17 Genuinely Heartbreaking And Shocking Things Celebs Revealed In Their Memoirs
Note: Some examples include topics of drug use, addiction, and abuse.
1.In her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy revealed that when her series Sam and Cat got canceled she was offered $300,000 as a “thank you gift” as long as she never spoke publicly about her experience at Nickelodeon.
Jennette has spoken about being sexualized as a minor, coerced into drinking alcohol by a producer, and emotionally abused during her time on iCarly and Sam and Cat.
She turned down the "hush money" but admitted to second-guessing her decision. She wrote, “Nickelodeon is offering me three hundred thousand dollars in hush money to not talk publicly about my experience on the show? My personal experience of The Creator’s abuse? This is a network with shows made for children. Shouldn’t they have some sort of moral compass? Shouldn’t they at least try to report to some sort of ethical standard?”
2.In his book, Lucky Man: A Memoir, Michael J. Fox revealed that he almost died while filming Back to the Future Part III. Michael was nearly strangled to death during a stunt that required him to hang by a rope around his neck.
He explained that practices of the stunt had gone smoothly, but once it came time for shooting, he couldn't get his hands in the right place in time before the rope cut off his airway. He swung from the rope "unconscious" for "several seconds" before receiving help.
He said, “I swung unconscious at the end of the rope for several seconds before Bob Zemeckis, fan of me though he was, realized even I wasn't that good of an actor."
3.In his memoir, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, Danny Trejo revealed that he met the infamous Charles Manson in prison and got hypnotized by him.
Back in 1961, when Danny was only 17, he was arrested and brought to the Los Angeles County jail, where Manson was also being held. He shared that in exchange for protection, Manson told his jail mates that he would take them through a guided meditation that would get them high without actually using any drugs.
He wrote, "Even before I fake-fixed, I could taste it in my mouth. Any junkie knows what that is like. By the time he described it hitting my bloodstream, I felt the warmth flowing through my body."
So, they sat down, closed their eyes, and the meditation began. "For 15 minutes, in great detail, he walked us through the process of copping the dope, finding a place to fix, cooking the heroin in a spoon, drawing it into a needle, and sticking it in our veins."
Danny, who's been sober since 1969, ended with, "If that white boy wasn't a career criminal, he could have been a professional hypnotist."
4.In his memoir, Will, Will Smith revealed that his first serious relationship was with a girl named Melanie, who cheated on him. As a way of coping with the betrayal, Will confessed to “homeopathic remedies of shopping and rampant sexual intercourse."
He explained that as soon as he met her she became "the center" of his life and he became preoccupied with “healing the pain of her trauma.” He also said, “The look in Melanie's eyes became the substitute for Gigi's [his grandmother’s] approval. I've always needed a woman to achieve for,”
Engaging in so much sex actually led Will to have a "psychosomatic reaction" to having an orgasm and he would "gag and sometimes even vomit."
He said, "I had sex with so many women, and it was so constitutionally disagreeable to the core of my being, that I developed a psychosomatic reaction to having an orgasm."
He also shared that when he started dating his current wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, he immediately tried to "satisfy" her by having sex multiple times a day, every day for four straight months.
He wrote, “I started to wonder if this was a competition. Either way, as far as I was concerned, there were only two possibilities: (1) I was going to satisfy this woman sexually, or (2) I was going to die trying."
5.Also in his book, Will Smith shared that because of his method acting for Six Degrees of Separation, he actually fell in love with his costar Stockard Channing. At the time, he had just welcomed a new baby with his then-wife, Sheree Zampino.
He wrote, "Sheree and I were in the first few months of our marriage with a brand-new baby, and for Sheree, I can imagine that this experience was unsettling to say the least. She'd married a guy named Will Smith and now she was living with a guy named Paul Poitier. And to make matters worse, during shooting I fell in love with Stockard Channing."
He also explained that his marriage to Sheree was off to a "rocky start" because he found himself "desperately yearning to see and speak" to Stockard.
He added, "I was like, 'Oh no! What have I done?' That was my last experience with method acting, where you're reprogramming your mind. You're actually playing around with your psychology. You teach yourself to like things and to dislike things. It is a really dangerous place when you get good at it. But once I had that experience, I was like, 'No more method acting.' For Six Degrees, I wanted to perform well so badly that I was spending six and seven and eight days in character before shooting, and you have to be careful with that."
