Secret Celebrity - Softcover

Carol Wolper is the author of Cigarette Girl and a Hollywood scriptwriter specialising in testosterone-driven action movies (Bad Boys with Will Smith was her latest). She lives in Los Angeles.

Although not technically a sequel to Cigarette Girl, Wolper's second novel reads like part two of her treatise on the cult of celebrity. Struggling filmmaker Christine Chase is the protagonist, rather than Cigarette's screenwriter, Elizabeth West (who makes a cameo appearance), but their personalities, attitudes and voices are identical. Sexy yet hard-boiled Christine is "an L.A. thirty-five"-meaning not quite adult by typical standards-who's stuck in a rut after the dissolution of her six-year marriage. She spends a lot of time at the newsstand buying tabloids from William the "Magazine Guy" as they gossip about the famous one minute and vilify Hollywood for its shallowness the next. Herein lies the crux of the novel: its characters' schizophrenic love-hate relationship with the glitzy world they inhabit. Christine's idol is Richard Gault, a reclusive musician/philosopher/actor/rebel who never sold out. He shunned the limelight after a touch of fame in the 1970s, before mainstream success could spoil him. Christine is inspired to find him and to document her quest for HBO, so like a Hunter S. Thompson in Gucci stilettos, she begins the search. Getting to Gault proves to be more difficult than Christine had expected, provoking theplaintive introspection, "was I just another Hollywood dreamer hustling a bad idea?" Writing in coolly conversational staccato prose that reads like a collaboration between Jackie Collins and Mickey Spillane, Wolper provides Christine with many theories and maxims, which fluctuate between refreshing and pretentious. The narrative features plenty of tough talk, references to licit and illicit drugs, and unapologetic sex. For readers expecting too much, the novel will seem, in Christine's words "as unfulfilling as a fake orgasm," but others will enjoy it as a quintessential beach read.
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