Years ago there was a hack writer here in Canada named Charles Gordon. He may still be around for all I know but I have not (mercifully) seen any of his stuff published for a while now.
He will always stick in my memory because of a hilarious incident involving a John Lennon biography. The biography was by Albert Goldman. Goldman wrote hit pieces on celebrities and he often made it easy on himself by picking celebrities with drug habits as it is easy to find evidence of people with drug habits doing really stupid things because people with drug habits do do a lot of really stupid things.
Anyway, Charles Gordon took umbrage at Goldman's book and accused him of getting his facts wrong. One of the principle wrong "facts" he chose to highlight was that Goldman said that Lennon's cocaine use in later life had been so heavy his nostrils had collapsed. This was so obviously false, in Gordon's view, that merely quoting it was enough to prove Goldman an idiot.
Anyway, the column was picked up by the wire services and published here in Quebec. The local editor must have decided it would be good to have a photo with it and someone picked one off of the wire. It was a late photo.
The funny thing, as you may guessed, was that the photo clearly showed that Lennon's nostrils had completely collapsed.
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