Want to hear a celebrity really spill the tea? Put a computer in front of them and say, "Write your memoir!" That's all it seems to have taken for these 15 celebrities to reveal absolutely unforgettable secrets. Check 'em out:
1. Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel — the famously intense inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage — revealed in his 2026 memoir Roll the Calls that he eats a cup of live worms every morning as part of an extreme health regimen designed to keep him going as long as possible. Emanuel typically wakes around 4 a.m. to begin a two-hour routine that includes an ice plunge, infrared-light therapy, and the worms, which he says are meant to eat “the bad bacteria in my gut.”
Emanuel says people are baffled by the ritual, but he doesn’t understand why. “The astonishment people express at my morning routine astonishes me,” he wrote. “If you want to win at life, then isn’t Job One having more life?” Despite Emanuel's confidence in his routine, there’s no established medical evidence that eating live worms improves longevity or general gut health.
2. Michael Douglas confessed to an incredibly awkward drunken moment with Julia Roberts in his 2026 memoir One Helluva Ride. Douglas — who was in middle of producing 1990's Flatliners co-starring Roberts — was at a Golden Globes party with his then-13-year-old son Cameron. At one point, Douglas says he saw Roberts with her arm around Cameron, “kind of nuzzling him,” and, because he was “pretty drunk,” decided this required an intervention. Douglas wrote, “I told her, ‘Take your hands off my son and take that Golden Globe and stick it where the sun don’t shine.” (Roberts had just won Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias.) The next morning, his producing partner Rick Bieber called and told him, “We need to talk, Michael.” Douglas realized he'd “crossed a line with the most in-demand young actress in Hollywood,” sent Roberts roses, and later apologized in person. She forgave him enough to finish Flatliners, but their friendship was over.
His drunken moment may have also changed the course of movie history. Roberts was considering taking the role of Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, but declined it after the Golden Globes drama. Douglas said the incident was “wildly embarrassing” and stuck with him for years. He eventually went to rehab in 1992 for substance abuse.
3. Kevin Federline made an incredibly disturbing allegation about his ex-wife Britney Spears in his 2025 memoir You Thought You Knew. Federline claims their sons told him that when they were younger, they would sometimes wake up at night to find Britney standing silently in their bedroom doorway holding a knife as she watched them sleep.
Again, this is Federline’s allegation, and there's no independent evidence it actually happened. Britney pushed back, calling his claims “extremely hurtful and exhausting” and accusing him of “constant gaslighting.” She added, “Those white lies in that book, they are going straight to the bank and I am the only one who genuinely gets hurt here.” Her representative also accused Federline of “profiting off her” now that his child-support payments had ended. Federline defended the memoir, saying that he believed he was trying to help both their children and Spears herself.
4. In the early ’70s, former Beatle George Harrison — who was married to model Pattie Boyd — began an affair with his ex-bandmate Ringo Starr's wife Maureen. Pattie spilled all the English breakfast tea in her autobiography Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me. She recalled finding George and Maureen locked in a room together, and George giving the spectacularly unconvincing explanation that Maureen was tired and had gone in there to lie down. "She was the last person I would have expected to stab me in the back," Boyd writes, "But she did." The marriage was over.
Even wilder, Beatles insider Chris O’Dell says she was sitting at Ringo’s kitchen table when George told him, “I’m in love with your wife.” O’Dell says Ringo responded, “Better you than someone we don’t know,” but was nevertheless heartbroken by what happened. (Ringo got remarried in 1981 to Bond girl Barbara Bach, so he's doing alright!)
As for Pattie, she had some of her own drama up her sleeve. She left George to move in with Eric Clapton, George's best friend! Remarkably, when they got married three years later, George attended the wedding party!
5. Drew Barrymore was only 6 years old when she became world famous after starring in E.T. But instead of having a normal childhood, her mother took the grade schooler to nightclubs like Studio 54. She drank by 9, used cocaine by 12, and went to rehab at 13.
In her autobiography Little Girl Lost, Barrymore told her story in all its shocking detail. The most shocking part to me, though, isn’t just the drugs; it’s how many adults around her watched a literal child partying with grown celebrities and thought nothing of it.
6. Priscilla Presley revealed in her 2025 memoir Softly, as I Leave You that Elvis allegedly became so enraged over her affair with karate instructor Mike Stone that he talked about having him killed. According to Priscilla, Elvis told members of his entourage that “Mike had to die” and asked his friend Joe Esposito if he could find a hit man. Thankfully, Elvis eventually cooled off and abandoned the idea. Priscilla wrote that he “gave up the idea … thank God.”
She also says that after learning about Stone, Elvis felt emasculated and, in her words, “needed to prove to himself, to me that he could make love ‘like a real man.’” According to Priscilla, he then had sex with her “forcefully, not forcibly,” without his usual tenderness.
7. While researching her 2025 memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, Tom Hanks's daughter E.A. Hanks found journals written by her late mother, Susan Dillingham, in which her mother described witnessing her own father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl. Hanks said she'd known almost nothing about her maternal grandfather growing up — in fact, merely telling her mother she'd visited his grave once caused her mother to shut herself in her room and stop speaking to her for about two weeks.
Hanks says that she is only recounting what her mother claimed to have witnessed in the journals, not presenting the murder as an independently proven crime, and she wonders if her mother may have been writing metaphorically about her own difficult childhood. “If any part of the red journal is true," she says, "where I read about my grandfather raping and murdering, then my mother never stood a chance.”
