Nancy Reagan
Kelley, Kitty
French phrase Oh! quel cul Ors. TAinan's expertise did not extend to showbiz law, and thus he made less money from Oh! Calcutta! than did any of his subordinates. A sequel, Carte Blanche—"tat for...
...Since her scholarly text contains no footnote notations (how convenient), this documentation turns out to be forty-two pages of "notes," organized by chapter and presented in long batches containing even gamiermaterial than appears in the main body of the work...
...Reagan...
...Too bad everyone also knows that this bit of speculation is recycled from her earlier book on Sinatra...
...It was my debut in print...
...Sinatra, nor did I interview Mrs...
...M ost pornophiles are cradle-tograve losers...
...24.95 Peter Hannaford 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...
...Lady, I don't think you can tell us anything...
...By the late 1970s he seemed more of a bad joke than anything else: ardently and unsuccessfully endeavoring to ascertain the Masturbation Fantasies of the Rich and Famous (with a view to publishing them in book form), ritually flogging the girls foolish enough to take up with him, and apt to sing the praises of Wilhelm Reich to any hearer who had not crossed the street first...
...1:1 door of the First Family's living quarters...
...So Deaver and Hannaford lived together during the week in a one-bedroom apartment in Brentwood and on weekends commuted to their families in the north...
...But because the business grew, we soon were working in Los Angeles (or on the road) all week most weeks...
...I did not interview Mr...
...True, except for a few "details": The idea of managing a post-governorship program for Mr...
...In the round of interviews and parties during the initial promotion of the book, she repeatedly claimed to have conducted more than one thousand interviews for the book...
...W hen one has been in the public eye for much of four decades, a personage like Nancy Reagan will have, no doubt, a number of people eager to redress real or imagined slights...
...the rasping voice...
...NANCY REAGAN: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY Kitty Kelley/Simon and Schuster/603 pp...
...To take one example involving this reviewer: Discussing Ronald Reagan's final year as California governor (1974), Kelley writes: "[Mrs...
...I did not go into the bedroom...
...As for Taman the industrious hater, he appears at his most devastating in a 1966 analysis of Humphrey Bogart written for Playboy: I have now read about eighty-three accounts of him, in magazines or books, and I still cannot find it in me to be mesmerized by Bogart the Man...
...It is a sobering experience to read TYnan's Profiles, and not just the ones that amaze by their author's precocity...
...Reagan] encouraged Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford to leave their families in northern California and move to Los Angeles to start a political consulting firm with Reagan as their main client...
...They are not crammed with aphorisms, as Tynan's theater reviews were, though his comparison of Charles Laughton's gait to that of "a salmon standing on his tail" and his account of Noel Coward "baring his teeth as if unveiling a grotesque memorial" are unforgettable...
...She takes a kernel of truth, embroiders it with supposition, and then draws a weird conclusion...
...Ever the optimist, he planned to recoup his losses by writing a pornographic movie script, only to discover that his own mighty efforts in effecting the permissive Utopia had ensured a lamentable oversupply of the very product he was now trying to sell...
...Surely Tynan realized what excellence his most searching articles had reached...
...Reagan and Frank Sinatra were carrying on in the White House...
...Reagan originated with Mike Deaver and me over a period of several months in 1974...
...Kelley seems desperate to be taken as a serious historian...
...A Kelley fact is at best a factoid...
...At one point, for instance, she drags in, for no apparent purpose, a discussion of lesbianism at Smith College back in the forties, when—pow!—she connects: "A secret but romantic 'best friends' relationship developed between Nancy Davis [Reagan] and a classmate who later became an avowed lesbian...
...two bedrooms, not one...
...Kelley lists the names of these alleged sources in the book's acknowledgments, yet with every day the number grows of those who, having learned they are named as sources, deny they ever talked with the author or her assistants...
...Tynan had the talent to be a cradle-to-grave winner, but he chose to destroy himself as spectacularly as Yukio Mishima did, while lacking even the decisiveness and physical valor which lent a suggestion of dignity to Mishima's horrible end...
...Her source for the lowdown is—ah, too bad—anonymous...
...Perhaps someday our journalists will learn that, what with their deadlines and short horizons, they rarely affect the judgments of history...
...from Gielgud to Greta Garbo via Graham Greene...
