Wild Stories About Famous People In Celebrity Memoirs
With all the glitz, glamour, and wealth that come with being a celebrity, it's not surprising that famous people have unconventional tales to tell. Some A-listers who write about their lives share these unbelievable experiences in their memoirs, and inevitably include other celebs in the tale-telling.
While some stars use their autobiographies to throw shade at other famous people, others share some of their wildest experiences with fellow celebs. Even stories that are more universal and relatable, such as learning how to French-kiss or having a drink for the first time, become exponentially more interesting when the other people involved are equally well-known.
In his autobiography Me, singer Elton John revealed a peculiar encounter with Stevie Wonder when the latter stopped to visit as he was passing through Colorado. According to Vulture, John shared:
Musicians passing through Denver or Boulder would drop by to visit… Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To preempt your question: No, I have no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.
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2Shirley MacLaine had no issue giving the inside scoop on what it was like to work alongside Debra Winger on the set of 1983's Terms of Endearment. In My Lucky Stars, the Steel Magnolias actor recalled a particularly memorable time on set:
The first day Debra and I worked together in front of the camera, the assistant called us to our marks…
“You're over here,” Debra said.
The crew stopped talking. They could sense a stakeout.
“I heard you,” I said. “I know marks when I see them.”
“Good," she said. “How's this for a mark?”
She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.
“Do you always talk with your mouth full?” I asked. She laughed.
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In his 2011 memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe detailed an evening spent at the Grant household, where he, his friend Jennifer Grant, and her father, Cary Grant, watched Lowe perform in his first TV role (an ABC after-school special). Lowe admitted he didn't know how big of a star the elder Grant was at the time, relieving him of any anxiety:
Just as the show begins, Cary pops his head in. “Young maaan, would you mind if I watched with you?”
“Not at all,” I say, proving unequivocally that ignorance is bliss. And so, the single greatest movie star of all time takes a seat with us to watch a 16-year-old rookie in his first starring role.
When the show is over, I'm not quite sure what to think… In Cary Grant's bedroom, as the credits roll, no one says a word. Then, finally, from Cary, “Young maaan, you're quite goood. You remind me very much of a young Warren Beatty.”
Driving away, down his long, winding driveway, I suddenly see him, running down the hill, chasing me in his big, white bathrobe. “Young maaan! Young maaan!” he calls, rushing up to my driver's side window.
“I thought you might like to have these!” he says, slightly out of breath. His arms are filled with products from Fabergé, where he sits on the board. He fills my car with boxes and boxes of Brut aftershave and soap on a rope.
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In The Dirt, the members of Motley Crue shared their wildest stories on the road as the “world's most notorious rock band.” In one instance, Nikki Sixx said Ozzy Osbourne snorted a line of ants in front of him in 1984. As reported on Planet Radio, Sixx recalled:
I handed [Ozzy] the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it… I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little dugout built where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn't,” he did.
He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white a** peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort.
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According to the late Friends actor Matthew Perry, he first met Valerie Bertinelli on the set of their short-lived TV 1990 sitcom Sydney. Perry said he fell in love with his co-star, who was married to Eddie Van Halen at the time. In his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big, Terrible Thing, Perry revealed:
I was obsessed with her and harbored elaborate fantasies about her leaving Eddie Van Halen and living out the rest of her days with me… I didn't stand a f**king chance. Of course.
That said, there was one night… I was over at Valerie and Eddie's house, just hanging out and gazing at Valerie, trying to make her laugh… As the night progressed, it was clear that Eddie had enjoyed the fruits of the vine a little too hard, one more time, and eventually he just passed out, not 10 feet away from us, but still. This was my chance!
If you think I didn't actually have a chance in hell you'd be wrong, dear reader - Valerie and I had a long, elaborate make-out session. It was happening - maybe she felt the same way I did. I told her I had thought about doing that for a long time, and she had said it right back to me.
Perry admitted he was “devastated” that Bertinelli never mentioned the incident again, but she did confirm the events on TikTok upon the memoir's release.
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As co-writer of The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen considered Nicolas Cage to play the film's villain. Soon after the production studio suggested him, the comedian began conversing with the Ghost Rider star. However, Rogen realized that his demands were a little too eccentric for the part. In Yearbook, he revisited the conversation:
Cage: I want to play a bald guy but have hair tattooed on my head and big prosthetic lips.
