“She’s pretty good,” agrees Shawna Kenney, sipping a virgin cocktail. “She could kill a man with that thing if she wanted to.”

Kenney should know. The 30-year-old buxom, brown-haired lass is a past master at inflicting punishment with such implements. Her recent 122-page potboiler, “I Was a Teenage Dominatrix,” tells the story of how Kenney put herself through Washington’s American University by smacking the fat, white asses of lawyers, lobbyists and, yes, the occasional politician while she was the top dom in the stable of one Mistress Miranda.

“There were all kinds — doctors, Washington policy wonks and elected officials,” says Kenney of her clientele. “I had at least one congressman — very old and wealthy. A Republican, of course.”

Hmm. Who could that have been? Henry Hyde? Newt Gingrich? Dick Armey? Kenney won’t say, and in any case, it’s not really that kind of book. Kenney’s tome is more Holden Caulfield in leather than “Venus in Furs.”

Though there are plenty of naughty bits, the memoir doesn’t dwell on them. Instead, the reader follows a 19-year-old punk-rock refugee from the Maryland sticks to the big city, where she labors at a series of dead-end day jobs before spotting an ad in D.C.’s City Paper that reads: “Get Paid for Being a Bitch.” After discovering that being a bitch can pay about $300 a night on average (and often more), Kenney does the math and says goodbye to the fast-food industry and hello to her new life as “Mistress Alexis.”

“The spanking was my favorite part,” Kenney confesses, laughing. “I think it’s fun and funny. And anyway, most men deserve it.”

But it wasn’t all bondage and nipple clamps; there were plenty of gross-out moments, which Kenney describes in the book with the wide-eyed wonder of a Gen X Judy Blume. “My new profession colored the world around me,” she writes in one passage. “I stared hard at every male passerby — was he a submissive? A foot fetishist? A toilet boy? The world was Silly Putty. Everything I thought I’d known was stretched out of perspective and replaced by my new ‘inside’ view. I was privy to a kaleidoscope of desires and differences that I made no judgment on — just enjoyed watching and observing.”

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. The dom game has become so mainstream in America’s large urban centers that it hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. Even Kenney admits that “out here” in La-La Land, where she and her boyfriend moved after she bailed from the world of D.C. B&D, every other person you meet is into whips and chains.

What keeps Kenney’s coming-of-age, slap-and-tell memoir from being hackneyed? Well, writing ability for one. Kenney’s an amusing read, even when she’s describing relatively prosaic scenes from her childhood in the Maryland boonies.

But she also offers the perspective of her generation — one reared on “Repo Man,” Ronald Reagan and SCTV. When she makes a passing reference to “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” or quotes Henry Rollins’ “Hallucinations of Grandeur,” her peers are with her all the way.

“I thought the book was awesome,” Jose Travez, 24, a writer for Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine, told me. “I really liked the first-person account of that world through the eyes of a hardcore punk girl. Her likes were my likes. I was able to relate to her.”

On the basis of reading Kenney’s indie-published memoir, Travez asked her to write a monthly column for Screw called “Twisted Sister.” He’s not the only one who’s gone gaga over Kenney. Since “I Was a Teenage Dominatrix” came out at the beginning of the year, both Extra and National Enquirer TV have taped episodes on Kenney. NETV’s has already run. Extra plans to run theirs during the May sweeps.

But the real excitement started a couple of weeks ago when Matt Moneypenny, an agent at the powerhouse Hollywood firm ICM, called Kenney up out of the blue and offered to buy her lunch. Seems someone gave Moneypenny Kenney’s book as a gift, and he just had to sign her. Thus, the wet dream of every wannabe screenwriter in this town was handed to Kenney on a silver platter. Eat your hearts out, boys!

“They think it’ll make a great movie,” says Kenney. “I had heard about ICM, but I wasn’t trying to get an agent really. They brought me a contract at lunch, and I signed on.”

Currently the book’s sold about half of its initial run of 5,000 — not exactly John Grisham, but pretty good for an unknown author being published by a company almost no one’s heard of before. Prior to putting out Kenney’s book, Retro-Systems was primarily known as the home of the now defunct Whap! magazine, a National Lampoon-style fetish rag that billed itself as “The Modern Gal’s Guide to Marital Bliss.”

Kenney was a contributing editor there for several months until her bosses, intrigued with her salacious war stories, proposed that she pen an account of her dom days. Kenney did just that, and now she’s got hotshot wheeler-dealers talking about feature films and maybe even a TV series.

Who’d play Kenney? It’s too soon for that. My suggestions: Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Michelle Gellar or Christina Ricci.

