Joe Hyams was a Hollywood columnist and bestselling author of more than 25 books, including biographies of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean. Early in his time in Hollywood he interviewed Ava Gardner in a bar. She threw a punch at him. Ducking, he caught a blow, got up “and started to lay her over my knee for a spanking” — the absurdity of that tableau made her laugh, and their friendship was established.

No regular journalism-school product, Hyams was later about to marry the actress Elke Sommer when her besotted manager arrived with a burly stuntman to express his feelings. Hyams realised how useful his karate studies had been. Zen in the Martial Arts was one of the books he wrote after his 15 years of chronicling Hollywood, where Bogart’s friendship had been a guiding, paternal influence.

He was born in 1925 in Boston; his mother was an 18-year-old student. In due course she encouraged his violin studies, but he flunked Brookline High School and began loading furniture. Orson Welles’s radio voice, however, so impressed him that he changed his own voice and took courses at Harvard.

He then transferred to Kentucky before joining the army. Annoyed that his parents had somehow prevented his being posted abroad so that he could marry a girl they favoured, he left for Alabama where he got into trouble for refusing to obey an order. Posted to a labour battalion, he explained his situation to his sergeant, who put him in a journalism section.

He was briefly married to a nurse in the war, and afterwards married a model, Ellie, in bohemian Greenwich Village, with free rent for part-time cleaning. He left New York University, where he studied Hebrew, and joined the Herald Tribune. He was sent to Hollywood, where he learnt when to speak up and when to keep quiet, guided by the vulnerable, worldywise and well-read Bogart, whose eyes measured “the bottle rather than the tumbler”, Hyams wrote, and who favoured “insults, followed by wary acceptance”.

It was Burt Lancaster’s dislike of one of his reports that prompted Hyams to take up karate. He was one of few people who was close to James Dean; his writing about Cary Grant’s supervised LSD experiments attracted a lawsuit — which was settled by his agreeing to work on Grant’s memoirs.

Prosperous, with numerous cars and gadgets, Hyams fell for other women, especially the rising star Elke Sommer whom he married rapturously in 1964. Their house became famous for its ghost, whose arsonist tendencies drove them out. The death of their friends Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate was a turning point. He wrote up the incident as a Hollywood folly, and was guilt-ridden when the Manson aspect emerged.

Already Peter Sellers’s ghost writer, he turned to books. As well as Dean and Bogart, he wrote on George Bush Sr’s wars and helped Ronald Reagan’s troubled adopted son.

From a serviceable novel (The Pool) to Billie Jean King’s tennis guide (“a tennis ball doesn’t know whether it was hit by a man or a woman”, he wrote), he was adaptable — and was at his best in the elegantly candid memoir Mislaid in Hollwood (1973), an account redolent of that era before stars became corporate figures.

In 1994 Hyams married his fourth wife, and he is survived by his four children.

Joe Hyams, columnist and author, was born on September 6, 1923. He died on November 8, 2008, aged 85