The First Lady And the Slasher

By Richard Zoglin

Nancy Reagan watchers used to refer to it as "the gaze." It was that look of rapt attention she fixed on people, a look that implied the recipient was the most important person in the world. Classmates at Smith College may have been the first to notice it; she developed it further in Hollywood while wooing Ronald Reagan. But the gaze became most famous during Nancy Reagan's days in the White House: the frozen, doe-eyed stare of adoration that the First Lady would fix on the President whenever she watched him speak.

The American public has lately become accustomed to another sort of gaze: the all-embracing, unflinching stare of the pop biographer. Unlike Nancy's, this gaze is without mercy or letup. It can go on for hundreds of pages, unearthing skeletons, resurrecting old grudges, exposing big faults and magnifying little blemishes. Few can survive it with reputation intact.

That pitiless gaze was focused on Nancy Reagan last week by Kitty Kelley, America's premier slash biographer. The resulting furor caused even some die- hard Nancy haters to feel a sympathetic twinge or two for the former First Lady. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (Simon & Schuster) went on sale across the nation just as newspapers and TV newscasts began to revel in the book's most sensational allegations. Many bookstores sold out their copies within hours. Aggrieved parties cried foul, Johnny Carson made jokes and guardians of journalistic integrity shook their heads. The New York Times, which trumpeted the book's revelations in a long, uncritical front-page piece on Sunday, sobered up three days later with a condemning editorial. "Lightning rods have had it better than Nancy Reagan," it said. ". . . But truly, nobody deserves this."

In more than 600 pages the book digs up seemingly every tawdry anecdote, unflattering recollection or catty comment ever uttered about Nancy Reagan. The former First Lady was, in Kelley's account, a cold and uncaring parent, a manipulative social climber and an acquisitive arriviste -- who was nonetheless so cheap that she would recycle old gifts and send them to friends. In her Hollywood days, the book contends, Nancy Davis got parts because she was sleeping with MGM's head of casting. In Washington she was a ruthless Marie Antoinette who was the real power behind the President. She rejected her natural father, spied on her kids and lied about her age. In short, she was the Wicked Witch of the West and East coasts. "Believe it or not," says a fashion industry executive who helped outfit Nancy in Adolfo clothes, "Leona Helmsley was nicer."

The image of the Reagans' wholesome, all-American marriage takes a thorough beating. Before marrying Nancy, Kelley claims, Reagan was one of Hollywood's busiest woman chasers; one former starlet even claims Reagan forced himself on her one night in her apartment. "They call it date rape today," the actress is quoted as saying. When Reagan married Nancy in 1952, it was only after his proposal to another actress, Christine Larson, had been rejected. On the day Nancy was in the hospital giving birth to daughter Patti, Kelley says, Reagan was at Christine's, sobbing that his life was ruined. In perhaps the book's most sensational allegation, Kelley asserts that Nancy had an extramarital fling of her own: with Frank Sinatra, who used to come up to the White House for private "lunches" -- winkingly placed in quotes by Kelley -- that lasted three or more hours.

The stories go on. When her grandmother died, a cousin relates, Nancy pleaded that she couldn't help pay for a gravestone, even though no one else in the family could afford one. In the White House Nancy was such a perfectionist that she could spend "an entire day deliberating on the amount of nutmeg to be shaved into a chicken veloute sauce." Her much vaunted anti- drug crusade, Kelley suggests, was little more than a public relations ploy.

And that's not all. Or maybe it's quite enough. The portrait of Nancy Reagan in Kelley's book is so lavishly, unrelentingly negative that it has set off a pair of fierce debates. The first centers on the former First Lady herself. Criticizing Nancy Reagan -- a First Lady America never really warmed to -- has become something of a cottage industry, and many of Kelley's charges merely reinforce and embellish those in earlier memoirs such as For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington by former White House chief of staff Donald Regan. "Had people liked Nancy Reagan in the first place they wouldn't be susceptible to all this dirt," says James Rosebush, the First Lady's former chief of staff. The question is whether Kelley's savage portrayal is gross overkill. Could Nancy Reagan -- could anyone -- have been such a monster?