“I’m waiting to hear something,” Kenney remarks hopefully. “California’s been really good to me so far.”

The whip girl’s long since left the stage as Jumbo’s Clown Room nears closing time. Now there’s this completely naked Rubenesque blonde before us, writhing to the tune of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.” Jumbo’s is so whack. Supposedly Courtney Love stripped here back in the day. And there are rumors that it’s a great place to score smack, but, not being a dope fiend, I can’t confirm that.

In any case, it’s seedy. Kenney had never been there before, so it seemed like the perfect spot to do an interview. But now the smoke from a drag queen’s cancer stick is giving Kenney a headache, and she wants to go. She’s finished her cranberry juice in any case. You see, the former dom is a health nut and vegetarian. Moreover, she avoids both alcohol and tobacco.

“I’ve never even tried,” she says of cigarettes as we walk out the door. “My whole family smokes and I hate it.”

That Adam Ant song comes to mind. So I sing her a lyric: “You don’t drink, don’t smoke. What do you do?”

She glances over her shoulder and bats her eyes, “You mean, you have to ask?”

Every politician’s memoir, especially if written while the author is still in office, is a series of self-serving half-truths. There’s really not much benefit to total and complete honesty, and most politicians are convinced enough of their own righteousness that they probably don’t even think of their omissions and distortions as dishonest. So, everyone Haley trashes in her book says she is lying. That is not that surprising!

Among the points of contention:

• Haley omits examples of her own hypocrisy. She attacks lawmakers who don’t disclose their sources of income, then dismisses a controversy over her old “consulting” job with a firm seeking legislative favors as “character assassination.”
• She attacks S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell (GOP) for opposing a reform bill she championed, including a supposed conversation in which he said something haughty and corrupt-sounding. (“We’ll decide what they need to see and what they don’t.”) Harrell says the conversation never happened (and that Haley cynically positioned herself as an “outsider” after spending time in the House leadership).
• She writes that two of her opponents actually high-fived each other at a debate the day a second man accused Haley of carrying on an extramarital affair: “Then, just as the lights came down and the cameras started to roll, I looked over and saw the two men high-five under the table.” The men say that didn’t happen. Furthermore, you cannot “high-five” under a table.
• She claims that a consultant took down her campaign website as part of a “dirty trick.” The “trick” was that the guy who built her site was working for a different gubernatorial candidate, and when she announced her candidacy for governor, he told her she’d have to move her site to a different server.
• She accuses her Democratic opponent of running a campaign based on “character assassination and guilt by association.” Her opponent says his campaign was based on issues and her campaign engaged in character assassination. (This is the dumbest/most subjective example of a mistruth, obviously.)
• Haley says the Legislative Black Caucus complained about a lack of diversity in her cabinet, but didn’t offer any qualified minority or female candidates for posts. The Legislative Black Caucus says they offered her a list of a dozen qualified people whom she did not appoint.

Haley is constantly playing the victim card — everyone who ever opposed her engaged in character assassination or worse — and highlighting her independence from the S.C. political establishment. Because she’s a politician. Even though she clearly made up some of the details and conversations in her memoir (under the table high-five!) none of it will kill her career. (It’s probably a bad idea to put quotation marks around words you’re putting in other people’s mouths, but every other S.C. pol is less famous than her, so their objections won’t matter.)

What may hurt her career, though, is trashing everyone else in her state. In attacking, often viciously, nearly everyone in the South Carolina legislative leadership in both parties and even her own lieutenant governor, Haley is not making it easy for herself to actually work with these people. Which suggests that maybe she has … grander ambitions than remaining governor of South Carolina.

In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for “Left-handed,” a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in “Keep the Lights On,” Ira Sachs’ well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

Now Clegg has written a follow-up, “Ninety Days,” a tumultuous chronicle of his early sobriety. The book begins with Clegg’s release from rehab and follows him as he struggles to keep clean for 90 days, a milestone for those in recovery. Over the following weeks, he tries to rebuild his shattered life — befriending other recovering addicts, searching for a new apartment and shuttling from meeting to meeting — but before long, he is once again drinking, smoking crack and having anonymous drug-fueled sex. Thus begins a dramatic series of relapses.

The book, which is written in straightforward, readable prose, is an often-vivid testament to the difficulties of overcoming addiction and the value of companionship. Despite occasional moments of cattiness (Clegg can be ungenerous in his description of other meeting attendees), Clegg comes across as a deeply troubled but a perceptive and sympathetic man, learning lessons about addiction in some very difficult ways.

Salon spoke to Clegg over the phone from Manhattan about the fallout from his first book, the unique appeal of recovery memoirs and why he won’t be writing another book.