6.In her memoir, This Will Only Hurt A Little, Busy Philipps revealed that she co-wrote the movie Blades of Glory with her then-boyfriend Craig Cox and his brother Jeff — she even wrote a role for herself to play. But when it came time to pitch the movie to producers, Craig and Jeff took Busy's name off the movie and sold it themselves.
She wrote, "I had a hard time recovering. It wasn’t the script. It was that I’d been so easily thrown out, like trash. I was in the way of their success, I guess? Collateral damage."
She added that when she asked for credit on the movie Craig and Jeff told her she was "crazy" and rumors spread that she "stole ideas" from them. She said, "In order for them to do this insanely shitty thing to me, they vilified me and told me I was crazy. The story became that I was the one who had tried to STEAL ideas from them, that I was ALWAYS just looking out for myself. THEY had come up with this AMAZING STORY, and I was the less-than-talented girlfriend trying to glom on to their talent and carve out a piece for myself. A piece that I didn’t deserve. I had a hard time figuring out what was real.”
Busy even ended up auditioning for the role she wrote for herself, but it went to Jenna Fisher. Luckily, word had gotten out about what really happened behind the scenes and Amy Poehler was on Busy's side. She said, “Amy Poehler grabbed me. ‘Girl,’ she said. ‘Seth Meyers told me the story of what those dudes did. FUCK ‘EM! You rock and are so talented. Come here! Sit at our table!!'”
7.In her first memoir, Little Girl Lost, Drew Barrymore revealed that the first time she'd ever tried smoking weed she was only 10 years old.
She said, "When I was ten and a half I was sitting in the back seat of a car driven by a friend’s mother. She started smoking pot. I’d wanted to try marijuana for a long time, but I was afraid that if I asked, she’d say, 'No way, Drew. You’re too young.' However, she offered me some and I said, 'Sure, I’ll try it.'"
8.In her book, I'll Never Write My Memoirs, Grace Jones revealed that she actually used way less cocaine than what she was rumored to have used. However, when she did want to get high, she would take cocaine up her butt rather than snorting it.
She explained, "I preferred to put a rock up my ass rather than snort it. Sometimes it might get blown up there, one way or another. Then you get a very wonderful sexual feeling in your lower half. Stick a tiny little rock up your butt and it feels fantastic. The coke must be clean, of course. Very clean — that’s the word, more than 'pure.'"
9.In her memoir, Melissa Explains It All, Melissa Joan Hart revealed that while she was on Sabrina The Teenage Witch she was also experimenting with weed, mushrooms, ecstasy, and mescaline. She went on to say that she had never "snorted or shot anything into [her] body."
She added, "The one time I was offered coke, which happened to be by Paris Hilton, I turned it down." She even tells a story about the "third or fourth time" she dropped ecstasy and she ended up partying at the Playboy Mansion in LA and showed up hungover to a Maxim photoshoot the next morning.
10.In her memoir, The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher revealed that she had an affair with Harrison Ford while filming their first Star Wars movie in the '70s. At the time, she was 19 and he was 33, married with two kids.
She wrote, "I began filming Star Wars hoping to have an affair. Hoping to strike people as sophisticated and louche, someone you’d think had gone to boarding school in Switzerland with Anjelica Huston and had learned to speak four languages."
She recalls the first time they slept together was after George Lucas’s 32nd birthday, in his studio car on their way back to London. She said, "A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was underway, and I was unclear how it would turn out — but I realized who it was I wanted to win: my co-star, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head and the gun in his belt — not now, just when in character, but still. After a mad scuffle, Mr. Ford threw my virtue and me into the back seat of his studio car and commanded the driver to 'Go! GO!' We went, followed by the crew."
She said, "Harrison made me feel nervous. I got tongue-tied in his company, and clumsy. I was with him when we worked together and tried to avoid him otherwise, so as not to annoy him. It was more comfortable to hang out with the cast and crew, who were more fun and less immune to my charms. But when I look back with squinting eyes, I figure Harrison was scoping out the set in those early days. Not to have an affair, necessarily, but not not to, either. We were on location, after all, and a quiet jaunt on the side was almost expected."
She added that the affair went on for three months before she ended things and they "never again acknowledged that anything of that nature had occurred."
11.In his memoir, I Am Ozzy, Ozzy Osbourne revealed that one night while he was on drugs he tried to kill his wife Sharon Osbourne and was arrested for attempted murder. He woke up the next morning in a jail cell not remembering what had happened the night before.
