The Most Knife-Twisting Boss Betrayal Books
Eliot Spitzer's once-trusted confidante Lloyd Constantine wrote a book, out next week, about Spitzer's downfall—and Spitzer's none too happy. But it's practically a hallowed tradition to write a tell-all about your famous boss.
Constantine (left) was Spitzer's senior adviser; the two had been friends since 1982. Spitzer told the Times that Constantine's book, Journal of a Plague Year (borrowed from Daniel Defoe's novel about the Great Plague of London), is "a self-serving and largely inaccurate interpretation of events mixed with unfounded speculation. That such a close adviser and confidant of my family and member of my administration would choose to write such a book is a fundamental breach of trust."
Andrew Young, pictured here testifying against his former boss, was John Edwards's longtime adviser and confidante. When Edwards got Rielle Hunter pregnant, it was Young who bizarrely agreed to claim paternity. His book, The Politician, details all the sordid details of Edwards's life that we really didn't need to know. Of course, Young himself is incredibly creepy.
The late producer Julia Phillips' 1991 book You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again was both the handiwork of a bitter former drug addict and a bombshell for a town used to people kissing its ass. Steven Spielberg was one of the many people Phillips had in her sights (she and her husband had produced Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Although Lauren Weisberger always claimed that Miranda Priestley, the scary boss in The Devil Wears Prada, was a composite, everyone knew that Priestley was based on Anna Wintour, who was Weisberger's first boss after she graduated from Cornell.
Likewise, author Bridie Clark always denied that Judith Regan was the inspiration for the boss in her roman a clef Because She Can (and indeed, Clark never worked directly for Regan), but there were striking similarities between Regan and "Vivan Grant," who Clark describes in her book as "the most hot headed, ruthless woman in publishing."
Then of course there's John Dean, White House Counsel in Richard Nixon's administration, who wrote Blind Ambition: The White House Years after the whole Watergate thing went down. Dean had testified against Nixon at the Watergate trial, but had no proof for his allegations against Nixon until the secret Watergate tapes came to light.