It’s been a long time since the events of this book happened, and now you’re doing interviews and publicity about them. Does it feel strange to be rehashing all this stuff?

I wouldn’t say it’s strange, because one of the ways I’ve stayed sober is to stay very close to the things that happened, both when I was using and also in early recovery. I can’t talk enough about those early days of getting sober, because it’s the things I did and the lessons I learned — and the things suggested to me in those early days — that keep me sober today. The more comfortable I get and the more I forget it, the more vulnerable I am to relapse. And it’s pretty simple. Those experiences in those first 90 days are ones I never want to get away from and never want to forget.

Your first book was about your descent into drug addiction and alcoholism. This book is about your recovery. Why did you write it?

It came from a sense of not being finished when I completed the writing of “Portrait of an Addict.” During the three years it took to write that, I felt tethered to this live thing that needed my care and attention. I had this expectation that when I was done I would feel severed from that and I didn’t. So I just kind of didn’t stop writing. But I don’t feel connected to it, or any writing, at this point. I feel completely done.

In what sense?

Finishing this book, the process definitely stopped. I was reading the audio book a couple weeks ago and I hadn’t seen the text in a while. Reading from beginning to end, I almost couldn’t identify with the person who wrote the book. I identified with the person who lived the experiences, but I couldn’t really identify with somebody who would sit for six hours at a time and see that [book] to completion. I just don’t have it in me right now; it’s beyond my imagination that I’d be able to write anything longer than an email. Which is a relief, let me tell you. These books just sort of bullied their way into existence. I have a pretty busy day job as an agent, so I’m kind of amazed that they exist, these things.

What do you think is the overall message of this book?

I thought that once I got out of rehab that if I just stayed away from drugs and alcohol and followed a few simple suggestions there would be a clean narrative of getting sober, that there’d be a before and after that would be clearly defined. And that process for me was a lot messier than that. So if there’s a message in there, it’s that the only way that, in my experience, I’ve gotten sober and seen other people get sober is by asking for help and getting involved deeply in a community of addicts and alcoholics in recovery.

The first book was such a huge success. How did you deal with the sudden fame that came with it? The book included some pretty shocking scenes.

I guess I dealt with that in the same way I dealt with every difficult or wonderful thing, which is one day at a time. If I step back and regard any aspect of my life, whether that be my relationship with my family, or my job, or that publication, or this one, I will probably get overwhelmed and driven to my knees in exhaustion and despair. I was busy at that time doing my job so I just did everything that I always do but maybe with a little bit more desperation. I didn’t stop and look around and try and make meaning of any of it. I just kind of showed up to what I needed to show up to — whether it was an interview or working on the copy-edited manuscripts or whatever — and then moved on to the things that crowd my life.

Do you think your disclosures from “Portrait of an Addict” have changed the way people interact with you?

Because my collapse and the revelations of my alcoholism and drug addiction were so known to people in the book publishing world, it sort of mediated or affected every interaction I had professionally when I came back to work, whether that was with prospective new clients or colleagues. I think because that history was informing so many of my interactions and relationships, I got used to it as a kind of third person in the room. In terms of people outside the sphere of book publishing, it was challenging. I’m a self-conscious person by nature, and there were certainly uncomfortable moments.

Is there one big moment is “Ninety Days” that stands out to you as being particularly meaningful?

When I look back and try and locate some moment where a great shift occurred, it was the feeling [at one point during the recovery period covered in the book] when I was walking toward a place where I did drugs all the time. I was walking towards the door and thought of Polly (this woman I got sober with who is still very close to me) who was not sober at the time. She was, at that point in her recovery, pretty dire — like life or death. I felt like if I went in and got high and went down that rabbit hole, she might show up to a meeting and find out that I had relapsed and that that would keep her out of there.

My involvement in her recovery and connection to her was the thing that stopped me from walking through that door. Somehow the pull of my feeling of usefulness and responsibility to Polly was greater than my desire to use. That was the first time anything stood between me and a drink or a drug. And I turned around and walked away. Very soon after that, the obsession to use and to drink lifted, which was something that hadn’t happened in all of the time that I had tried to get sober.

To me that reminds me how important it is to stay connected to other people in recovery. To me recovery is sort of moving from the first-person singular to the first-person plural. For me as an addict, I can get very consumed with my own anxieties and worries and struggles and ambitions. And if I get too wrapped up in those thing and lift away from my usefulness to other addicts, I’m most vulnerable to relapsing.

In the book, you enter a lot of spaces in which people are meant to be anonymous. There must have been tension between describing the people and wanting to preserve their privacy.

