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You are an investigative journalist who is fascinated with celebrity. You want to write a searing book about, say, Suri Cruise, called Inside the Bottle. You are 100-per-cent committed to this project. But are you willing to go deep undercover as Suri's manny in order to secure the little girl's trust?

The award-winning writer, journalist and curator of the pop website Ianundercover.com, Ian Halperin is willing to do this and a lot more. In the 11 years since he decided to explore the world “behind the fairy tale,” as he called his book on Celine Dion, he has masqueraded as a gay prince, a male model, a hair dresser.

And, for Brangelina – his exposé of the “iconic Hollywood super couple” Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, out today – he pretended to be a tortured mental patient to get into the same clinic where Angelina was treated in 2000.

Given his reputation for deep dish – in this book, he explores the possibility that the couple has drug problems (he with pot; she with crystal meth) and that they'll break up within 18 months – it may not be surprising that the day the press announced Halperin's book Jolie and Pitt made a kissy-faced appearance for the camera.

I talk to Ian Halperin about Brangelina , a book he wrote because he has long been “fascinated by Hollywood golden couples” and the “unequivocal nonsense” they “spin,” while he was in New York, holed up at the Helmsley doing PR.

A laid-back Montrealer, Halperin thinks Canada is “afraid to play big.” “She doesn't love me. No one wanted my first books,” he says, referring to Canada's uneasy relationship with American celebrity, to our relatively small, or Corner Gassy sense of fame. But he stands by his work: “If I'm wrong!” he exclaims ferociously about his journalistic integrity, “I'll sleep naked in Times Square!”

An expert star-watcher, Halperin knows a friend or a colleague or employee of just about every celebrity. And so he can dish with certainty that Jennifer Aniston feels sick at the thought of even kissing her ex-husband Pitt again; or that Pitt, according to the few people who see him at all, has “aged 20 years because of Angie. Bad. He looks bad.”

Still, he is often derided. His hometown paper the Montreal Gazette, for example, published a bemused review that questioned the reporting of his book Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson ; furious readers chimed in their loathing of this glib “vulture,” accusing him of being a crass opportunist.

He doesn't care: “I work hard to get to the bottom of issues,” he tells me. “That's all that matters to me.”

So much of Halperin's work, as a biographer, screenwriter and playwright, is actually about tragic figures. Unmasked fought, while Jackson was alive, against the public “conviction” that he was a pedophile. His work on grunge rocker Kurt Cobain suggests he was murdered. His hit play 27 Heaven is about doomed rock stars. And his film His Highness Hollywood is a documentary about Scientology's alleged deprogramming work on homosexuals.

His life was threatened after that film came out in 2005. But stamping on nerves is Halperin's business. And while he's a great disher of dirt, he's also a defender of defeated stars, and a critic of corporate greed and institutional evil – think of a slimmer, less meretricious Michael Moore in a slick suit.

So why Brangelina ? This is his penultimate book, he tells me. Halperin is doing one more, top-secret biography with a big American press next fall and then will stick to making movies. He wrote it because he feels Jolie, in particular, is deceptive; that the whole Brangelina enterprise is constructed with “smoke and mirrors.”

“She uses a magician's trick called misdirection,” says Halerpin, wherein, for example, the magician draws the viewer's attention away with a rabbit while palming a coin. Jolie's rabbits are many and well-known (her fallout with her father, her self-injuries, her adoptions), but Halperin draws shrewd and fascinating attention to James Haven, her brother, with whom, at the 2000 Academy Awards, she shared a steamy, French-looking kiss.

The public went wild with disgust and almost immediately afterward, according to Brangelina , Jolie dove into her tempestuous romance with Billy Bob Thornton, regaling the media constantly about their faint-inducing sex life. And, as we turned to watch this new act, we forgot about Haven.

And soon enough, Jolie forgot about Thornton and turned to her “prize,” as Halperin describes Pitt to me, Hollywood's “golden boy,” then all the more deliciously, married.

Reading Brangelina , one gets two senses of Jolie: that she is a complex shape-shifter of the Madonna school, a genuine humanitarian and beautiful mother and wife. “I respect her,” Halperin says. Yet he offers enough tantalizing information about her that one may also see her as a calculating, heartless machine, like Metropolis 's sexy robot, False Maria.

Alternatively, one might read her in the manner of her legendary tattoos. Brangelina describes still more that were inked then inked over, usually because they were linked to one man or another: These are pentimentos, ultimately, paintings over paintings, just as the actress herself takes great pains to revise her image, over and over.

There is a lot here to please Team Aniston. “She had dignity, she went and quietly sought spiritual counselling,” Halperin says of the famous Aniston-Pitt breakup. And he agrees with my theory that Jolie is sure to have an affair with Johnny Depp, the “new” Sexiest Man Alive, who is very much attached to his long-time love, a father and more suited to Jolie's hokey outlaw taste.

Most will read Brangelina for the salacious gossip, and Halperin will be accused of capitalizing on the couple. And why shouldn't he? These are not actual people, at least not to most of us, just alluring chimeras, and their only value lies in their ability to entice us. This tell-all goes far toward keeping their sexy myth alive: The exhausted-looking Brangelina should send Halperin flowers. A card, at least.