Bestseller dealing with Lenny Bruce

Goldman's breakthrough success, Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!! (1974), won praise from the likes of Norman Mailer and Pauline Kael, who called the book "brilliant." The book was largely positive in its appraisal of Bruce's talent, though it was criticized by many of Bruce's friends for allegedly distorting his character and for claims that Bruce had homosexual experiences.

Elvis Presley biography

Goldman's critical 1981 biography Elvis was much more controversial. In this book, Goldman drew on more than four years' research into Elvis Presley's life. But for many fans and some critics, his research was undermined by his intense personal dislike of Presley.

Goldman dismissed the performer as a plagiarist who never did anything of note after his first records at Sun Records, insisting that he was inferior as an artist to Little Richard and other contemporaries. He also portrayed Presley as nearly insane, using stories that some might see as innocuous (such as Presley taking his friends halfway across the country to buy them peanut-butter sandwiches) to "prove" that the singer had lost his grip on reality.

On the other hand, the book does include several newly discovered facts. For instance, in the course of his research, Goldman discovered that Presley's manager, Colonel Thomas Parker, was not a true Southerner, but instead a native of the Netherlands, and probably in the United States illegally. Parker had successfully covered this up to the degree that Presley himself allegedly never learned of it. (The book is harshest on Parker himself out of all the figures in Presley's life with whom it deals, with the probate attorney Blanchard E. Tual, "guardian ad litem" of Lisa Marie Presley in 1981, being identified as Goldman's primary informant on the subject of Parker as a manager.) Furthermore, the book critically deals with the singer's weight problems, his diet, his choice of performing costumes, and his sexual appetites and peculiarities. Goldman even suggests that Presley's promiscuity masked latent homosexuality. Discussing Presley's personal life, Goldman concludes: "Elvis was a pervert, a voyeur." Some critics found comments like these overly biased and judgmental.

• In his review of the book in the Village Voice, rock critic and Elvis Presley scholar Greil Marcus wrote: "The real significance of Goldman's 'Elvis' is its attempt at cultural genocide . The torrents of hate that drive this book are unrelieved." He particularly objected to Goldman's constant slurs against Presley's background, including his characterisation of Presley's parents as "the original Beverly Hillbillies" without bothering to include the explanatory context that the situation comedy was actually the story of suddenly rich innocents, as Presley's parents themselves were, who were trying to cope with the fear that even money and social access would never be enough to enable them to belong. "It is Goldman's purpose to entirely discredit Elvis Presley, the culture that produced him, and the culture he helped create – to altogether dismiss and condemn, in other words, not just Elvis Presley, but the white working-class South from which he came, and the pop world which emerged in his wake." However, Marcus also admits that Goldman has significantly shown that "Elvis Presley built his own world...where the promise was that every fear, pain, doubt, and wish could be washed away with money, sex, drugs, and the bought approval of yes-men..." He notes regretfully that it "as no book on Elvis Presley before it, has been taken seriously. Despite some partially negative or carping notices, the reviewing media has accepted the book as it presents itself—as the last book we will need about Elvis Presley."^[5]
• In 2006, Blender called Elvis a "muckraking biography", stating that Goldman dealt with everything about Elvis Presley but his music.
• Other critics liked the book. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called it a "nasty book, written in spectacularly execrable prose, but the view of Presley that it expressed dovetailed in many instances with my own, and in spite of itself I found things in it to admire."^[6]
• According to Rolling Stone, October 21, 1981, Elvis "is a poignant book, the result of Goldman's winning the trust and confidence of hundreds of sources, including many of Elvis' closest friends. It is also an intimate look at a side of Elvis that few even suspected existed. Many people will find some of the revelations unpleasant and view them as a needless and harmful invasion of privacy. Yet, such revelations comprise a truth about modern American heroism and success. The fact is that somehow inherent in Elvis' great fame as an American ideal and idol is a contradiction that was the seed of destruction."
• Lamar Fike, the Presley insider and former member of the Memphis Mafia, who introduced Goldman to many of his sources, recalled: "The problem was Albert's personality. At first, he liked Elvis. But later, he started disliking him. And by the end of (writing) the book, I think he hated him. I said, 'Albert, you can't do this.' But I couldn't stop him."^[7]

Defending himself against his critics, Goldman told an interviewer: "People were scandalized by my use of humor and ridicule in [the Elvis biography]. Elvis was someone they were accustomed to taking in a very sentimental way. But I feel he was a figure of the most bizarre and grotesque character. . . . The humor is a mode of perception. Of making things vivid."^[8]

Article on Bruce Lee

In 1982, Goldman wrote a very unflattering article on actor Bruce Lee which was published in two parts by Penthouse in January–February 1983.

The Lives of John Lennon

Goldman's next biography arguably aroused even more controversy than the Elvis biography. In The Lives of John Lennon (1988), a product of years of research and hundreds of interviews with many of Lennon's friends, acquaintances, servants and musicians, Goldman juxtaposes Lennon's talents against his perceived neuroticism. The book reveals a very personal side of the musician who was prone to faults, such as anger, domestic violence (exemplified by an assistant's allegation that then-girlfriend Yoko Ono's 1968 miscarriage was triggered by a beating from Lennon), drug abuse (including longstanding addictions to cocaine and heroin), adultery, and indecisiveness, but who was also a generational leader. It deals with Lennon's childhood and the impact others had on the life of the sensitive little boy, among them his aunt, Mimi Smith, his father, Fred Lennon, and Johnny Dykins. Goldman implies that strong women ruined Lennon, starting with Smith, and that he was later being held prisoner by Ono (who may have encouraged their mutual heroin addiction as a way of controlling him and his vast fortune to her own ends).

Focusing on the mistakes Lennon made and mean things he did, Goldman made many controversial allegations, among them the charge that he may have had something to do with the sudden death of his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, an early member of The Beatles. (Sources other than Goldman's book reported the cause of death as a brain hemorrhage.) Goldman also says that Lennon had a sexual relationship with The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, whom Goldman characterizes as a dishonest, incompetent businessman who hid behind the image of a "gentleman". Half of the book covers the personality of Ono, who is portrayed in a very bad light. Goldman alleges that, among other things, she hated Paul McCartney, arranged for customs officials at a Tokyo airport to search carefully his luggage upon his arrival there eleven months before Lennon's death and to arrest him for smuggling marijuana, neglected her children, brainwashed Lennon and pulled him away from everyone who ever meant something to him. Goldman also alleged that the two carried on constant extramarital affairs throughout their marriage, with Ono involved in one during the summer of 1980. Goldman substantially revealed that no record exists of the phone calls Ono claims to have made to McCartney and Mimi Smith the night Lennon was murdered.

Concerning Goldman's account of Lennon's consumption of LSD, Lucy Sante, in The New York Review of Books, said: "Goldman's background research was either slovenly or nonexistent."

Peter Doggett writes in You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles that Goldman's book possessed many faults, but still managed to capture significant elements of Lennon's life.

Second book on Presley

In 1990, Goldman published a second book, entitled Elvis: The Last 24 Hours, on the circumstances and events of Presley's death, arguing that the singer had committed suicide. The book drew some attention for its sensational thesis but was largely ignored.