Close your eyes and think of Snoop Dogg. He's taking a bomb-ass hit off a thesaurus, right? Cracking open ice-cold magnums of Wite-Out while his copy-editing bitches make sure every page of his purple prose is suited, booted and grammatically pimped out? All right, no, this is probably not how the Doggfather spends his leisure hours. Somehow, come October, however, his first novel, Love Don't Live Here No More, will find temporary shelter in bookstores everywhere.
Will the celebrity productivity epidemic ever end? Snoop, of course, is an extreme case. Just matching his intake of the sticky icky icky each day would be a full-time job for most two-lunged individuals, but the Big Boss Dog also runs a record label, makes movies, dabbles in sneaker design and hosts a monthly satellite radio show.
Of course, he doesn't do it alone. No doubt he'll employ some editorial day-worker to do the heavy lifting on his novel, just like he did with his autobiography, Tha Doggfather, published six years ago and cowritten by author Davin Seay. ("Is it any good?" Snoop cracked during a 2003 interview. "I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.") Still, it takes time to find a good ghostwriter; it takes discipline and sustained effort. And instead of making excuses about his busy schedule or simply torturing strangers in bars about his plans to hire a ghostwriter someday, as so many of us would-be novelists do, Snoop took action.
It's inspiring, the efforts our celebrities make to conquer new realms, but it's risky too—even our most brilliant stars have only so much genius to dispense. Every time P. Diddy spends time realizing his dream of producing a low-rated celebrity cooking show starring Tom Arnold, his effort to revolutionize the fragance-design game becomes, in some small way, a dream deferred. Whatever attention Pamela Anderson devotes to her Star Wood Leigh novels is attention she can't expend on plotting her next swimsuit calendar.
Still, you have to appreciate the magnanimity underlying such adventures in brand expansion. According to a press release, Snoop Dogg's fictional debut will tell "the story of a young man living the hard life in Southern California while struggling to make it in the world of hip-hop." This territory has been covered in dozens of novels and movies already; a no-name writer would have to write the hip-hop equivalent of The Great Gatsby to sell that story. But Snoop's involvement turns a generic concept into a noteworthy one, and that no-name writer gets a payday and readers get a book with celebrity cachet. Everybody wins.
Blowback is an ever-present danger, however. Look what happened to celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck when he engaged in the food industry equivalent of hiring a ghostwriter, licensing his name to a canned coffee drink that he played no role in actually developing. The product, which featured a built-in heating mechanism, generated plenty of buzz when it debuted last year, but soon retailers and consumers were complaining about "meltdowns, curdled product, sour product [and] leaking cans." According to the industry trade publication Bevnet.com, a woman in Las Vegas suffered serious burns last month when her Wolfgang Puck Self-Heating Latte blew up in her hotel room. Until now, Puck's reputation for culinary excellence has been so unimpeachable he can charge more for a frozen pizza than anyone else. Now his name will also be forever associated with suicide lattes.
No doubt when you have a platinum record or a hit movie, everything seems possible, but there are other paths. Take, for example, Matt LeBlanc. He has yet to introduce, like P. Diddy, a cologne that "reinvents masculine style with classic luxury." There is little evidence that he is writing a novel. He understands, one imagines, that playing dumb-but-lovable Joey Tribbiani is an achievement 99.9 percent of mankind will never equal. It is, in short, enough. So that is where he invests his creative energies. There is something noble about that.