Heymann made oodles of money writing about Jackie O. and Elizabeth Taylor, but he received a boatload of criticism about what he used as "factual" sources. This was most problematic with a book he wrote about troubled heiress Barbara Hutton:
The most dramatic response to Mr. Heymann’s work was engendered by his first celebrity biography, “Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton,” an account of the Woolworth heiress that arrived in bookstores in the autumn of 1983.
That December the book’s original publisher, Random House, recalled and destroyed 58,000 copies of the book because of factual errors. Chief among them was Mr. Heymann’s assertion that Edward A. Kantor, a Beverly Hills doctor, had prescribed excessive drugs for Ms. Hutton in 1943.
Dr. Kantor, who became Ms. Hutton’s physician in the late 1960s, graduated from medical school in 1954. In 1943, as the news media reported after the error came to light, he would have been 14.
Mr. Heymann, who did not dispute this and other errors ascribed to the book, attributed them to researchers he had engaged to conduct interviews on his behalf.
After the book was withdrawn, Mr. Heymann later said, he attempted suicide. He moved to Israel for a time; there, he told interviewers afterward, he worked for Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
His wife couldn't confirm he was a spy. Fortunately, he survived to write other bios.
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Automobile innovator Carroll Shelby, builder of famed cars like the Cobra (which always reminded me of an early Corvette lookalike) and a souped-up version of the Ford Mustang, died in Dallas yesterday. He was 89 years old:
Shelby began building his Cobras in 1962 using the chassis and body of a two-seater from AC Cars of England.
Early prototypes broke apart because of stress on the fragile frames. “When you try to put 300 horsepower in a car designed for 100, you learn what development means,” Shelby recalled in a 2002 interview with Sports Illustrated. But the Cobra with the high-powered Ford engine proved a formidable racer, celebrated in pop culture when the Rip Chords recorded “Hey Little Cobra” in 1964.
The Cobra captured the United States Road Racing Championship series of the Sports Car Club of America in 1963 and won the Grand Touring world championship in the large-engine category in 1965.
Soon after Lee A. Iacocca of Ford introduced the Mustang in 1964, he asked Shelby to help create a high-performance version for racing. In January 1965, the first Shelby Mustang, the GT350, made its debut. Shelby also developed the Ford GT40, and the Shelby GT500 and GT500KR (the KR stood for King of the Road).
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