The turning point came in 1977, when Piers Ackerman, another Australian recruit, learned that Elvis Presley’s former bodyguards might be willing to talk about his drug use in return for money. A fee of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was agreed upon, and Dunleavy flew out to California for a series of tell-all interviews. In just two months, he produced “Elvis: What Happened?,” a three-hundred-page book packed with salacious details about Presley’s private life. Serialization of the book in the Star began the very day before Presley was found dead at Graceland. “The circulation went from two million to three million in a week,” Ian Rae, a Fox News executive who was then editor of the Star, recalled. “We never looked back.’’ Dunleavy’s book became a best-seller, but he received only a flat fee of thirty thousand dollars, which he put toward the purchase of the house in Lido Beach. He wasn’t bitter. “Mate, I’ve never had a bad day in journalism in my life,” he said. “You win, you get drunk because you won. You lose, you get drunk because you lost.”
As Rod Dreher, who worked with Dunleavy at the New York Post writes, “Like Keith Richards, he lived on booze and cigarettes, and you didn’t think anything could kill him. Sadly, that wasn’t true. What a guy. The world is now a much less interesting place.” Read the whole thing.