Worlds Collide

Prologue I've always been a firm believer that celebrities are just like the rest of us. I've had my fair share of star encounters, and for the most part I was never that impressed. But even I have my weaknesses, and Jack Harrington has always been one of them. He first became popular when I was in high school. When I practiced my interviewing skills in the mirror as I dressed for school, Jack Harrington was always my subject. "Mr. Harrington," I would say in my best no-nonsense reporter voice, which I'd been cultivating through my position on our school's newspaper, "your new project is quite a departure from your previous work. Tell us what seduced you into taking such a controversial role." I always imagined myself pinning him with my penetrating stare, silently daring him to bare his soul. I admit there was some melodrama in my imaginings; I had always been a love-story junky and hopeless romantic. Of course my fantasy would always end with Jack falling for me, Jada Eastman, the astute and charming reporter who had finally enticed him to explore his deeper, emotional side. Such excitement was hard to find on assignments for the Central High Herald. I found myself in California after college, working as a fact checker for the entertainment department of the LA Times. I kept my writing skills honed by joining a writer's guild downtown, where I met a biographer who took me under her wing. She hired me to help her on her current project: the biography of a prominent director. This experience was invaluable, and it started my interest in writing life histories. She mentored me for the next three years before I finally got my big break: the opportunity to write an "instant book" on a Hollywood scandal. It seemed like a smarmy thing to do at the timetwo actors' lives were already ruined forever by the revelation of their secret affair and manipulation of various high-up producers and directorsbut I'd learned over the past couple years that, to eventually get what you want, you had to temporarily take what you could get. I earned brownie points with the publishing company, though, when I broadened the book's coverage through a creative use of my old fact-finding contacts, and not long after the project was completed, I received a call for another book. Sheer luck seemed to catapult me into the paths of some pretty famous people, and by the time I was thirty, I had written three biographies and assisted two celebrities in writing their memoirs. But these experiences shed light on sides of human nature I didn't really want to see. It was my job to get them to dump their stories, and I soon discovered the path to fame is paved with a lot of pain, both suffered and inflicted, and a lot of decadent and twisted living. Secrets kept hidden for decades would surface unexpectedly in the middle of an interview, as if the teller could no longer contain them. It was often obvious the story wasn't being told to be part of the biography, but just to ease the weight of the person's conscience. It was my job to sort the tellable from what was best kept hidden, to know what to reveal and what to return to the vault of memory. But all the information remained in my head, and I could never look at those people, or others like them, in the same way again. Disappointment in discovering the tarnish on the stars of Hollywood left me with a marked disdain for celebrity and fame, and though I continued to accept work from them, I developed a resentment toward them that slowly ate away at me and left me jaded. It was in the depths of this cynicism that I received the call from Jack Harrington's assistant asking me if I would consider helping him and his wife tell their story. Now, you have to understand that even though I had come to preStrobel, Alison is the author of 'Worlds Collide', published 2005 under ISBN 9781578567935 and ISBN 1578567939.