The 20 Most Explosive Hollywood Tell-All Books -- Of All Time!

They’re the type of books that fans love to read, the celebrity biographies jam-packed with illicit sex, drugs and bad behavior. Here is our list of the best tell-all books of all time.

Child rape, drug addiction and hanging out with the King of Pop. These are just some of the subjects that former child star Corey Feldman covered in his 2013 memoir Coreyography. The Goonies actor alleged that he and the late Corey Haim were both the victims of sex abuse at the hands of older men who preyed on young boys in Tinsel Town. Most notably, however, Feldman says his friend Michael Jackson was not one of them.

The Partridge Family actress Shirley Jones raised more than a couple of eyebrows with her racy 2013 autobiography. But she also angered Joan Collins by claiming the Dynasty star’s husband Anthony Newley invited Jones and then hubby Jack Cassidy to get naked and watch porn with them after a dinner party. Not amused, Collins fired off a cease-and-desist letter, asking publishers Simon & Schuster to correct the story and remove her name from eBook versions of the memoir.

Brandi Glanville didn’t hold back when she wrote her New York Times bestseller, Drinking and Tweeting. Her philandering ex-husband Eddie Cibrian and his mistress-turned-wife LeAnn Rimes were easy targets. Nothing was sacred, including tales of her vaginal rejuvenation and her night in the Beverly Hills slammer after her 2010 DUI arrest.

Queen Elizabeth II called 1992 her “annus horribilis” and the publication of Diana: Her True Story probably contributed to her lousy year. Andrew Morton’s book took readers behind palace walls and revealed the true extent of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ crumbling marriage, Diana’s bulimia , her suicide attempts and the couple’s affairs. When Diana died in 1997 Morton finally admitted that the princess herself contributed to the jaw-dropping biography.

She says her nickname is  “Superhead” and Karrine Steffans explains why in her salacious book Memoirs of a Video Vixen. Pick a rapper, athlete or hip-hop mogul and in her 2005 tell-all Steffans claims that, if she hasn’t slept with them, she’s at the very least orally pleased them. 

Before there was “Superhead” there was Pamela Des Barres, a rock and roll groupie who claims to have slept with a plethora of rock stars in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Des Barres her sexual conquests include Rolling Stone front man Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.

When a daughter claims she had a 10-year consensual sexual relationship with her father, it’s an explosive revelation. When the daughter is actress Mackenzie Phillips and the father is Mamas and the Papas musician John Phillips it’s an explosion that’s heard around the world. The recovering drug addict and troubled actress detailed all these claims in her 2009 memoir High On Arrival.

“I asked intimate questions and it was tough – especially on the telephone – to ask what this man was like in bed, but the women I talked to were honest.” That’s what writer Kitty Kelley told People magazine in 1978 about her research for her unauthorized biography of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Kelley dug into the former First Lady’s past to find out about everything from her sex life to her alleged secret electric shock therapy treatment.

In her 2008 autobiography, veteran broadcaster Barbara Walters was bold and candid in her revelations about her life and celebrated career. She created headlines for weeks by writing about  the secret affair she allegedly had in the 1970s with married Senator Edward Brookes. Walters said he was “the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming and impossible man.”

In this book Janice Dickinson spills the beans on everything – from her bulimia battle and drug abuse to her relationship with Sylvester Stallone. She even dishes the dirt on the size of Liam Neeson’s penis.

Jack Nicholson’s life is put under the microscope in this 2013 biography about the Hollywood hell raiser. Marc Eliot claims that, during the darkest days of his drug addiction, the Oscar-winner allegedly had “homoerotic fantasies.” It is also claimed that the famed womanizer, allegedly bedded actress Meryl Streep on the set of their 1987 movie Ironweed.

Most men wouldn’t take too kindly to being dubbed a bit of a prima donna who is lacking in the trouser department, even if it comes from a friend they’ve known for more than 50 years. Mick Jagger is no different so he was understandably a bit peeved when his band mate Keith Richards needled him about both in the latter’s 2010 autobiography Life. Richards later told Rolling Stone magazine: “I know that some parts of it and some of the publicity really offended Mick and I regret that.”

Among some hardcore Elvis Presley fans Albert Harry Goldman’s name is mud. In 1981 – just four years after the King of Rock and Roll died – the author’s salacious biography was released amid a swirl of controversy. Goldman, who concluded that Presley was a “pervert, a voyeur,” defended his stance by saying he thought the singer “was a figure of the most bizarre and grotesque character.”

A notoriously litigious Tom Cruise was not amused by the release of the 2008 unauthorized biography that Andrew Morton penned about him. The actor’s lawyer Bert Fields called Morton’s suggestion that daughter Suri Cruise is not his biological child a “grotesque lie.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, the British writer pours cold water on persistent rumors that the actor is allegedly gay.

In this 1986 bestseller Tina Turner details the highs and lows of her life and career from her beginnings in Nutbush, Tennessee to her beatings at the hands of her abusive ex-husband Ike Turner and on to her triumphant return to the pop charts.

Joan Crawford’s legacy never fully recovered after the 1978 release of her daughter Christina’s shocking book about life with the Hollywood legend. The movie veteran’s adopted child tells it all from her mom’s drunken rampages to alleged beatings with wire hangers. In 2008 Christina told the U.K.’s The Guardian: “People fantasized about who or what I was; that I had this privileged, wealthy, film-star family life. I didn’t have any of that.”

In her 1985 memoir Elvis & Me Priscilla Presley lifted the lid on what it was like to live with the Love Me Tender singer. Priscilla – who met Presley when she was in her early teens – revealed how the rocker molded her into his own image, controlling every aspect of her life from the color of her hair to the food she ate. In a 1985 interview with Barbara Walters, she said: “Nothing was harmful; nothing was done with bad intent.”

In 1977 when she was just 13, 43-year-old director Roman Polanski had unlawful sex with her in a Jacuzzi at Jack Nicholson’s empty home. More than 30 years later, in 2013, Samantha Geimer finally told her story – in all the uncomfortable details – in The Girl: A Life In The Shadow of Roman Polanski. In her autobiography Geimer claims that after plying her with glasses of wine and a Quaalude, the director allegedly went on to have vaginal, oral and anal intercourse with her.

According to crooner Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra was so furious about Kitty Kelley’s exposé on him that he wanted to take out a hit on the muckraking author. Revelations in her 1986 unauthorized biography include allegations that Sinatra’s mother ran an illegal abortion service.

In 1990, aged just 15, Drew Barrymore released her autobiography telling the world about her wild child past. The former E.T. star says she had her first drink at nine-years-old, started smoking pot aged 10, graduating to cocaine when she was 12. She packed rehab stints and a suicide attempt into her short life before penning her memoir with the help of writer Todd Gold.