploited personal and professional relationships, often for no other reason than that they could.
Because they were allowed to get away with it, they came to assume that prima donna outrageousness was not merely okay, it was expected of them.
In celebrity culture everyone, star and sycophant alike, gets sucked into the fame trap where unequal, parasitic relationships are the norm. As Zevon's son says: "Nobody with a decent circle of friends could have gotten away with what my dad got away with."
Both were gun nuts who liked blasting inanimate objects, especially if it caused an explosion. Despite their counter-culture credentials and reputations as trouble waiting to happen, they were drawn to the showbiz elite. .
As brilliant fruitcakes tend to do, they gravitated towards each other: "Complained to Hunter about my skin and hair loss," writes Zevon in this illuminating diary entry. "He proposed dragging me behind a boat in the Ohio River at dawn. I told him the psoriasis was affecting the 'disrobing in front of strangers aspect of my career'. Hunter said, 'Maybe it's time to stop - you don't want to be a filthy old man disrobing in front of strangers'. Advice on maturity from HST! And he is right!"
The Zevon book is more interesting because his narrative is less familiar (on a personal level I was intrigued to learn that the woman I saw him embracing moistly at Adelaide airport in 1990 was former US Vice-President Walter Mondale's daughter) and his eccentricity less self-conscious.
His father was a gangster, best man at the wedding of Mickey Cohen, the then head of the West Coast mob. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, was insanely superstitious and collected grey extra large Calvin Klein T-shirts. It was assumed he wore them once then threw them away in the Hollywood manner, as deranged film producer Don Simpson did with black Levi jeans, but they remained in their wrappers. After his death, they were distributed among his friends.
Given the circumstances of his death, it was perhaps fortunate that Zevon was an ironist.
For years, he sent gofers in search of cigarettes whose health warnings didn't mention "the C word". Heart disease and emphysema were fine but not the C word. Life'll Kill Ya, his last album before he was diagnosed, pretty much out of the blue, with incurable cancer, includes a jokey song foreshadowing the bombshell: "Well, I went to the doctor; I said, 'I'm feeling kind of rough.' He said, 'Let me break it to you, son - your sh*t's f****d up.'"
And when the news of his imminent death sparked renewed interest in his work, he nailed the irony thus: "It's a damned hard way to make a living, having to die to get them to know you're alive."
