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LAID BARE
A Memoir of Wrecked
Lives
and the Hollywood Death Trip
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Here is the definitive amoral account of Hollywood in the '50s and
'60s, born screaming out of Gilmore's deceptively unassuming genius for surgical
revelation and obsessive anecdotal analysis. Laid Bare
dispassionately itemizes the fundamental depths of sexual superficiality,
selfishness and genital dyspepsia to redefine all previous reports of the
destructive compulsions that devour ambitious celebrities.
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This is a graphic
vision of Holly wood--a dark, new existentialism full of grossly compelling
characters whose self-respect, sincerity and sense of identity are as thin as
the slime that seems to cover their every activity. Magnificently
necessary!"
A
powerful chronicler of the American Nightmare through his gripping examinations
of near mythic California murders (the Black Dahlia, Tate-LaBianca), Gilmore now
draws upon his personal experiences to turn his sights on our morbid obsession
with celebrity, and the ruinous price it exacts from those who pursue it.
With caustic clarity and 20/20 hindsight,
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Gilmore unstintingly recounts his
relationships with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jack Nicholson, Brigitte Bardot,
Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg, and many other denizens of the twentieth
century's dubious Pantheon.
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Also see:
LA Despair: A
Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times
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"The French have a name for this kind of writing–temoignage
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the literature of the witness; crossing genre, auto- biography or reportage, but
most important-fact-lived. We reel through sex with stars of both sexes, through
brushes with fame and sleaze, and meet the freaks, whores, grifters
and producers of the slide-side of Hollywood existence.
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Gilmore's odyssey shows an
unflinching exploration of the strange paradox in narcissism, with its underlying self-hatred. Gilmore aims for the heart of a thing–the truth, the
thing in itself, and hits the bull’s eye with incredible accuracy. He is one
of the today’s most intense and most uncompromising writers...
A true literary
artist.”--Donald Shepherd on
LAID BARE.
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(Donald Shepherd is the author of
Jack Nicholson and Duke:
The Life and Times of John Wayne; The Hollow Man–Bing Crosby, etc)
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"John
Gilmore is one of the best nonfiction writers of our time, the type of writer
that grabs the reader alternately by the throat and by the heart. The stories he
tells in this, his first book of memoirs tell tales of broken hearts, broken
dreams and broken lives. John Gilmore has crossed paths with the famous and the
infamous and while some have walked away with their lives and souls intact, most
have been carried off by anger and death, we should feel fortunate that John
Gilmore has remained behind to tell his stories." --Maximum Rock 'n' Roll
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"Reading Laid Bare is like finding a
series of lost diaries by such icons as James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Janis
Joplin, all of whom John Gilmore--an LA-born child actor--hung out (if not
slept) with before they become iconic. Beautifully written in a style
somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski..."
--Sight and Sound
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and