I felt very comfortable talking about my experience getting sober without naming the program of recovery that I’m involved in. And in the instances where there are people in the program that I got sober with and who are still in my life, I spoke to them about the fact that I was going to describe our experience and went to lengths to protect their anonymity and their privacy and followed their lead in terms of what they were comfortable with and what they weren’t. The main point is to transcribe my struggle to get a toehold in sobriety and maintain it. I didn’t feel that the focus of the book is on anyone else’s recovery necessarily, outside a handful of relationships that I had and still have.

One person in the book about whom this question arises is the character of Asa, whom you describe extensively as he helps you during your early sobriety. I’m assuming you weren’t able to get his permission to write about him.

I didn’t think so. He was, he made it clear at a certain point that he didn’t want to have any contact with me because he was no longer sober. But I’m very happy to report that he’s come back into recovery and is sober. He knows that he is in the book, and that he is well masked. I went to great lengths to protect his privacy.

You’ve been the rumored “muse” of a few projects that have gotten coverage in the media in the last few months. How does it feel to be the subject of that kind of attention?

I don’t really have anything to say about that.

One of those projects, the film “Keep the Lights On,” recently got a distribution deal. Did you have any participation in that?

I guess I can’t really speak to any books or films that any other people wrote that I may or may not be connected to by speculation in magazines and elsewhere. It’s not my place.

Fair enough. Going back to your book, the most famous recovery memoir in recent years is the controversial “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey, which you allude to in the book. Did other recovery memoirs affect your way of thinking about this book?

You know I haven’t read, probably very consciously, other books of addicts and recovery — but particularly in the last seven years, when I’ve been involved in working on these two books. People I got sober with would use this phrase, “compare and despair.” I probably internalized that while getting sober and set out not to read other books about addiction and recovery when I was writing these. I would probably think they were better writers than me, or be affected by it so I just felt like in the writing of these books, I just had to follow my own instincts.

What do you think is the appeal of the addiction and recovery memoir for readers?

I think there are a lot of alcoholics and addicts in this world. And they touch a lot of people. It’s a disease that cuts through all class and age and race, and affects many, many people. I certainly myself felt very lost when I was first trying to get sober, and other people in my life felt incredibly lost. Both experiences are very isolating, so when reading an account of somebody getting sober — or in the case of David Sheff’s book “Beautiful Boy,” reading an account of a parent whose kid is an addict — I think identification is a powerful thing. It makes the struggle feel less singular, and it shows at least one particular path which one may choose to take or not take in any of those circumstances, whether you’re an addict yourself, or the father of an addict, or the daughter or son. I think people look to books to find answers, separate from addiction and alcoholism, they look to stories to illuminate their lives more clearly, to more clearly find their way.

I think there’s also the appeal of witnessing someone’s downfall and redemption.

Perhaps. People tend to make mistakes, and the reading of how someone may prevail against those mistakes may be encouraging to some people. If it is, that’s one use of those books.

As a young writer, winning the Whitbread Prize for First Novel in 1985, making Granta’s 1993 list of the best young British novelists (along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Alan Hollinghurst), Winterson burned bright, using her childhood and her rebellious sexuality as fuel. “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” was her autobiographical coming-of-age novel, funny and harrowing. The two books that followed, “The Passion” and “Sexing the Cherry,” retained much of the escape velocity that got Winterson out of Accrington, Lancashire, and into Oxford and the London literary world. The ones after that were less successful, thematically diffuse grab bags of big ideas with story lines that tend to wander off into the tall grass and stall. Many fans lost interest. As badly as Winterson needed to break free of her youth, its constraints gave form and focus to her intensity.

Now Winterson has returned to her origins, with a memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” that recounts the real-life basis for “Oranges,” a novel that Winterson describes as “the cover version … a story I could live with” when “the other one was too painful.” The occasion was Winterson’s decision, in 2008, to search for her birth mother. Not surprisingly, this quest led to a reassessment of the woman who raised her and whose “dark orbit” shaped her life. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against hers,” Winterson writes. “It was my survival from the very beginning.”

Mrs. Winterson (as the author likes to call her), is also — like it or not — the novelist’s muse. The subject matter of “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” (titled after a question Mrs. Winterson asked her teenage daughter when she refused to give up her female lover) restores Winterson to her full power. This isn’t a retread of “Oranges,” but a reconsideration of that novel’s terrain. There’s always been something Byronic about Winterson — a stormily passionate soul bitterly indicting the society that excludes her while feeding on the Romantic drama of that exclusion — but Byron died at 36. Winterson, at 52, offers a glimpse of how such figures age and, if they’re lucky, even mellow. Just a bit.

