cover image Tabloid Prodigy: Dishing the Dirt, Getting the Gossip, and Selling My Soul in the Cutthroat World of Hollywood Reporting

Tabloid Prodigy: Dishing the Dirt, Getting the Gossip, and Selling My Soul in the Cutthroat World of Hollywood Reporting

Marlise Elizabeth Kast. Running Press Book Publishers, $24.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-7624-2970-7

Kast's story of her three years as a tabloid reporter is a walk on the wild, seamy side of workaday journalism in the mid-1990s. At age 21, recent college graduate Kast-a minister's daughter who ""wanted to be Katie Couric""-was sucked in by the glitter and glitz of Hollywood tabloid reporting and soon found herself ""prepared to jeopardize my morals, abandon the voice of ethics, and embrace perilous risks"" for her job. As a reporter for the Globe, Kast was willing to do almost anything for a story, with a pat justification close by at all times (""I don't make celebrities do what they do - I just report it""). Kast is eager to recount many of the big stories she reeled in; unfortunately, a majority of her dishes are stale leftovers-remember Tanya Harding and her brawl with boyfriend Darren Silver, or Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire romance?-and she's strangely spare with dates, perhaps silently acknowledging that a decade in tabloid-time might as well be a lifetime. While Kast's exploits are imaginative and daring, uneven writing and a pervasive feeling of distance make for a disappointing read.