Sex addiction, faded pop stars and illegal immigrants

A PSYCHOLOGIST unwraps a set of Rorschach cards in front of a man who suffers from sex addiction. “What does it make you think of," the psychologist asks. “Same thing again, Dr Zwiegers," comes the reply.

One reads Maureen Callahan's bestseller Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed as if seeing the truth for the first time. Then, slowly, you realise this is the same thing again, Dr Zwiegers. Muckraking dressed as new historiography.

Callahan is not a follower of the Kennedys. She has fought with Meghan Markle, Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift and Hillary Clinton. She picks fights only with the best. And who better than the descendants of Big Joe Kennedy?

Unfortunately, I have to admit that I devoured Ask Not. Dr Zwiegers will never see me, but there is something about reading at a safe distance of the golden age of the Sixties' ersatz Camelot. Jackie Kennedy said after his death that John F Kennedy had thought of himself in terms of Alan Jay Lerner's famous lyrics from the musical  Camelot: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."

Jackie Kennedy Onassis has always captivated me. Not on account of the way JFK or Ari Onassis trampled her, but because she mastered two difficult roles like an actress. She was a spin doctor and an introvert on a mission, finally finding her feet as a cultural lioness. An ardent supporter of preserving historic buildings, a gifted publisher and editor, she translated 10 French novels for her first husband so he could understand French culture.

She took legal action to thwart the tarnishing of JFK's image in William Manchester's 1967 book The Death of a President, but Callahan doesn't care for the propriety surrounding Jackie's life. She reveals everything in Dr Zwiegers' terms. From wearing wigs to her long affair with JFK's younger brother, Bobby. Jackie, Callahan tells us without misplacing a comma, shares with Marilyn Monroe the distinction of sleeping with both brothers and contracting venereal diseases from both. This is after Callahan reveals that Jackie went to seek help from a physician because JFK's bonks rarely lasted longer than three minutes.

JFK's life was one of sin and frivolity. The rest of the men in his family, as well as Jackie's own father and mother, were raunchy in their arrogance and unstoppable in abusing their wealth.

“Men are common,” one of my colleagues used to say, and Callahan proves with Ask Not exactly how common. Big Joe Kennedy was an open supporter of Adolf Hitler while he was the US ambassador to Britain. It cost him his political career. After that, the Kennedys used their money and power to keep all horror stories about JFK, Bobby, Ted and their children out of the press. Callahan claims this book settles matters. Possibly so – she's in the super league of gossip writers.

Finally, your sympathies lie with Jackie, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh, Monroe, Mary Richardson Kennedy and Kick Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne and a long list of other unfortunate women. Women who in many ways paid the highest toll for the honour of being surrounded by Kennedy opulence.

It's a strange book. Callahan is an excellent journalist. Her description of Jackie Kennedy's experiences before and after JFK's assassination is some of the best creative reporting I've read. Dazzling, actually. With Kopechne's death, she lifted her writing to an even higher level. Who would have  thought that Ted Kennedy's struggle to spell Kopechne's last name for the police could yield an absolutely poignant piece of reporting?

The question remains, how much freedom does a reporter dare to take on the creative side? Everything, Michael Herr said of his Vietnam reports at the time, as long as you don't create facts. Ask Not drifts into that grey area of New Journalism, a genre that, alas, has long been rendered irrelevant by Fake News.

But when you come across it, as here, it is pure reading pleasure. Because, you know, it's that same thing again, Dr Zwiegers.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan was published by Little, Brown & Company and costs $22.90 at Amazon.

Fancy some tabloid reading material? This one is a glory – a collection of interviews with pop stars who were once famous.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that only with the highest exception, pop stars are geniuses, socially adaptable and cheerful. Some of them (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Taylor Hawkins) die young, sparing us the trouble of being spectators of a long decline.

Nick Duerden starts with Peter Perrett, who was famous in 1976 as a member of the punk band the Only Ones and is still trying to make that elusive comeback. Still a junkie. Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays) has become a TV star. Bill Drummond (KLF) has survived and is still making music that fewer and fewer people listen to. Brian Nash (Nasher from Frankie Goes to Hollywood) has become an electrician again, making money in his old age by attending other people's funerals as a former pop star. And so on. Billy Bragg, Rufus Wainwright, Martin Carr and  many more. Maybe you remember everyone. The book is a nice escape.

Duerden, cunning journalist that he is, concentrates mainly on the success stories. The website BuzzFeed has long looked at the unsuccessful, disastrous ones. When I realised that, I knew it was a precious e-book that I had in front of me. Publishers don't publish many books like this any more. They know this kind of information is part of the internet's information machine.

I would recommend it to those who were actively interested in famous pop stars in the Seventies to Nineties. But feel free to keep an eye on BuzzFeed. I think a few of the people Duerden writes about here are not going to be with us for much longer. They still talk a lot, but they don't sound healthy.

Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden was published by Headline and costs R350 at Exclusive Books.

The adventures of an illegal immigrant in the main danger zone of the American nightmare: intellectual life. Catalina is a near-orphan from Ecuador. Her Jehovah's Witness grandparents raised her illegally in New York. Straight to Harvard, where the nice life swallows her up only to spit her out later in Queens.

In the pages of this book, the candyfloss culture clashes with the brain of an outsider in all its glory. Literature, cinematography, rappers and other pimps of banality populate the chapters. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio creates with a big sieve – early in the book she manages to have Charlize Theron, Jay Gatsby, Joseph Kennedy Sr, Theodore Dreiser, Jay-Z, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola and Rosario Dawson walk through in a freakishly elegant way.

Catalina finally completes a thesis (on “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom: Death Tourism and Roberto Bolaño"), which, alas, we won't get to read. But the run-in we have in front of us, and it's absolutely not boredom-inducing.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was published by Random House and cost $21.33 at Amazon.

♦ VWB ♦

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