Winterson’s mother and father converted to Pentecostalism at a tent revival, and one of the more refreshing aspects of “Oranges,” also reflected in “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” is Winterson’s often fond remembrances of her church. It was repressive and puritanical with respect to many ordinary pleasures (her mother referred to Woolworths as a “Den of Vice”) but there was also “the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do.” Faith gave Winterson and her co-religionists purpose. “I saw a lot of working-class men and women — myself included — living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church.”

Her mother, however, latched on to Christianity’s doomsday aspect. When most children learned to make little presents for Santa, Winterson crafted for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Her mother’s favorite hymn was “God Has Blotted Them Out,” “which was meant to be about sins, but really was about anyone who had ever annoyed her, which was everyone.” In her mother’s fantasy of heaven, she got to live alone, in a big house, with no neighbors. In that spirit, Mrs. Winterson never gave her own daughter a key to the family house and often made Jeanette sleep outside, on the doorstep, when she’d been naughty.

Yet Mrs. Winterson was also a compelling presence, “out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable.” She taught her daughter to read using the Book of Deuteronomy — “because it is full of animals (mostly unclean)” — and drew illustrations of all the creatures. She read aloud (from the Bible, of course) to the delight of her husband and child, who found it “intimate and impressive at the same time.” In a passage that neatly encompasses the Wintersonian take on the North’s droll vernacular shot through with flashes of high rhetoric, she writes of the time “our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn’t like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs. Winterson replied, ‘It’s a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’”

Winterson also has a knack for aphorism; this is a book that will inspire much underlining. Babies are “raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.” Literature is not superfluous to the working class because “a tough life needs a tough language — that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.” Young Jeanette’s great salvation was the section in her local library marked “English Literature: A to Z,” which she proceeded to read straight through in alphabetical order. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” she explains. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Because fiction was forbidden in her house, Winterson squirreled away paperbacks, obtained from the rag-and-bone man, under her mattress. (“Seventy-two per layer can be accommodated.”) In time, the rising level of her bed aroused her mother’s suspicions and the books were discovered, extracted and then burnt in the backyard. This, and the punitive beatings that her weak father administered at her mother’s insistence, caused Jeanette to hate her parents, “not all the time — but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.”

Nothing, however, matched the fury that greeted the discovery of Winterson’s affair with another girl in the church at age 16. She was subjected to a brutal “exorcism” — three days without food or heat, sleep deprivation, more beatings and a church elder who foolishly tried to molest her with the promise that “it would be better than with a girl” (she nearly bit his tongue off). Not long after that, her mother kicked her out and for a while she lived in a friend’s car before being taken in by a teacher and working her way from community college to Oxford (where her tutor informed her that she was “the working-class experiment”).

The narrative takes a big leap after that. Twenty-five years later, and Winterson suffers a breakdown (which she refers to as “going mad”) and contemplates suicide. A new romance (with the celebrated psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach — possibly responsible for such occasional and regrettable lapses into psychobabble as “It takes courage to feel the feeling”) and the urging of friends persuade her to search for her birth parents. Much wrangling with obtuse bureaucrats ensues. The results are not entirely what she expected: a renewed appreciation for the adoptive mother who treated her so badly.

Winterson seems to marvel at her expanding capacity for forgiveness and compassion, though in truth the strength of her writing about this period in her life has always been its generosity. “She believed in miracles, even though she never got one — well maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn’t know that miracles often come in disguise,” she writes of her mother. True enough. Mrs. Winterson was also Jeanette’s miracle in disguise. To summon the energy to catapult herself out of that dingy row house in Accrington, the fledgling writer needed to transform herself from Devil’s spawn to Promethean hero. The measure of any hero is the size of his archenemy; that’s why Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarity to truly come into his own. “She was a monster,” Winterson writes, “but she was my monster.”

My daughter Donna had grown into a beautiful little girl with sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair. She was a good student, attending a grammar school on the corner of Beachwood Drive and Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood, not too far from our small apart­ment. Even though I did not see much of her due to my vagabond lifestyle, I adored her.

As for my good friend George Cukor, he had made extensive alterations to his property on Cordell Drive in West Los Angeles. On the western side of his large home he had built two smaller houses. The interior of his own dwelling had been redecorated by Bill Haines, the art director and designer who had taken me up as his guest to San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s spectacular residence on the Pacific coast back when I was a kid on a weekend pass during my boot camp days in the Marines. The orange grove around George’s house had been replaced by landscaped gardens. One of the two new houses George built was rented out to Martin Pollard, a very suc­cessful and high-profile local Chevrolet dealer. The other one, where George’s property fronted onto St. Ives Drive, was rented out to famed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer megastar Spencer Tracy. George and Tracy were the best of friends. They respected one another’s talents enormously. The two of them had first worked together at MGM in 1942 on the very successful romantic drama “Keeper of the Flame,” in which Tracy costarred with Katharine Hepburn.