8. Terms of Endearment was a box office hit and won Best Picture, but there was little love between Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, who played the film's mother and daughter. Director James L. Brooks described the set as "stormy," and at least between MacLaine and Winger, it was. First, MacLaine beat Mariah Carey to her iconic "I don't know her" line by 20 years, when, in 1984, a reporter asked her what she thought of Winger before they worked together. Her response? "Debra Winger? I didn't know the name. I didn't know who she was."
But it's what MacLaine wrote in her autobiography, My Lucky Stars, that's most shocking. While rehearsing, Winger allegedly yelled at MacLaine to "get over here" when she didn't hit her mark. MacLaine wrote: "'I heard you,' I said. 'I know marks when I see them.' 'Good,' [Winger] said. 'How's this for a mark?' She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face." Winger was asked in 2008 by Andy Cohen if the farting story — and another one that she'd licked MacLaine's leg while she was filming a love scene with Jack Nicholson — was true. She smiled and admitted there "was something true in there."
9. Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne lived a pretty wild life. He licked up his bandmate's pee, snorted ants like drugs, and bit off a bat's head onstage. But the most shocking event in his life came in 1989 when he was charged with attempting to murder his wife Sharon. Ozzy had mixed vodka with pain pills, and, as he wrote in his posthumous autobiography Last Rites, "It was too much. I’d gone too far. I was out of control." The couple argued, culminating in the drug-and-alcohol-altered Ozzy choking Sharon.
Ozzy went on to say he blacked out and had no memory of the attack, only learning about it when he woke up in jail and was told he'd been charged with attempted murder. Ozzy wrote, "I couldn’t believe it. 'Maybe I really am insane,' I remember thinking.” Thankfully, Ozzy got sober, and in time, Sharon dropped the charges. The couple reunited and stayed together until Ozzy's death last year. Reflecting on this dark time, he wrote, "Sharon, I’m sorry. And thank you for giving me another chance when almost anyone else would have walked away."
10. Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron wrote in his autobiography that his sex life was once so nonstop that his penis exploded from overuse like a hot dog in the microwave. When his penis became raw and chafed on tour, a doctor warned him to stop having sex. After a show in Oklahoma City, though, he took a "beauty-pageant-type woman" back to his bedroom, started having sex, and then heard a tearing sound. Then came blood. A lot of blood. Negron says he wrapped himself in a towel and walked into an emergency room, where the doctor stitched him up while laughing.
11. Wilt Chamberlain — the only player in NBA history to score 100 points in a game — scored even more off the court. In his book A View from Above, Wilt claimed he slept with 20,000 different women. “At my age," he wrote, "that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.”
12. Lily Allen revealed that she hired female sex workers while still married to her ex-husband Sam Cooper. "I slept with female escorts when I was on tour, cause I was lost and lonely and looking for something. I'm not proud, but I'm not ashamed. I don't do it anymore," she wrote.
13. Will Smith wrote in his memoir, "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. It would literally make me gag and sometimes even vomit... In every case, though, I hoped to God this beautiful stranger would be 'the one' who would love me, who would make this pain go away. But invariably, there I was, retching and wretched."
14. Lena Dunham revealed in her memoir Famesick that she cheated on her ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff after getting a hysterectomy for an endometriosis-related chronic illness. She reached out to Nick, her middle school ex-boyfriend, and told him, "I've been through something awful. I don't want to talk about it, but I need you to fuck me, and I need you to do all of the work." After, Lena tried to convince herself that everything with Jack would be fine once he returned from tour. “I had fixed myself, proved I could be the freaky sexy lively young woman he fell in love with. I had exorcised the demon. In a way, I had fucked Nick for both our sakes, to make our house a home again."
15. Tatum O'Neal alleged in her 2003 memoir A Paper Life that her father Ryan O'Neal was physically abusive after becoming jealous of her acting success in a role HE helped her get. Tatum was just 8 years old with no acting experience when she was cast as her dad's daughter in 1973's Paper Moon, and Ryan was already an established star. There was little reason to expect his 8-year-old daughter to become the film’s breakout star, but then Tatum left no crumbs (as the kids say), becoming the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar (while her father wasn't even nominated). This threw her father into a jealous rage and he slugged her. "Things got ugly fast," she wrote.
In an especially bleak passage of Tatum's memoir, she describes telling her father his drug dealer molested her. His response, according to Tatum? To claim she (a minor) led the drug dealer on, and kept the dealer on the payroll. Ryan was no fan of the book, saying, “She wrote a book—bitch! How dare she throw our laundry in the street for money!”
Tatum, who learned she was left out of her father's will after he died, summed up their relationship in her memoir by writing: "The role I longed to play was never written into Ryan's script: daughter."
16. Former first lady Laura Bush was the driver in a heartbreaking crash that took a teenager’s life. On the night of November 6, 1963, Laura Welch (her birth name) ran a stop sign while driving her father’s Chevrolet sedan and plowed into another car at an intersection, killing Michael Dutton Douglas. Making a sad situation even sadder, Douglas was a close friend of Laura's. According to police reports, Laura was not drinking or speeding, and was not charged. When Laura became first lady in 2001, the story resurfaced.
In her 2010 memoir Spoken from the Heart, Laura finally addressed the crash in detail. She wrote, “The whole time, I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling ‘Please God, please God, please God,’ over and over and over again.” She added that the trauma shaped her life, and that “I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years.”
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