Media articles by RPCVs

The Secret Celebrity Diaries: A Master Interviewer’s Behind-the-Scenes Chronicles For decades, veteran celebrity interviewer Lawrence Grobel has been getting Hollywood’s biggest stars to open up in ways few journalists ever have. But while conducting legendary interviews with icons like Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Dolly Parton for Playboy magazine, he was secretly keeping a detailed diary of everything that happened behind the scenes—the anxious phone calls, the unexpected friendships, the creative struggles, and the deeply human moments that never made it into print. In this fascinating Vanity Fair excerpt from his unpublished journals, Grobel reveals what it was really like to spend ten days on Brando’s private island near Tahiti, to watch a paranoid Pacino worry he’d revealed too much, and to have Dolly Parton talk him out of interviewing Charles Manson because “he’d steal your soul.” The diary entries span from 1977 to 1981 and read like a time capsule of both Hollywood’s golden . . .