Tracy was still a Hollywood phenomenon. During the forties there was a saying in the film industry that MGM had more stars in its firmament than there were in heaven. Tracy was one of the biggest and brightest. In a career spanning more than four decades he would be nominated for nine Academy Awards. He won two, for Best Actor in “Captains Courageous” in 1937 and for Best Actor in “Boys Town” in 1938.

When George heard that I was no longer working as a bartender at the 881 Club he invited me over for brunch one Sunday. And that was the first time I met Spencer Tracy. By then I was used to being in the company of big names, but Tracy was different. He was an actor of almost mythical proportions. People felt humbled in his presence. When I arrived at George’s place and saw Tracy lounging at the pool my heart skipped a beat. How was I going to react? What could I possibly talk to him about? Would I be intimidated by him? All doubts and fears were cast asunder as soon as George introduced me to him. Tracy was the easiest guy in the world to get along with. Because George didn’t drink, and typically didn’t have any wine or booze at home, Tracy had brought a large flask of scotch with him. The three of us sat around the pool as these two great talents of the cinema talked shop. George was never one for long, drawn out social gatherings, so by three o’clock Tracy excused himself and trotted up the driveway to the gate and then down the block to the house that he was renting on the west side of George’s property. It was the maid’s day off, so I decided to linger for a while and help George clear up. As we busied ourselves in the kitchen George told me that Tracy had married his wife, actress Louise Treadwell, back in 1923, the very year I was born. They had a palatial place somewhere in Beverly Hills. But Tracy desperately needed his space and his privacy. He therefore often lived alone in the house he rented from George. His marriage to Louise would last until his death in 1967. They had two children, a son John, born in 1924, and a daughter Susie, born in 1932. Sadly, John was born deaf and there was little doctors could do to help him. News of this unfortunate state of affairs never got into the press. Few people knew about it or about how much Tracy an­guished over his son’s debilitation. Louise devoted the rest of her life to helping deaf children through the John Tracy Clinic, which she established in Los Angeles in the early forties. Tracy was very sup­portive of her charitable efforts and funded much of the operating costs of the clinic himself. He was a generous, good-hearted man.

As we stashed away dishes and glassware, George and I also discussed the phony romance between Tracy and Katharine Hep­burn that the studio and the publicists had concocted for public con­sumption. The invented story had been so well managed that the press and public alike accepted it without question. People across the United States and around the world gave it so much credence that both Tracy and Hepburn had little choice but to pretend that it was true. Whenever they worked on a movie together flashbulbs popped. They were hounded by the paparazzi if they were known to be dining out at a restaurant or seen with other members of a film’s cast, danc­ing at the Coconut Grove. On movie productions they were always given trailers, dressing rooms, hotel suites, or bungalows alongside one another to keep the myth alive. And they both played the part. It was as though they were performing in a movie within a movie whenever they did a picture together. Such was the power of the stu­dio publicity machine. It was like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor story all over again. Except in this case none of it was true. Hired Hollywood spin doctors even went so far as to say that the reason Tracy never divorced his wife Louise to marry Kate was because of his Catholic upbringing which, according to church decree, forbade divorce. It was all so farcical.

Tracy looked and behaved as masculine as they come. Think Sylvester Stallone, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Anthony Quinn. They don’t come manlier than that. To the world — on-screen and off — Spencer Tracy was like them. Once I had started bartending more or less full time I saw Tracy a couple of times at small dinner parties, especially at George’s place, and progressively began to know him better. As our acquaintanceship developed I began calling him Spence, which he preferred over Spencer. Kate Hepburn called him Spence, too.

One day — I don’t remember exactly why — I got a call from Spence. He knew that in addition to working at parties and private dinners I was also available for general handyman chores and, if memory serves me correctly, I think he wanted me to take a look at his hot water cylinder or something like that. When I arrived at about two o’clock in the afternoon he was sitting in his living room listening to classical music, thumbing through a screenplay, and drinking scotch. The rented house was perfect for his needs, espe­cially when he was working. He could spend time alone there relax­ing, learning his lines, and developing his characters. And boozing. Lots of boozing. Other than Errol Flynn I seldom saw anyone put away as much alcohol as Spence did. On that particular afternoon he seemed pretty low. Apparently he had been over to his house that morning to see his wife and something had obviously upset him. He didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps it was something to do with his son John’s hearing affliction. Who knows? Anyway, I believe that I messed around with his hot water heater while he kept throwing back scotch after scotch. By sundown he must have finished an entire bottle. I offered to put together a light meal for him, which he agreed to. The next thing I knew another bottle of scotch came out and he was downing the stuff like orange juice.

