There are 2,174 annotations at the end of Suzanne Finstad's "Warren Beatty: A Private Man," one of several new memoirs and biographies about glamorous guys. This book also devotes four pages to the actor's family tree. Its research spans centuries and goes back to Swords, Ireland, for the "great procreators" on his father's side to Little Bras d'Or, Nova Scotia, for his mother's. Mr. Beatty winds up only a few degrees of separation away from George Washington, if you count the role of one ancestor in the French and Indian War.

Call this comprehensive or call it crazy. Either way, it shows how difficult it is to find news about someone so often photographed and interviewed that his legend precedes him. Even this person's autobiography can be upstaged by writers who are shameless in what they insinuate or make up. So telling the truth has some novelty in this genre. But it needn't be as strenuous as Ms. Finstad makes it seem.

While this tirelessly appreciative author discovers that Mr. Beatty is even more sensitive, gentlemanly and astute than had already been realized, Tab Hunter delivers a different kind of candor. He writes frankly (with the assistance of Eddie Muller) about having been a gay man in Hollywood when Hollywood still snickered about that. Merely because he was born gorgeous, Mr. Hunter (originally Arthur Gelien) found himself a Sigh Guy for swooning fans. He also became a target for the tabloids. But coy magazine articles with titles like "What Every Girl Should Know About Tab Hunter!" stopped short of what Mr. Hunter wants known about himself here.

One chapter of his lively memoir, "Tab Hunter Confidential," is called "Don't Worry ... It'll Only Play at Drive-Ins." That's a fair assessment of his early work. In describing a career that ranged from top of the heap to dinner theater, Mr. Hunter is good-humoredly realistic about its embarrassments. For instance, he recalls that his angelic looks made him a candidate for the lead in "Billy Budd" - until the director's wife took one look at him, proclaimed him "all wrong" for the role and slammed the door.

Paths converge in these accounts: Mr. Hunter and Mr. Beatty, now 74 and 68 respectively, met some of the same potential mentors, notably Luchino Visconti and Tennessee Williams. Both were directed by Arthur Penn, though Mr. Hunter appeared in a "Playhouse 90" episode on television while Mr. Beatty became the driving force behind "Bonnie and Clyde."

Incidentally, Mr. Beatty thought of casting Bob Dylan - the Zelig of several new biographies - as Clyde Barrow before he took the role himself.

Nobody ever cast Robert B. Oxnam in a movie. He is an Asia specialist, not an actor. But "A Fractured Mind: My Life With Multiple Personality Disorder" gives him the kind of dramatic aura that many a celebrity might covet. Here's why: while appearing to be the dignified president of the Asia Society, Mr. Oxnam was actually the front man for 11 personalities, including a witch, a baby and a librarian. He hits the confessional-book trifecta by having been alcoholic and bulimic too.

Christopher Lawford also has a lot to work with: his Kennedy-Hollywood heritage and long, rich history of substance abuse. Mr. Lawford - who used Bob Dylan's yawl for a prenuptial trip around the Carribean - has another angle, too: obscurity. He describes what it was like to have been constantly overshadowed by his Kennedy cousins, growing up with ostensible status, but no actual clout.

Like Mr. Lawford, Cynthia Lennon uses the experience of having been overlooked to her advantage. Writing about her former husband, John Lennon, in "John," she describes being on top of the world with the Beatles (who were first given marijuana by Bob Dylan) without feeling secure there. After all, she was not the only young woman trying to get into the Beatles' hotel rooms by calling herself "Mrs. John Lennon." And she found herself disparaged as the wife from whom Mr. Lennon wanted to escape.

She remembers powerful contradictions, like Mr. Lennon's singing about world peace in "Imagine" at a time when he refused to talk to her on the telephone. She cites questions from their son, Julian, about Mr. Lennon's public stunts with Yoko Ono. ("What's Dad doing in bed on the telly?") "John" is at its most barbed when Ms. Lennon describes having been shunted aside once Ms. Ono became the outspoken guardian of the Lennon legacy. "The truth is that if I'd known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to," she concludes, "I would have turned round right then and walked away."

Regret also colors "Room Full of Mirrors," a biography of Jimi Hendrix that emphasizes his lonely childhood. The author, Charles R. Cross, presents a touchingly eager-to-please side of Hendrix, based on the musician's boyhood need to scrounge for everything, even meals. This is at odds with the usual image of Hendrix as a guitar-smashing, groupie-barnacled outlaw. Indeed, it suggests that Mr. Hendrix - who adored Bob Dylan but doubted that Mr. Dylan remembered their one brief meeting - was too gentle a soul to withstand the frenzy around him.

Two other books about music stars have Dylan angles. The forthcoming "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" (by Peter Guralnick, who wrote "Last Train to Memphis" about Elvis Presley) presents a charismatic figure who has not been given his due. But agents told Mr. Guralnick that writing about Cooke was a bad career move, for the Catch-22-type reason that Cooke was not sufficiently well known. So jacket copy for "Dream Boogie" hypes Dylan's role in this story, even though it's barely a walk-on.

"The Autobiography of Donovan" may finally answer the main question about its subject: where is Donovan? ("Quite dodgy at the moment," according to one fan Web site.) Way back when, Donovan was often described as a lighter-weight Dylan - that is, when he was not being dismissed for his rarefied language. He may not have changed much. "The feminine side of the male had not emerged from its chrysalis, due, no doubt, to the patriarchal Christian culture of the previous 2,000 years," his book explains.

If Dylan is currently ubiquitous, it is a consequence of his startling memoir, "Chronicles, Volume I," plus Martin Scorsese's new documentary, "No Direction Home." On the theory that a moment this ripe calls for a $45 souvenir, "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966" has arrived. Its packaging is so ingenious that it features removable ticket stubs, memos, snapshots and other memorabilia tucked into glassine envelopes or attached by masking tape.

This scrapbook even reproduces the notebook in which the music critic Robert Shelton scribbled while attending the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which rocked the world. Not much is legible besides "Like a Rolling Stone" and "leather jacket." But sometimes only a few words say it all.