He wrote, "I used to black out a lot. And my biggest fear was waking up in a police cell and having an old lady say to a police officer, yes, that's the guy who ran my husband down, or that's the guy who hit my son over the head with an axe. It used to terrify me ... And then it happened — that day when I woke up in this little single cell with human shit up the walls — and I thought, what the fuck have I done now? Has one of my practical jokes backfired? So I asked a police officer. I said: 'What am I here for?' I hadn't got a fucking clue. It's the most horrific feeling. He read me a piece of paper, and said, 'You're charged with attempting to murder Mrs. Sharon Osbourne.' I can't tell you how I felt. I just went numb."
12.In her memoir, Open Book, Jessica Simpson revealed she had an "emotional affair" with Johnny Knoxville that started on the set of Dukes Of Hazzard. At the time, Jessica was married to Nick Lachay and Johnny was married to Melanie Lynn Clapp.
She wrote, "Sigh, Johnny. The boy from Tennessee, as I coded him in my diary. First off, we were both married, so this wasn't going to get physical. But to me, an emotional affair was worse than a physical one."
She explained that Johnny was one of the people she could be her "deepest authentic" self with and that he laughed with her, instead of at her. She even admitted to writing him love letters while her husband Nick was passed out in bed next to her.
She said, "We wrote these flowery love letters back and forth, often at night with Nick passed out in the bed next to me. We talked about music, and I would listen to the Johnny Cash songs he suggested just to feel like we were still together."
13.In her memoir, Troublemaker, Leah Remini revealed that children are constantly left on their own in Scientology. She explained, "In Scientology, minors are considered spiritual beings and not children in need of protection and guidance. You are the only one responsible for the condition of your life, regardless of your age. The Sea Org members believed that their kids could make up their own minds."
She said that some children were even forced out of their own homes, "As a result, these kids could no longer live with their parents... Even if that meant they ended up practically squatting, or sleeping in a stranger's apartment, their parents felt that it was the child's decision to make."
Leah also said that she'd witnessed several babies, including her sister Shannon, be neglected in the Sea Org's "nursery." She added, "'Nursery' was a charitable term for the motel room in the Quality Inn filled with cribs of crying, neglected babies, flies, and the smell of dirty diapers. The only ventilation came from a huge fan by the window... The person in charge was a kid like me, just some random teenage Sea Org member on post, who was hardly qualified to be taking care of children. Shannon was crying and soaked with urine in her crib...The neglect was overwhelming."
14.In her memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny, Holly Madison shared the details of her first night living in the Playboy Mansion. She learned that having sex with Hugh Hefner was a requirement to live there and he even offered her a quaalude, saying, "In the '70s they used to call these pills 'thigh openers.'" She refused the drug but still got drunk.
Tina Jordan, Hugh's No. 1 girlfriend at the time, brought Holly into his bedroom, which she explained was "like an episode of Hoarders." She recalled hardcore porn being played on two TV screens as Hugh masturbated to other girlfriends acting out lesbian scenes. Holly remembered being pushed towards Hugh as a girlfriend urged him to "be with the new girl." She wrote, "It was so brief that I can't even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine."
15.In her memoir, Finding Me, Viola Davis shared her experience growing up in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She explained, “We were ‘po.’ That’s a level lower than poor."
She added that food stamps were never enough to feed her family and that none of the toilets in their home worked — she became "very skilled at filling up a bucket and pouring it into the toilet to flush it." She said that they would also go "unwashed" and could never go into their kitchen because "the rats had taken over." The apartment building she lived in had even caught fire several times.
16.In her memoir, unSweetined, Jodie Sweetin recalled dealing with her drug and alcohol addiction as a teenager. She revealed that she was "high as a kite" after snorting meth in a bathroom stall during the 2004 premiere of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's movie New York Minute.
She wrote, "I was pulling off the deceit. It was hard for people to believe I was doing that much drugs. I look at photos from that event, and I didn't even look strung out!"
She also said in 1996 she had gotten so drunk at Candace Cameron Bure's wedding that she vomited and had to be carried out. She added, "I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14. That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do."
17.Finally, in his memoir, Miss Memory Lane, Colton Haynes revealed that he almost lost his role on Teen Wolf after MTV found out he'd done a photo shoot for gay magazine, XY, as a teenager.
Before publicly coming out as gay in 2016, Colton was urged to stay silent about his sexuality. He even recalled an instance where a producer told him not to come out, or else he would lose jobs. He said, “It didn’t matter who was on my team, the message I got was always the same: ‘You will not work if you are yourself.’” However, Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis fought to have Colton on the show.
He'd said he spent “years sending cease-and-desist letters to everyone who posted my XY shoot.”