As evening settled around us I laid out the meal I’d prepared and joined him in the living room. To distract him from his melan­cholic mood I asked him to talk about the script he had been paging through earlier that day. Flinging it across the table at me, with his words now slurring noticeably, he told me that it was for a picture called “Pat and Mike” that he was going to star in with Kate Hepburn later that year. And that’s what pierced a hole in the hornet’s nest. The minute he started talking about Kate something deep inside him was unleashed. He launched into a tirade about her. This was not the cool, calm, collected Spencer Tracy we were all familiar with through the characters he played on-screen. This was an angry, bit­ter, bruised man. He had been hurt by her. Slurring and stumbling over his words he told me that she was always rude to him, that she treated him like dirt, that she was contemptuous of him. Nothing about their great tabloid romance matched up with what Spence was telling me that evening as night fell.

Before I knew it, it was past midnight. Finally, after another empty bottle of scotch stood on the coffee table he began to undress and begged me not to leave him. I did not have the heart to say no. It was clear to me that Spence desperately needed someone to be with him. He was hurting badly. I could only assume that his pseudo-romance with Kate Hepburn was causing him this distress. I turned off the lights, undressed him, then got undressed myself, climbed into bed with him, and held him tightly like a baby. He continued to slobber and curse and complain. By then he had had so much to drink that I hardly understood a word he was saying. I tried to pacify him by saying that by morning all would be well and that we should try to get some sleep, but he wasn’t ready for that. Instead, he lay his head down at my groin, took hold of my penis and began nibbling on my foreskin. This was the last guy on earth that I expected an overture like that from, but I was more than happy to oblige him and despite his inebriated state we had an hour or so of pretty good sex.

At about four in the morning I woke up with a start. Spence had got out of bed and was stumbling around the bedroom trying to find the door to the bathroom to take an urgently needed pee. He fumbled for the light switch but couldn’t find it, so he just let loose. One moment he was urinating up against the drapes, the next into an open closet, then all over the carpet. Finally he fell back into bed and immediately lapsed into a deep sleep, snoring like an express train.

The next morning there wasn’t even the slightest hint of how drunk he’d been, that he’d pissed in the corner of the bedroom, or that we’d had sex together. He didn’t say a word about it. It was as though none of it ever happened.

That was the first of many sexual encounters I had with Spence. Sometimes I would go to his place at five in the afternoon and sit around the kitchen table with him until two in the morning as he drank himself into a stupor. Then he would be ready for a little sex. Despite everything, he was a damn good lover. The great Spencer Tracy was another bisexual man, a fact totally concealed by the stu­dio publicity department. That is, if they ever knew about it at all.

A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore.” Could the public finally be wising up?

Of course, the cause might just be the low caliber of the celebrities in question. I didn’t recognize any of the names the Guardian held up as fizzling memoirists — except for Alan Partridge, who isn’t even a real person. “I, Partridge” was in fact written by the actor-writer-director Steve Coogan, who created the character of Partridge for a television series parodying B-list chat-show hosts and other effluvia of the media world. His book is a parody of celebrity memoirs, and reportedly the only “significant” title in a genre whose sales have dropped 60 percent in the past year.

However, I suspect it’s mostly just wishful thinking that has some observers pegging the celebrity memoir as a fading trend. It’s hard for me to say for sure, though, because I seem to have a much lower than average interest in the people who write them. To be honest, apart from a couple of episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” back when it first came out, I’ve never watched a reality TV show. (My feeling is that if I’m going to be entertained, I’ll go to professionals.) So I still don’t really know who Snooki is, and when I asked friends and acquaintances to fill me in around the time her book came out, they all said. “You’re lucky. You’re much better off not knowing.”

Most celebrities are actors of some kind, and my (somewhat limited) experience writing movie and television journalism has led me to conclude that actors are some of the least interesting people in the arts. That doesn’t mean I’m not regularly awestruck by the work they create; I just really don’t want to listen to them talk about it. Or about their personal lives. And I certainly don’t want to read about either one. The more famous and rich an actor is, the more controlled, frictionless and therefore insipid his or her life is likely to be. As Korda writes, “Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.”

