Neil Strauss Strips the Sheen Off the Celebrity Interview

Celebrity interviewer Neil Strauss dishes dirt on Lady Gaga, Madonna and more.

ByABC News
March 21, 2011, 2:41 AM

March 21, 2011 — -- The celebrity profile: often, it's a fluffy piece of journalism, a rose-colored portrait intended to show the star in the best light, lunching at the Ivy, sipping tea at the Plaza Hotel, or playing with their Pomeranians in their penthouse.

But what about the times that the star in question is doing drugs, drinking heavily, and/or getting cuffed by the cops?

In his new book, "Everyone Loves You When You're Dead," Neil Strauss chronicles some of the most candid moments from the more than 1,000 celebrity interviews he's conducted over two decades of writing for outlets like Rolling Stone, Esquire and The New York Times. Beyond the usual backstage Q&As and hotel room suite sit-downs, Strauss details drinks with Paris Hilton, motorcycle lessons with Tom Cruise, and apartment shut-ins with Courtney Love.

"I went back through all the interviews and all the crazy adventures with these celebrities and found the moments of truth where you really saw somebody's soul," Strauss told ABCNews.com, "whether it was a moment of insecurity or them getting arrested."

He spent two years culling through recorded transcripts and notes; the stuff that made the cut fills more than 500 pages. That includes Madonna talking about drugs (she's good on morphine, bad on Vicodin), Cruise teaching Strauss principles of Scientology (Strauss called it "a fascinating peek behind the curtain"), and Lady Gaga crying ("She said, 'Some of the things I've been through are so horrific that I have 13-year-olds and 11-year-olds listening to my music and reading about me, and I don't want to put these images in their heads.'")

Strauss has training in making tough subjects open up: he wrote the modern-day Bible on wooing women, "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists," which taught him how to steer conversations to extract information he wants.

"When I did the Britney Spears interview, it was going so horribly, and she was just giving me one-word answers, so I did some of the 'Game' stuff, taught her about herself, the mind-reading stuff, and it just blew her away. She started jumping around the room saying, 'Oh my God, this is the best interview ever!'" Strauss said. "She made me stop the tape recorder and gushed about all this stuff and at the end of it, we exchanged phone numbers. My friends were all like, 'You've got to call Britney!'"

(Strauss claimed he never called -- journalistic standards and all that.) Below, check out 10 of the most revealing celebrity tidbits from ABCNews.com's interview with Strauss and his book.

Strauss on the meanest star he's ever interviewed: "Joni Mitchell: she's so bitter. She doesn't feel like she's gotten enough credit for her work. She's an icon in music but if you don't compare her to Picasso and Mozart -- that's how she wants it, Picasso, Mozart, Joni Mitchell -- she's not happy. And you see her in the '60s and she just seems like a daffodil."