But a growing part of the debate has focused on Kelley and her research tactics. A former Washington Post researcher who has written titillating bios of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Sinatra, Kelley claims more than 1,000 people were interviewed for the book, and she flaunts a monstrous list of "acknowledgments" of people she alleges helped her (many of whom say they never spoke with her). But as readers inside and outside the Washington Beltway pored over the book last week, Kelley's journalistic methods were coming under sharp scrutiny. Did she write a responsible work of journalism or a sleazy hatchet job?

Four years in the making, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography burst onto the scene after a deftly orchestrated public relations buildup. Unlike most major books, which are released to reviewers weeks or months in advance of publication, Kelley's manuscript was carefully withheld from the press. During editing, only five copies of the manuscript were printed; each was numbered and kept track of at all times. Simon & Schuster staff members even took copies home at night to guard against leaks. One special reader got the book a month in advance: cartoonist Garry Trudeau was allowed an early peek so he could prepare a week's worth of Doonesbury strips to coincide with the book's release.

The crowds rushing to buy the book were bigger than anyone could have anticipated. In one day the entire first printing of 600,000 had been shipped; by week's end 925,000 copies were in print. Said Simon & Schuster publisher Jack McKeown: "Booksellers are telling us it's the fastest-selling book they've ever experienced." Enthused Matthew Goldberg, merchandise manager for the Doubleday chain: "It's not only hot, it's supernova hot."

The reaction from the book's subjects has been just as hot. Nancy Reagan has thus far refused any comment, though friends described her as "profoundly upset" at Kelley's attack. Ronald Reagan put out a statement seething with outrage: "The flagrant and absurd falsehoods . . . clearly exceed the bounds of decency." A phalanx of Reagan friends and former advisers lashed out at the book, both in whole and in parts. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, charged that there are 20 factual errors in the passages involving her alone. She described the purported Nancy Reagan-Frank Sinatra tryst in the White House as "pure horse manure." Michael Reagan, Nancy's stepson, also jumped to her defense. "Gossip is one thing, and smut is another," he said. "This is smut."

Even Barbara Bush, whose relations with Nancy Reagan have been distant at best, attacked the book as "trash and fiction." She specifically disputed one episode: Barbara Bush did not, as the book relates, give Nancy Reagan a white vine wreath one Christmas -- a wreath Nancy supposedly had gift-wrapped and sent to a friend in California. Every window at the White House, the current First Lady pointed out, already has a wreath at Christmastime. "If you're going to make up a story," she said, "you can make up a better one than that." Nancy called Barbara Bush last week to thank her for the comments.

Kelley weathered the weeklong storm by fielding increasingly aggressive questions in TV interviews. "You just spend your time digging up ugliness about people," one audience member scolded on Sally Jessy Raphael. "I don't know how you sleep at night." Kelley's perky, predigested reply: "I didn't live the life. She did." Pressed about the Sinatra/Nancy encounters at the White House, Kelley let the innuendos speak for themselves: "I only take you up to the bedroom door." To the growing chorus of denials from principals in the book, she professed unconcern: "People are going to step forward and try to deny things I have said." Yet by the end of the week the heat seemed to have worn her down: Kelley's publicists abruptly called off a planned seven- city publicity tour, announcing that their "publishing objectives have been accomplished."

And what is a reader to make of the book at the center of this tornado? First, while Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography may be mean-spirited, it is no mean achievement. The book is exhaustively researched, packed with quotes (a surprising number of them with names attached), anecdotes and detail. To be sure, much of this is not new: Kelley mixes original quotes indiscriminately with recycled material from other books and articles, and fudges the notes at the end so the reader often cannot tell which is which. Still, much of the portrait -- Nancy's difficult relationship with her children, her obsessive attention to detail as a White House hostess -- rings true. Treated simply as a compendium of all the scraps a team of diligent researchers could gather about Nancy Reagan, it serves at least one historical function. It reveals that many, many people didn't like her.

