All Ye Know on Earth and All Ye Need to Know

Two hot-selling, over-analyzed gossip books— Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and Kitty Kelley’s Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography—give pause to consider the peculiar symbiosis that exists between those who acquire power in our society and those who write about them, even critically.

The town in Julia Phillips’s title is Hollywood. She was the first woman producer to share an Oscar for Best Picture (The Sting). Afterwards, she found herself thinking, “Is this all there is?” —but then she want on to produce Taxi Driver and Close Encounters, and now describes hitting a wall of frustration and self-loathing in her mid-forties...