TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.6 KB | 216 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 71

Meeeow! The Saga Of Kitty


The former Lilac Princess has the world on a leash, so don't
mess with her

By JESSE BIRNBAUM -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington and D.
Blake Hallanan/San Francisco, with other bureaus


    Tired of hearing about that ambitious woman who climbed
her way from a humble background to fame, fortune and a White
House closetful of red Adolfo suits? Try this for a hot
biography. There's this poor little rich girl in Spokane, kind
of a Shirley Temple type. Dad's a lawyer, Mom's a tough lady who
likes to nip at the bottle. Despite the kid's pitiful efforts
to please her mom, all she gets is a hard time.

    Home is a trap, but at school the kid shucks all that and
really blossoms. She's everywhere. The school dances, the annual
town parade, the pep squad, the pick of the boys. O.K., so
she's not an Einstein, gradewise, but she gets a college degree
and dumps that dreary town and her painful homelife and heads
for the Big Time.

    A job or so later, she's in Washington, working for a real
U.S. Senator and salivating around the powerful. She's
primarily a receptionist, but it looks better on her resume to
say press secretary. It's no big deal. Then it's on to a
newspaper and a career in journalism. This leads to writing
books jammed with dirt on famous people. Soon she's pulling in
zillions. She owns a mansion, wears designer clothes, chums with
notables at glittering parties. Makes a lot of friends. Makes
a lot more enemies, thanks to her inimitable way with the rumors
that she gathers for her best sellers. Maybe sends a few
anonymous letters to warn off folks who are searching for the
real person behind all that pizazz. The lady's got the world on
a leash.

    Could this be the real-life story of Kitty Kelley? Only if
it falls into the category of vacuum-cleaner journalism,
sucking up every stray fact and innuendo and without trying to
sift the important from the trivial. Kelley has raised the
practice of prattling about the rich and famous to high
artifice, so perhaps that is why she dodges full-dress
interviews about her past with the nimbleness of a faun in a
forest fire.

    "Sources," the journalist's staple, are not much help
either in piecing together Kelley's life. They fall into two
categories: praise from admiring friends and unkind remarks from
a larger number of uneasy people, most of whom insist on
anonymity, often because they fear Kelley's wrath. In
Washington, where gossip is never in deficit, Kitty Kelley, 49,
commands clout. She could write a book. About you.

    Journalists who have limned her, or tried, believe Kelley
is capable of the same kind of petty reprisals and organized
stonewalling that she herself has confronted over the years in
her incessant Hoovering of famous figures. After Washington Post
book critic Jonathan Yardley panned Kelley's biography of
Elizabeth Taylor in 1981, he received a gilded Gucci box wrapped
with gold ribbon. "Inside," says Yardley, "was a bag of fish
heads and a postcard of Liz Taylor giving me the finger." The
card was signed, "From the friends of Kitty Kelley."

    Even more curious was the experience of free-lancer Gerri
Hirshey, who wrote a 9,000-word article on Kelley for the
Washington Post Magazine in 1988 without, despite repeated
efforts, interviewing Kelley; she was too busy. While
researching the story, however, Hirshey received a number of
unsolicited letters, some unsigned, all postmarked from
different parts of the country, most offering flattering tidbits
about Kelley's childhood and professional life. Hirshey sent the
notes to a former CIA forensics expert, along with samples of
Kelley's business correspondence. The expert concluded that
three of the letters had been typed on the same machine that
Kelley used for her business mail. (Reached by TIME last week,
the expert confirmed the analysis.) When Hirshey queried
Kelley's lawyer about the typewriter, he replied, "No such
machine is owned."

    What Kelley would probably admit she possesses, apart from
blond cotton-candy hair, a breathless voice and a historic
mansion in Washington's fancy Georgetown ghetto, is a drive for
nonstop work and a tenacity that borders on obsession. Enemies
and friends agree on that.

    The former, of course, decline to be named but readily
stamp Kelley as someone you'd hate to have for a dinner partner,
let alone a confidant: "She will suck you into her world and
then betray you . . . She craves attention." Or, "She exploits
people, and I don't like to mess with her."

    On the other hand, says Washington columnist Marianne
Means, Kitty is "very warm. She's not secretive, but she doesn't
talk about herself a lot. She's fun to be with." Jack Limpert,
editor of Washingtonian magazine, which lists Kelley on the
masthead, says, "She's a relentless reporter. You've got to give
it to her. She works very hard." Limpert does not discuss the
widespread conviction of other journalists, as well as Kelley's
own subjects, that she too frequently fails to bring perspective
or analysis to the fruits of her reporting and at times lards
her work with dollops of questionable inferences and innuendos.