I’m not talking about creative visionaries like Patti Smith or innovators like Tina Fey, real writers whose ability to reflect thoughtfully on their own work and lives is unquestioned. Their books don’t exist for the sole reason that the people who wrote them are famous and know some other famous people; often, they aren’t even thought of as celebrity memoirs in the first place. The true celebrity memoir is “written” (that is, ghostwritten for) what used to be called “entertainment personalities,” namely, movie and television stars.

A movie star, like a politician, has usually spent much time, effort and money to construct a public persona, and, as Korda explains, such people are “seldom likely to want to deface their images, or to puncture the balloon of their egos merely to sell books.” (The money to be made on even a successful book is dwarfed by the fees for starring in Hollywood movies.) For this reason, most famous actors’ memoirs are bland and cautious, but even if they were willing to “tell the truth” — the thing, according to Korda, that every book publisher hopes for — that truth is unlikely to be worth the price of a hardcover book.

The example he uses is the film actor Glenn Ford, whose memoir the agent, Swifty Lazar (a more entertaining character than any actor Korda mentions), once tried to peddle. Ford had co-starred and been infatuated with Rita Hayworth (the Angelina Jolie of her time). But they’d never slept together, which put him in a fairly similar position to every other guy in America except Orson Welles. Who cares? And if Ford had slept with Hayworth? Is that really enough to justify the other 250 pages of a no-doubt tedious book chronicling Ford’s childhood in Canada and early theater work in Santa Monica? Sort of a moot point, that, since Ford clammed up at the very mention of the Hayworth non-affair.

Perhaps reality-TV stars have arisen to fill the candidness deficit created by people who are famous for some good reason. That movie star or top athlete is never going to ‘fess up about his or her private quarrels and most humiliating intimate or professional moments; they don’t have to. But reality-TV stars exist for the sole purpose of having embarrassing experiences in the public eye. They aren’t just willing to talk about this stuff: it’s their job. They’ve got nothing else to talk about.

Again, I’m the opposite of an expert in this department, but I do have a certain perspective to offer. Because I don’t watch reality TV, my impression of it is constructed entirely from conversations with people who do watch it. With the exception of a handful of contest shows like “Project Runway,” I’ve never heard anyone speak of the characters in reality TV shows without contempt. Often they will go on and on about how awful these people are. Whatever lofty anthropological reasons some of them may offer for watching the shows, from my perspective it seems that their chief appeal lies in giving viewers someone to look down on.

But while Americans may take great pleasure in collectively groaning over whatever risible antics Snooki gets up to for a half-hour every week, it’s no surprise that this would not translate into sales of her book. Surely people buy celebrity books not because they’re anticipating a satisfying literary experience, but rather to own a tangible piece of that individual’s stardom. (Also: Autograph tours are an obligatory element in the publication of any celebrity-authored title, so they get a chance to meet their idol face-to-face.) It’s another way of expressing one’s fandom. If the whole point of Snooki is hating on her, why would anyone want to purchase a bookful of that?

Celebrity memoirs make some commenters very, very angry. Although the genre has been around (in one version or another) for at least a century, the latest iteration is often held up as Exhibit A in arguments for the disgraceful state of book publishing. I can’t get too worked up about this. It makes as much sense as ranting about the abundance and popularity of books on any topics that don’t interest me personally (i.e., golf — lotta golf books out there).

Besides, the indignation seems misdirected. Publishers publish these titles because (until recently, at least), they do sell. For all the hopeful talk of declining enthusiasm for the genre, it’s worth noting that “Kardashian Konfidential” has sold well over 100,000 copies. Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress,” published in 2004, has sold over 1 million worldwide.

Doesn’t the problem here lie instead with the buyers of such books? (Seriously: Since I have such a hard time imagining why anyone would do so, if you have bought one of these celebrity memoirs, would you be so generous as to explain your motives in the comments thread?) Every time someone told me I was fortunate in not knowing who Snooki or Kim Kardashian are, I couldn’t help wondering why they chose to know so much about her themselves. Perhaps they secretly enjoy their own theatrical disgust with the state of American culture and society.

If we really wanted these annoying figures to go away, the solution is pretty simple: Stop paying attention to them. I’m here to testify that this is very easy to do. You, too, can know next to nothing about the Situation or Tila Tequila (whoever they are!), if they really bother you that much. A blank expression will pass over your face when their names are mentioned in conversation, and when you see placards announcing their forthcoming appearances at chain bookstores, you’ll frown vaguely, shrug and keep walking toward the shelves with the real books.

Further reading

Michael Korda on the dullness of Hollywood memoirs

The Guardian on flagging sales of celebrity memoirs

The Hollywood Reporter on the failure of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s “A Shore Thing.”