...That is what her late cleaning lady said the window washer told her...
...At his death, the biography of Reich with which he was going to stun mankind remained unfinished, a fact that inspired regret in absolutely no one...
...If one knew nothing about him except what these profiles reveal, one would take him for an eminently sensible pyrotechnician...
...It's all [documented] in the back of the book...
...Not bad, if I may say so myself...
...A sequel, Carte Blanche—"tat for tit," Punch derisively called it—inflicted still more fmancial damage on its creator...
...The book is so wildly overstated as to make the subject unrecognizable to those who actually know her...
...It wasn't, in other words, a manipulative Nancy Reagan who kept us from our families, but a combination of business decisions and coincidences...
...Fat chance...
...Our firm was established as a public relations/public affairs firm, not as a political consultancy...
...ne can only speculate about the author's motives...
...I can only tell you what transpired up to that point...
...The relentless author remains coy: "I take the reader to the bedroom Peter Hannaford, author of The Reagans: A Political Portrait, is head of a Washington-based public affairs firm...
...Successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can't act frequently express the same opinions as successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can (such as Bogart...
...for what she calls, in quotation marks, "luncheons," just to make sure we'll know they weren't...
...How else to explain his metamorphosis into a creature that future paleontologists will know as Tynanosaurus Sex: predatory, dumb, and very extinct...
...He could be obnoxious with the best of them, but his compliments were as fiery and as imperious as his insults...
...The cleaning lady told her cousin (or at least a woman claiming to be her cousin) who told me...
...As we had enough capital to staff only one major office, we chose Los Angeles, where our most active client would be located...
...Aged ten, I saw [The Petrified Forest] when it opened in Britain, and immediately wrote a letter to a movie magazine, begging Warner's to give us more of this untamed man with the warning eyes and K itty Kelley enjoys deep kissing with goats...
...She describes Sinatra as coming in by a back door (find me one at the White House...
...Our initial plan was to take turns working three and two days a week in Los Angeles...
...With characteristic originality, 'Tynan then turns the tables on every reader who assumes that the foregoing presages a hate-Bogart tract: If I seem to knock the cult of Bogart the Man, it is because I invented the cult of Bogart the Actor...
...To meet these growing demands on our time, we took an apartment—in Santa Monica, not Brentwood...
...Would-be historian Kelley slipped when she told the Washington Times, "This is the best journalism there is...
...No, he didn't...
...Reagan's] place in history...
...Yet the profiles are uniformly enriching, at times poignant: there is any amount of appropriate desolation in the pieces on Graham Greene and Tennessee Williams...
...from Miles Davis to Mel Brooks via Marlene Dietrich—are sane and sharp...
...Reagan's recent memoirs...
...We proposed it to the Reagans in October of that year...
...This view was taken seriously by some members of the press, including one in the Los Angeles Times, who may have inadvertently hit upon the book's underlying motive when he said the book "deals yet another blow to [Mr...
...She said he said he witnessed it through the bedroom window...
...That is Tynan all over...
...Sounds like they've become the latest practitioners of the "greed" unleashed by Reaganism...
...Kelley is said to have received a $3-4 million advance from value-free Simon and Schuster, who also happen to be the publishers of Mr...
...To hate phonies and prize loyalty is a fairly common attribute, even among the untalented...
...And on every other page of the Bogart dossiers there are tributes from colleagues that bring me out in a sweat of incredulous embarrassment...
...Her mastery of salacious innuendo will send the supermarket tabloid industry back to the drawing board...
...Meanwhile, to anyone who knows the Reagans or was there, the Kelley scenario can only appear laughable...
...Early or late, these tributes to the sacred monsters that peopled TYnan's imagination—from James Cagney to James Thurber...
...Already the stuff of folklore is Kelley's suggestion that Mrs...
...She would have us believe that Ronald Reagan spent his eight years in the White House as a puppet to an all-powerful wife (except when she was "lunching" with Frank Sinatra...
...Okay, I made the story up, but only to illustrate how easy it is to mimic the research methods used by Kitty Kelley in compiling her gossip-and-venom-filled volume on the former First Lady...
...Kelley exploits any such differences in order to present a woman who is power-mad, vain, conniving, and without a single redeeming quality...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