Me: …All right.
Cage: I wanna do a voice like Edward G. Robinson.
Me: Okay.
Cage: Actually… maybe not the tattooed hair. That's something I might want to do in real life, so it might be weird if I also do it in a movie.
Me: …Yeah. That might make it weird.
We called the studio and were like, “I'm not sure we're gonna find common ground here. He's coming with weird ideas… FOR Nicolas Cage, which is saying something.”
Days after the encounter, Rogen recounted that Cage called to let him know that he had sensed the team was unhappy with his take on the character and was turning down the part.
Wild story?In his self-titled memoir, Slash, the Guns 'N Roses guitarist revealed that his mom dated David Bowie, adding to his already unconventional childhood:
In 1975, my mother started working closely with David Bowie while he was recording Station to Station; she had been designing clothes for him since Young Americans. So when he signed on to star in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth my mom was hired to do the costumes for the film, which shot in New Mexico. Along the way, she and Bowie embarked on a semi-intense affair. Looking back on it now, it might not have been that big of a deal, but at the time, it was like watching an alien land in your backyard.
After my parents split up, my mom, my brother, and I moved... It was a very cool house: the walls of the living room were sky blue and emblazoned with clouds. There was a piano, and my mom's record collection took up an entire wall. It was inviting and cozy. Bowie came by often, with his wife, Angie, and their son, Zowie, in tow. The '70s were unique: it seemed entirely natural for Bowie to bring his wife and son to the home of his lover so that we might all hang out. At the time my mother practiced the same form of transcendental meditation that David did. They chanted before the shrine she maintained in the bedroom.
Wild story?Shirley Jones divulged in her self-titled memoir a particularly odd tale of Marlon Brando that occurred during a wrap party for their 1964 film Bedtime Story:
When the picture wrapped, [actor] David [Niven] invited Marlon, Jack [Cassidy, Jones's husband], and me, and a group of David's friends to dinner at his house in Brentwood.
When we arrived on the porch, Marlon's best friend, Wally Cox... rushed up to us and said, “Marlon is here, but he doesn't want to face his son. So don't be surprised by what you see when you come into the house.”
Jack and I walked into the living room, where a huge table was filled with all kinds of food. Underneath the table was Marlon, sitting cross-legged, hiding from his son.
He stayed that way for a couple of hours, then, without a word, got up and rushed out into the night. Some bedtime story…
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Drew Barrymore wrote in Little Girl Lost that an actor gave her a beer at Rob Lowe's 20th birthday party - when she was 9 years old. Recalling the memory in detail, the actress wrote:
I knew I was going to take a drink that night. It was Rob Lowe's birthday party. I think he turned 20. We walked up to the club - me, [my friend] Gigi, and my mom - which was packed, and the doorman waves us all through…
All the Brat Packers were there. Rob, his younger brother, Chad, and stepbrother, Micah, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore, Melissa Gilbert, and so on… Almost everyone had some kind of drink, even though no one was of age, and the dance floor was humming.
As was our routine, my mom went off in one direction to visit with people she knew and Gigi and I went off on our own… There were a slew of cold, open bottles set up on the bar. We walked up, quickly snatched one, and ran off to the bathroom, where we got into a stall and split the bottle while puffing on a couple of cigarettes…
Later, I got braver. I sidled up to one of the Brat Packers, and real Mr. Nice Guy, who was holding a bottle of beer by his side.
“Can I have a sip of your beer?” I asked. “Yeah, sure,” he said, handing me the bottle. I'm sure he thought it was cute to give a little kid a sip of beer. But I quickly downed the remainder of his bottle. “Hey, I said a sip,” he said, taking the empty from me. “Sorry,” I shrugged coyly.
Wild story?According to Brian Cox, Princess Margaret once put her hand up his shirt on his 23rd birthday. As reported via Thrillest, the Succession actor divulged in his memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat:
Did I forget to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret once?… “I thought you were so wonderfully hooded,” [Princess Margaret] said to me. “I really wanted to know more about you, because you were so hooded in your performance.”
Hooded, I thought.
