I haven’t read Kitty Kelley’s new book. But I have read enough news and editorial comment to get a pretty good idea of the issues in the controversy. Kelley, whose book about Frank Sinatra I admired for its scouring thoroughness, has been charged with writing out of an animus so virulent that Nancy Reagan is her victim rather than her subject. Kelley may well have loaded her case against Nancy Reagan. Still, I think there is something salutary even in carnival excess when it concerns people we know mainly through the work of spin doctors, damage controllers, speechwriters and stage managers of pseudo-events and photo ops. I’d guess that the more we are presented with public-relations figments the more likely we are to get into a feeding frenzy over inside stories that contradict such things as Nancy Reagan’s official version of her birth, social springboard, childhood years, family life, exercise of power and so forth.
Obviously Kelley is no friend to Nancy Reagan, but then again no biographer, even the best disposed and admiring, who has any gumption and integrity can be altogether a friend to the person he or she is writing about. The subject sees a life one way, the writer sees it another. Nancy Reagan had her turn; now it’s Kitty Kelley’s.
Kelley is reputed to be the Saddam Hussein of privacy it simply isn’t doing its job. Contemplating their ultimate exits, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens and many others put their correspondence and private papers in the fire out of fear that some biographer might get hold of them. A new terror had been added to death. And now that contemporary biographers no longer wait for the promised end but turn to the living for their subjects, a new terror has been added to life as well. Because the telephone has replaced the letter as a confidence conduit these writers have to rely on interviews, which are shifty and self-serving to begin with, and just plain hearsay.
Conventional publishing wisdom has it that the flood of tell-all biographies began in 1978 with Christina Crawford’s “Mommie Dearest,” but the spirit if not the overt practice of telling all is so deeply rooted in Anglo-American literary culture that biography is now a sort of tribal rite. A “golden age” that began with Boswell’s Johnson unleashed an apparently insatiable appetite for personal detail. Most other cultures don’t share our belief that there’s a connection that’s worth examining between private and public lives or between childhood and adulthood. They also don’t share our inflamed curiosity about other people’s sex lives. Kelley has apparently turned up some juicy and probably unverifiable stories about the amatory adventures of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, and this has generated a certain amount of outrage about invasion of privacy. But in essence, at any rate, what Kelley was doing in this department has something in common with the distinguished biographer Leon Edel’s much applauded explorations of Henry James’s anomalous libido. We insist on trying to find out what people “do” sexually, even though this area of behavior may have only a tenuous connection with what they do in public life.
We’ve created–and Kelley has every right to take advantage of this–a culture that thrives on scandal and gossip about the rich, famous and powerful. Magazine and book publishers keep churning this stuff out like breakfast cereal year after year, and people keep eating it up with berries, cream and sugar. We no longer care very much about the difference between gossip and news. We have no trouble deciding at what point someone becomes a public person and subject to fair comment. Is J.D. Salinger a public person because he’s a celebrated recluse as well as a celebrated writer?
It has also been charged that Kelley’s new book is so compacted of malice, hearsay and nastiness that it’s not even a biography but something on the order of a National Enquirer story about missing World War II bombers found on the moon. True, it may lack stylistic distinction, patience, empathy, perspective, scrupulous checking of facts and sources, and other estimable qualities we associate with the higher reaches of biography. But it is biography nonetheless, just as the work of another gold-mine author, Danielle Steel, is fiction, no matter what Milan Kundera or A.S. Byatt may think of it.
I’d guess that a large part of the outrage generated by Kelley’s book comes from something we don’t like to acknowledge: our dependency on totemic figures. Albert Goldman became a pariah for depicting an incontinent Elvis Presley with his face in a bowl of chicken soup and for demythologizing John Lennon in a more recent biography. Kelley may be similarly execrated. She has apparently cut the ground out from under whatever claims Nancy Reagan had on the dignity of being First Lady during two notable tacky terms in the White House.