    This is not the same sweet, pudgy, pig-tailed little girl
who grew up in a fashionable district of Spokane, the oldest of
seven children of a prosperous Irish lawyer. Kitty's homelife,
according to Gerri Hirshey, was mean and hard. She did not get
along well with her heavy-drinking mother, a strict
disciplinarian who padlocked the family refrigerator.

    At Holy Names Academy she was gregarious and peppy; Sister
Bernadine Casey remembers a "pleasant, lovely and active
student" who had a "gift for writing." Kitty made the
cheerleading squad and was elected "Friendliest Girl" for four
years running. She was chosen the school's "Lilac Princess," and
rode a float in the annual Lilac Festival parade.

    "She was always somebody who couldn't be ignored," says
Phil Shinnick, a school chum and currently a research scientist
in Brooklyn. "She was queen of the prom and a street fighter.
She had an aura about her. She was physically well endowed and
always got the best guy." Her beau in those days was Tom Shine,
now a Spokane architect. The romance did not last. "We came
from different backgrounds," Shine recalled last week. "I knew
she wanted to leave Spokane and do other things."

    In 1964 Kitty graduated from the University of Washington
in Seattle with a bachelor's degree in English. She taught
school briefly and then headed East, first to New York City,
where she was a hostess at the World's Fair, then to Washington,
where she joined the staff of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Was she
McCarthy's press secretary, as the book jacket on her biography
of Jackie Onassis claimed? "She was a good receptionist," said
McCarthy, but she also handed out press releases. The jacket
blurb was later revised.

    In 1969 Kelley moved over to the Washington Post as an
editorial-page researcher; two years later, she was asked to
resign for making notes unrelated to her job. One day in 1973
she turned up at Washingtonian magazine with an unpublished book
written by the novelist Barbara Howar. Kitty claimed that she
had found the manuscript in the drawer of a table sold at
Howar's yard sale and wanted the Washingtonian to print
excerpts. When Howar heard about it, she raised a mighty fuss;
only one copy of the manuscript existed, she said, and this she
kept on the third floor of her house, far from the milling
buyers in the yard. The magazine dropped the project, but not
before Howar spent $16,000 in legal fees to reclaim her work.

    By now, Kelley was finding her metier: rummaging through
people's secrets, real and imagined. She wrote a free-lance
article about resorts where the rich and famous frolicked, and
parlayed the piece into The Glamour Spas, a book flecked with
naughty gossip. This brought her to the attention of New Jersey
celebrity-book publisher Lyle Stuart, who sent her off to do a
job on Jackie Onassis. Kelley's friend at the time, gossip
columnist Liz Smith, gave her voluminous files on Jackie, and
Kitty set out on a tireless quest for the down and dirty. The
book, Jackie Oh!, revealed little that had not been told before,
but it was a best seller nonetheless.

    Next, Kitty wanted to take on an easy target, Liz Taylor,
but Stuart balked. Kitty aced herself out of her contract with
him, took her proposal to Simon & Schuster, got an advance of
$150,000 and in 1981 produced another prurient best seller.

    What surprised critics and readers, and possibly even
Kelley herself, was the thoroughness of her next effort, His
Way, a devastating biography of Frank Sinatra. Even before the
manuscript was completed, the singer had mounted an all-out
campaign to dry up Kelley's sources. When that did not prove
sufficient, he filed suit claiming that Kitty was
misrepresenting herself to sources and failing to disclose her
reasons for writing the book. But Sinatra had never had to deal
with so determined an opponent. Kelley argued that Sinatra was
trying to prevent her from publishing freely; Sinatra's lawyers
finally dropped the suit. The book, which detailed Sinatra's
fabled womanizing, his alleged Mob connections and two suicide
attempts, received respectful reviews. More than 3 million
copies have been printed in hard-cover and paperback.

    That was the first time, and possibly the last, that
Kelley would be credited with a well-documented and largely
accurate portrayal of her subject. Dan Moldea, a Washington
author who specializes in organized crime and who supplied
Kelley with sources, admires the book, though he is annoyed, he
says, because Kitty undermined him by telling a competitor when
his own book was due to be published. "One thing Kitty has
always wanted," he says now, "is public respect and legitimacy
as an author and a journalist. She achieved that with the
Sinatra book, but Nancy Reagan is not going to stand up."

    Meanwhile, readers who cannot get enough of slasher bios
will have a chance later this spring to buy another one.
Tentative title: Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty
Kelley. The book will be published by Lyle Stuart, who is still
chafing over Kitty's defection; the writer is George Carpozi
Jr., who works for the tabloid Star. Kitty professes to be
unconcerned. The book may not be destined for the best-seller
lists, but at least it should bring a smile to four people named
Jackie, Liz, Frank and Nancy.