“I didn’t know who you were,” she continued, “but I wanted to know who you were, and as a result I was transfixed by you for the whole evening…”
“Thank you, ma’am, thank you,” I said, with suitable deference. The conversation duly moved on to the fact that it was my birthday and that I’d been given this present by Lindsay Anderson. This shirt. This lovely red shirt.
“Oh yes,” she said admiringly, “it really is a lovely shirt, isn’t it?” And with that she put a hand to my chest, just at the base of my throat, undid one button and slid her hand inside the shirt.
Christ, I thought, Princess Margaret is feeling me up. One day I’m going to be writing about this in my memoirs.
No, that’s a lie. I didn’t think that. In actual fact, what I thought was this.
Nothing.
I froze. I froze because Princess Margaret was feeling me up. No, trying to feel me up. Her hand was inside my shirt and traveling in the direction of my left nipple yet Princess Margaret was just chatting away as though this was something she had done a hundred times before. As though tweaking actors’ nipples was all in a day’s work for her.
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Though film critics and fans were equally unimpressed with Martin Short's film Clifford when it came out in 1994, the black comedy gathered praise and became a cult classic as it aged. The comedian shared in I Must Say that he found a surprising fan while on a flight from LA to New York: Nicolas Cage, whom he had never met.
Half an hour into the flight, I… noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Can I just say something to you?" he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity in his voice. ”The dining room scene in Clifford, with you and Charles Grodin, where he's confronting you and you keep lying to him" - a sustained battle of wits, much of it improvised, in which Clifford drives Grodin's character to the edge… “Well, I broke my VCR watching it. I watched that scene 25 times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.”
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While working on the 1985 made-for-TV movie The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn, Melissa Joan Hart and the other actors got a few pointed tips from their co-star Drew Barrymore. According to E!, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch star shared in Melissa Explains It All!:
Though I was only 9 at the time, Drew was 10 and still in her contentious, wild child, dope-smoking stage… One day, she took the group behind our motel to watch her give a French-kissing lesson with co-star Kimber Shoop, who went on to play the title role in The Ted Kennedy Jr. Story (yup, a TV movie). I'm bummed to report that she didn't let me come watch her wiggle her tongue in Kimber's mouth, because I was a year younger than her, but she did teach me how to backstroke in the motel pool.
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Jennie Garth retold a story of how an evening in a hot tub got unexpectedly steamy in her memoir Deep Thoughts From a Hollywood Blonde:
I was dating this guy and Ian (Ziering) was dating some lovely young woman, and the four of us wound up in a hot tub together back at Ian's place. Someone was stroking Ian's arm and he assumed it was me, since I was sitting next to him, but after a few minutes, this hand comes up out of the water and rests on his shoulder and starts massaging his neck. He looks over at me, and at the same instant we both realize it's not my hand; it's the hand of my date! I will never, ever forget the look on Ian's face at that moment. Or how much fun he's had telling that story all these years.
Wild story?In his memoir Life, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards semi-recalled a time when he and John Lennon went on a three-day acid-fueled road trip, “an episode of such extremes that I can barely piece together a fragment,” he wrote, continuing:
It took in, I thought, [the English towns of] Torquay and Lyme Regis over what seemed like a two-or three-day period with a chauffeur. Johnny and I were so out there that sometimes years later, in New York, he would ask, “What happened on that trip?” With us was Kari Ann Moller, now Mrs. Chris Jagger… Her reminiscences, which I sought out recently for this book, were quite different from mine. But hers were at least not almost a total blank, like mine…
I remembered going in a chauffeur-driven car. But Kari Ann says we didn't have a chauffeur. We went in a cramped two-door car with one other unidentifiable passenger - so maybe we did have a chauffeur. According to Kari Ann, we started in Dolly's nightclub, the precursor of Tramp, and drove around Hyde Park Corner several times wondering where to go.
We drove to John's house in the country, she says, and said hi to Cynthia [Lennon], and then Kari Ann decided we'd go and visit her mother in Lyme Regis. What a nice visit for her mother - a couple of flying acid heads who'd been up for a couple of nights. We got there about dawn, so her story goes. One greasy-spoon caff wouldn't serve us. John got recognized. And Kari Ann realized that we couldn't go and visit her mother because we were so out of it.
There follow therefore some missing hours, because we didn't get back to John's house until after dark. There were palm trees, so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy.
Wild story?