The problem is that in marshaling her case against the former First Lady, Kelley's book is so slanted that its credibility is called into question at every turn. She uses a variety of techniques that would not pass muster with most reputable news organizations. Some examples:

Print the quote, whatever the source. For Kelley, all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating thirdhand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses. (And sometimes more weight.) This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have their own axes to grind.

For example, Kelley quotes at length Shirley Watkins -- identified as "one of Mrs. Reagan's secretaries" -- describing the cynical way in which Nancy Reagan and her advisers tried to mold her public image. When it was suggested that Mrs. Reagan meet with a little boy dying of muscular dystrophy, Watkins recalls that a top aide replied, "Absolutely not. The First Lady doesn't want her picture taken with some drooly kid on a respirator. It's too disgusting."

According to Gahl Hodges Burt, White House social secretary during the Reagan years, Shirley Watkins was a computer technician whose job was to answer phones and record visitors' names. "She never saw Nancy Reagan and never saw me," says Burt. "If those are the kinds of sources being used, it's really shocking."

Highlight the charges; never mind the corroboration. One of the book's more sensational, if most trivial, allegations is that the Reagans took puffs on a marijuana cigarette at a dinner party hosted by Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale during Reagan's tenure as California Governor. Supposedly Alfred Bloomingdale went upstairs after dessert, brought down the joint and passed it around to the guests, who included the George Burnses and the Jack Bennys. "Within five minutes they all started giggling," writes Kelley, "but claimed they didn't feel a thing and said they couldn't see what the big deal was."

The anecdote comes from Sheldon Davis, Bloomingdale's former executive assistant, who claims Bloomingdale related the incident in the office the following Monday. Only in the notes at the end of the book does Kelley admit she tried in vain to corroborate the story. Three friends of the Bloomingdales are quoted; all say they never heard the story. Few newspapers would print a charge on such flimsy evidence. (Betsy Bloomingdale last week called the story "unbelievable. It of course never happened.")

Use quotes selectively. Kelley frequently rehashes material that has been published elsewhere -- in itself no crime. But her selection of which parts to quote and which to leave out reveal her motives. For example, she describes an episode in which Nancy, after an angry encounter with her stepson Michael, then 16, callously told him he had been born out of wedlock to an army sergeant who had gone overseas and never returned. Writes Kelley: "Michael said he was rocked by the heartless way he received the news . . . 'I guess I expected Nancy to be more sympathetic,' he said years later."

The account is taken entirely from Michael Reagan's own memoir, On the Outside Looking In. Yet Kelley leaves out the sentences that show his more complex feelings about the incident. "For years I resented Nancy for telling me the truth about my blood parents," Reagan wrote. "Looking back, I really can't blame her. I had provoked and pushed her to the breaking point." Michael Reagan considers Kelley's account distorted: "She shows just one side of the story and doesn't tie it all in to what else was happening back then."

Exaggerate and oversimplify. Kelley hammers home the widespread view that Nancy Reagan wielded great power behind the scenes at the White House. Yet she damages her credibility as a political observer with hyperbole and distortions. At one point she provides a list of "Nancy-inspired firings and forced resignations" among top Reagan officials. Along with a few Nancy Reagan did indeed play a role in removing (like former chief of staff Donald Regan) are a number she had little or nothing to do with, such as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. What's more, Kelley fails to note that much of Nancy's advice had little effect on her husband. She started pushing for the ouster of Edwin Meese as early as 1982, for example, but Reagan stubbornly held on to his longtime adviser until Meese resigned in 1988.

Kelley shows little grasp of Nancy Reagan's real contributions to the Administration. The First Lady was an astute political adviser on many matters. She played an important role, for instance, in getting Reagan to realize the severity of the trouble his presidency was in over the Iran-contra scandal.

