Sheila Weller

Take a 30-year-old first-time screenwriter, a macho action-movie director, and a corrupt studio financier, and you get . . . a feminist classic? Sheila Weller has the unlikely backstory of Thelma & Louise.

Surfing was still a strange and exotic art in 1961, when Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw escaped their troubled homes for the beach at Malibu. Becoming acolytes to the dashing, lawless Miki Dora, the three boys found themselves at the crest of a craze sparked by one of the girl surfers on the scene, whose father wrote the novel Gidget about her obsession. Sheila Weller revisits an underground culture of big waves and wild times, which ended in a blaze of Hollywood decadence, drugs, and death.

On the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, Sheila Weller remembers the late star as she knew him on a weekend a year before he passed.

The famous singer herself responds to the "You're So Vain" rumors. (Now she's just fueling the fire.)

Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us and V.Fs resident Carly Simon expert, gets inside the rumors behind Simons infamous well-hung gavotter.

Four decades after Love Story, looking back at two tumultuous marriages (to Robert Evans and Steve McQueen), Ali MacGraw tells Sheila Weller what Hollywood could never give her.

Michelle Phillips talks about the effect Mackenzie's incest allegations have had on the family.

They came of age--and to music stardom--in the 60s and 70s: Carole King, the sensual Earth Mother; Joni Mitchell, the bohemian risktaker; and Carly Simon, the glamorous iconoclast. Today they are activists, role models, grandmothers. In an excerpt from her new book, Sheila Weller looks back at the passions and heartbreak that inspired their greatest hits.

When Denny Doherty died, in January, Michelle Phillips became the last of the Mamas and the Papas, the 60s foursome that made hippie sexy and topped the charts for almost two psychedelic years before breaking up. At 63, the muse of “California Dreamin’ ” tells the real story of her stormy marriage to the group’s leader, John Phillips; her very brief marriage to Dennis Hopper; her liaisons with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty; and the tangled emotions that bound four musicians—Michelle, John, Denny, and Cass Elliot—for life.