Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives & the Hollywood Death Trip

John Gilmore has seen the Hollywood dream come true. John Gilmore has also seen that dream turn to nightmare. This book of memoirs is his story. Now, before you go off and say "who the hell is John Gilmore, and why should I care about his story?" Please realize that John Gilmore has not lived your average Hollywood life. John Gilmore was born and raised in Hollywood to an actress mother and an LAPD father. In his life he has seen some of the brightest stars born, reach their apex only to burnout after a few very short years. He has seen Hollywood make stars and he has seen life snuffed out in the same town. John Gilmore has lived a life that few could ever imagine, the pages of this book detail that life and the lives of so many immortal stars that have come and gone from his life.

Gilmore ropes the reader in from the get go as he shows the reader a young Janis Joplin just getting her start in the bars of San Francisco.

This is a young, broke Janis Joplin just learning the excess that would make her famous, a young woman searching for something, anything and finding it in sex and drugs. Gilmore leaves her In a Chinatown drugstore sitting on a stool at the counter, listening to the jukebox and eating French Fries with a picture of Hank Williams pressed to her stomach. From that point on, the reader has no choice but to continue digging deeper into the pages of Laid Bare to see what type of hope, sorrow, realized and unrealized dreams and whether success or death await the unwitting subjects.

John Gilmore ran in some fast circles when he was a young actor and his life seemed to cross paths with people at important times in their lives. Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper. Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg. Lenny Bruce, Hank Williams. Ed Wood. Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Charles Manson. Charles Schmid, Jim Morrison; Gilmore knew them all. However, where an author of lesser talent would focus his prose on the stories of these famous individuals and just incorporate himself as a peripheral figure, Gilmore never stoops to that level. The aforementioned people ran through his life and this book is nothing short of a retelling of a fantastic life: John Gilmore's life. That is where the strength of Gilmore's writing lies, in that the reader is drawn into the pages of the book, the writing grabs like a chokehold and doesn't let go.

The author does not disappoint with the tales he tells one bit. After gaining the reader's attention with the Joplin piece, Gilmore goes on to detail his various attempts to break into films and the problems he ran into when he would not play the Hollywood game with the directors that wanted him. As one director stated, Gilmore did not understand Hollywood etiquette. In this section we are introduced to the one figure that looms very large in Gilmore's life and in this book. James Dean. Gilmore shared a very special bond with Dean and probably got as close to the tortured actor as anyone could have. The author derails all aspects of his relationship with Dean in this book and there are some very revealing scenes. However the most interesting thing to see is the reaction of other actors such as Steve McQueen to the success and death of Dean. Gilmore shows McQueen to be nothing more than a shallow self-serving lowlife, the Stereotypical Hollywood shallow scum. To say that James Dean haunted and perhaps still haunts the life of John Gilmore is an understatement.

These are just a few of the highlights from Laid Bare, to detail every piece of the story would be impossible, there is simply too much happening in this book. In fact. Gilmore himself turned the short pieces that focus on Charles Manson, Charles Schmid, and James Dean into their own fantastic books. Suffice it to say, that Gilmore saw and lived the best and the worst of Hollywood. This is perhaps the most honest and unflinching look at Hollywood that 1 have ever laid eyes on. The only other book that could compare would be Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. The difference between the two books being that Anger was basically a historian in his, Gilmore lived this one.

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.

Official John Gilmore Site