Yet Kelley wrongly implies Nancy Reagan had a major hand in shaping foreign policy. In one encounter described in the book, President Reagan's aides showed him an agenda for his Geneva summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The President asked whether the agenda had been shown to Nancy yet. No, he was told. "Get back to me after she's passed on it," he said. The reason for his concern was almost certainly Nancy's obsession with coordinating his schedule with the astrological charts -- a revelation that came out years ago. But Kelley uses the incident to imply, misleadingly, that the First Lady was involved in substantive planning of the summit's agenda.

Even if the end product were more balanced and authoritative, Kelley's reporting techniques would raise serious ethical problems. Many supposed sources for the book have denied ever having spoken with Kelley. In many cases interviews for the book were done by researchers working for Kelley but hiding that fact. Others who admit they talked with Kelley were startled to see the way their remarks were embellished and given more weight than they deserved. Gene Nelson, the former actor and dancer who lived with Maureen Reagan for three years, is quoted at length, talking about Nancy's estrangement from her stepdaughter. Nelson remembers being interviewed by Kelley but calls her a "master of embroidery." One of her techniques: "She sets up some of my 'quotes' with 'Nancy told me . . .' But Nancy rarely told me anything directly."

A reporter at People, assigned to ensure the correctness of the facts in a 1988 story by Kelley about Judith Exner and John F. Kennedy, said working with the author was "an absolute nightmare. Kitty did not care about accuracy." Others have said the same thing, but lawyers have found it difficult to nail her on libel grounds. No libel suit, for example, was ever brought over her sensational biography of Sinatra in which she described the singer as a boor who ate ham and eggs off the chest of a prostitute and slammed a woman through a plate-glass window. Says a former Sinatra lawyer: "She has read all the defamation cases very carefully and operates right on the edge."

For all the denials and disclaimers that have greeted the Nancy Reagan book, a number of insiders contend that the overall portrait is surprisingly accurate. Though Patti Davis denied one of Kelley's major allegations -- that Davis had several abortions -- she remarked that "Kitty got a lot of things right, from what I have heard." A former Nancy Reagan aide, after reading the passages in which he was involved, expressed surprise at their accuracy: "I must admit I have more respect for ((Kelley)) now." Jody Jacobs, a former editor for Women's Wear Daily and the Los Angeles Times who is quoted several times in the book, called Kelley a thorough and conscientious reporter and the book "a realistic picture of Nancy."

To be sure, disputes over quotes, anecdotes and interpretations are to be expected when a biography takes a strong point of view on a controversial figure. The question is whether Kelley has done the essential job of the biographer: to weigh all the evidence responsibly, place it in some kind of perspective and attempt to reach a psychological understanding of the subject. And that Kelley certainly has not done. "She will quote anybody who says anything against Nancy Reagan," said historian Garry Wills, author of Reagan's America: The Innocents at Home. "She doesn't put Nancy's actions in context, so you can't tell what's important from what's unimportant. She offers no framework of understanding." Commented Robert Caro, who has written two volumes of a biography of Lyndon Johnson: "A biography is not merely the recording and regurgitating of interviews. It's important to try to assess the impact of someone's life on political and social history."

Others point out, however, that Kelley's approach is becoming increasingly common in today's gossip-obsessed press. Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power, attacked the "holier-than-thou" attitude of many journalists over Kelley's work. "What Kitty Kelley represents is what most newspaper and magazine reporting is all about," he said. "Anyone in journalism who criticizes Kitty Kelley should examine themselves first."

The problem here may be one of definition. Kelley's book falls short of the standards of serious biography: it is too sloppy in its scholarship, too uncritical of its sources, too single-minded in its pursuit of the sensational and salacious. In a sense, the book is a compilation of the sort of speculation, freewheeling opinions and water-cooler gossip that journalists hear every day but that rarely make it into the news pages. As such, it has an understandable fascination -- and possibly some historical validity. Water- cooler gossip, after all, is not only entertaining. Sometimes it contains pieces of the truth.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Wendy Cole/New York and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles