The story Joe Eszterhas forgot to share.

Joe Eszterhas tells all. All, that is, save the one story he wrote that helped shape the law of the land.

In his new 763-page memoir Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas certainly dishes out the goods. Drugs galore, celebrities acting badly, and all things Sharon Stone enliven his recounting of the journey from Hungarian poor boy to the Hollywood jungle. The screenwriter who brought us Jade, Basic Instinct,and Showgirls leaves hardly a stone unturned or a rival unmarked. For good measure, he self-flagellates.

"I was insufferable," Eszterhas assures us.

Which makes it all the stranger that he ignores Margaret Mae Cantrell.

Because what pre-Hollywood Joe Eszterhas wrote about Cantrell incited an invasion of privacy lawsuit whose ultimate resolution by the Supreme Court still affects journalists today. The court's ruling in the 1974 case known as Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing Co. means publishers can be held responsible when their freelance writers go astray. For more than one periodical, that's proved troublesome. And though in some ways the Cantrell ruling has a narrow reach, it's still one of only two Supreme Court cases to consider a controversial concept known as a "false-light" invasion of privacy. Meaning judges have looked to it for guidance, as they did when Battlestar Galactica actress Robyn Douglass sued Hustler magazine for its use of nude photographs she had meant for Playboy. Cantrell also shows the possible consequences of the journalism make-believe since perfected by the likes of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

That's the legal and historical legacy. And then there's the human part: what Joe Eszterhas' story did to the Cantrell family of Gallipolis Ferry, W.Va.

"It was all untruths," Cantrell told a jury three decades ago. "There had been neighbors and friends that had read it, and the children come home from school, come home crying because they had been making fun of them in school because of the article."

In December 1967, Eszterhas was working as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The 23-year-old Hungarian emigrant had energy to burn and an eye for a killer story. He landed a big one after the Silver Bridge collapsed across the Ohio River, killing 44 people. One of the dead was named Melvin Cantrell, a 40-year-old coal miner, and Eszterhas movingly wrote of Cantrell's funeral. His good work earned him a $50 in-house award from the Plain Dealer.

"He was known to me as the leading feature writer on the Plain Dealer at the time, and you can't be a leading feature writer without having a reputation for being accurate," Allan A. Arthur, the paper's former Sunday Magazine editor, later told a jury. Arthur's testimony is now stored, with the rest of the Cantrell trial transcript, at the Library of Congress.

Several months after Melvin Cantrell's funeral, Estzterhas sold Arthur on the idea of a follow-up freelance magazine story. So on a cold May day in 1968, on one of his off days, he and freelance photographer Richard Conway set off for West Virginia. Eventually, they found the Cantrell's 74-acre property. The reporters hadn't called to say they were coming, and Margaret Mae Cantrell wasn't home. Eszterhas introduced himself to the children, while Conway took some pictures.