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prologue

N o one plans to become a celebrity stalker—a car-chasing, privacy-smashing, garbage-diving predator ready to feast on red-carpet prey. No one plans to climb unscalable trees, make friends with every catering service waiter, dog walkers, and morgue attendants.

Everyone comes to Hollywood seeking the dream. No one comes here planning to rip open those dreams and expose the seedy underbelly, not even those of us who grew up on a steady diet of it and understood that, in the ecosystem of notoriety, the predators and the prey were symbiotic.

We needed the celebrities’ scandals to create headlines and they needed us to maintain their front-page status. It was a straightforward—albeit ugly at times—business and my father raised me to be a practical woman.