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Let Me Tell You a Secret: A Journalist's Career Covering the Rich and Famous
From interviewing John F. Kennedy Jr. in the summer he meets his future wife to hanging with Leonardo DiCaprio and his posse weeks before Titanic starts filming, award-winning journalist and #1 bestselling royal biographer Courtney Hargrove has had a front-row seat to key moments in pop-culture history.
For Let me Tell You a Secret, she opens her reporter’s notebook from 1994 into the 2020s, sharing her unvarnished observations and experiences with high-profile people from New York to Los Angeles to London and beyond. There’s a conversation with Tupac Shakur days after his release from prison, getting up close to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes when in Rome for their wedding, polo with Prince Harry, and skiing in Switzerland with Prince William and Princess Kate.
With her experience meeting the rich and famous at pivotal times in their lives, Hargrove is able to provide a clear-eyed look at both vintage and modern celebrity, noting the good, the bad, and the hypocritical, all while adding the historical context of each meeting.
In between spending time with kind, down-to-earth celebrities with extraordinary talent and attending glamourous galas, the author is smacked, mocked, groped, and semi-spit at by those she is meant to be covering in a professional capacity.
Let Me Tell You a Secret examines the endless chase for celebrity news from a tightly controlled industry that doesn’t want us peeking behind the curtain—and will do anything to stop those who do from writing about what they see. Hargrove examines the question, Can you ever know the real person behind the carefully cultivated image?
For Let me Tell You a Secret, she opens her reporter’s notebook from 1994 into the 2020s, sharing her unvarnished observations and experiences with high-profile people from New York to Los Angeles to London and beyond. There’s a conversation with Tupac Shakur days after his release from prison, getting up close to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes when in Rome for their wedding, polo with Prince Harry, and skiing in Switzerland with Prince William and Princess Kate.
With her experience meeting the rich and famous at pivotal times in their lives, Hargrove is able to provide a clear-eyed look at both vintage and modern celebrity, noting the good, the bad, and the hypocritical, all while adding the historical context of each meeting.
In between spending time with kind, down-to-earth celebrities with extraordinary talent and attending glamourous galas, the author is smacked, mocked, groped, and semi-spit at by those she is meant to be covering in a professional capacity.
Let Me Tell You a Secret examines the endless chase for celebrity news from a tightly controlled industry that doesn’t want us peeking behind the curtain—and will do anything to stop those who do from writing about what they see. Hargrove examines the question, Can you ever know the real person behind the carefully cultivated image?
- GenresNonfiction
298 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 16, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 7, 2026
I devoured this book in one weekend at the beach. It's told almost in essay form, with the author going through the phases of her career as a journalist from Massachusetts to New York to London and back again.
It does have a lot of fun celebrity gossip but it's really a look behind the curtain at what it's like to cover the stars as a reporter for the biggest celebrity magazine in the world. I LOVED it.
It does have a lot of fun celebrity gossip but it's really a look behind the curtain at what it's like to cover the stars as a reporter for the biggest celebrity magazine in the world. I LOVED it.
July 4, 2026
An interesting diversion with a LOT of typos.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews