Pandering
Pretty much everything but the contents of that little black book makes an appearance in this painfully personal memoir-cum-photo-album from Hollywood Madame Fleiss. Court records, wiretap transcripts, facsimiles of seemingly any article that mentions her and incident reports from her two-year prison stint: by rifling through her past as one of America's oddball pseudo-celebrities, Fleiss attempts, as she asserts in a brief introduction, to create a book about "memory, style, culture, and politics, as much as anything else." The copious news clippings are intended to "provide the context, so that the truth of those times can live on," and there's a revealing fascination on Fleiss's part with the endless coverage about her. But the most intriguing documents are the ones that weren't public until this book's release-images and descriptions of Fleiss's fellow inmates, the tug of war Fleiss enacted with prison officials in order to be transferred to a federal boot camp program so she could get out of prison more quickly, the overcrowded halfway house she entered after prison. Fleiss also includes plenty of unrevealing musings ("they say there is nothing like a woman scorned...well nothing compares to the ego of a man"), justifications and recriminations (one section of the book is titled "Jealous and Angry Hookers") in a hodgepodge of commentary that's complemented by the book's cluttered design. With its promise of tell-all titillation, curious celeb-hounds won't be deterred by this media scrapbook's shortcomings.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.