Jerry Oppenheimer

Unauthorized biography has been Jerry Oppenheimer's whole trade. He reported investigations in Washington and produced television news and documentaries before the books began, and he carried those habits, scores of on-the-record interviews plus public records, into portraits of Barbara Walters, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour and Jerry Seinfeld. House of Hilton, which Crown published in 2006, works down four generations, from the hotel fortune Conrad Hilton built to his great-granddaughter Paris, and gives the maternal line, Kathy Hilton's family, as much room as the famous surname. It is an unauthorized account. State of a Union, his 2000 account of the Clinton marriage, reported an alleged remark from 1974 that Hillary Clinton publicly denied. Crazy Rich turned to the Johnson & Johnson heirs, and a later book to the Kardashian family.