The celebrity insider – America is all about re-invention

A lot of people, especially in America, leave their pasts behind and the world of celebrities and showbiz is not always glitz and glamour.

RT sat down with one of America's most provocative best-selling non-fiction authors and journalists, Michael Gross, who told us the inside story of the world behind the photoflashes.

Gross earned his popularity by going behind the scenes of the rich and famous in America. Madonna, Calvin Klein, Richard Gere and John F. Kennedy Jr. – the list is very long. Michael says that the most fascinating stories are those about the most obscure people, stories of the complete, total reinvention, where people think that they can leave their identity behind and become someone completely different who no one will notice.

“I have been threatened a handful of times in my career and in every case the people who threatened and tried to stop me from writing about them were people that had things to hide,” concluded Michael Gross.

He shared that in his opinion in this time of recession, those people who used to have a lot of money just have a little less.

“What you’re seeing now is a lot of people who are reluctant to flaunt it, but they still have it. They just do not walk down the street carrying a thousand shopping bags and boasting about their yacht and their five homes. They are just quietly traveling between their five homes in their yacht and not talking about it anymore,” said Gross.

Speaking about the modeling business he wrote about in his book ‘Model: the ugly business of beautiful women’, Michael Gross noted that “you are dealing with a superficial image and behind it is a vast pool of reality”.

“Modeling is a machine that eats young girls. For every angel who dances on the end of the pin of fashion and fame there are probably a thousand girls who have failed in the process.”

“Personally, I would trust none of show business… I would not believe anything that I read about an actor or actress in a glossy magazine story and I would believe half of what I read in so-called scandal magazines… What passes as entertainment journalism is actually promotion,” said Gross, who believes that modern newspapers are invertebrates simply because they are too afraid to operate and are “sucking up” to powerful people.