POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Biography. Kitty Kelley. Simon & Schuster, $24.95. Breathes there a soul inside the beltway who has not heard about this book? The 528-page tome, which spiraled instantly...
...Most of this she managed with the appropriate obliqueness—using threats and rumors to their maximum effect...
...criticized on the covers of both Time and Newsweek...
...What's caught the public's imagination is a lurid tale of conspicuous consumption and clandestine affairs—a portrait of a two-faced harridan who reigned at 1600 Pennsylvania like Marie Antoinette...
...Nancy had an instinct for the deal early on: selling her personalized hand towels to another Nancy at Smith...
...disputed by People...
...The Nancy we see here is the antithesis of the nooner-inclined romantic—the relentlessly acquisitive bitch...
...But to Kelley's—and Nancy's—credit, it is also a study of a dealmaker of remarkable proportions: a master of manipulation who, once she paid her dues, made sure she'd never again have to pay her own way...
...satirized by Garry Trudeau...
...Forget 01' Blue Eyes...
...As Kelley tells it, Nancy was the eminence grise behind the president, convincing him to dump advisers from William Casey to Donald Regan to one hapless White House photographer...
...Clairol flew a hairdresser to the White House every three weeks to do the chemical treatments...
...Indeed, this unauthorized biography has got decadence to burn...
...Solid gold jewelry from Bulgari...
...And then, of course, there were the clothes...
...In time, freebies would become her way of life...
...and rehashed on every major and minor talk show in the country...
...Air Force transport planes to remove her worldly possessions...
...invested $100,000 worth of equipment—a retractable canopy roof, a small theater, a heated swimming pool with underwater lights, even electric drapes—in the house, making it a model of high-voltage living...
...The 528-page tome, which spiraled instantly to the top of the best-seller list, has been trumpeted on the front page of The New York Times...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Biography...
...But as she aged, she traded the small-time hustle for more elaborate moves...
...Not satisfied with the address—she claimed the number 666 signified Satan—Nancy had the offending numerals switched to 668...
...Throughout her life, she chafed at paying for the smallest details, even toilet paper, yet when she decamped from the White House, it took nine U.S...
...In 1956, while her husband was the spokesman for General Electric, the company agreed to electrify the couple's home in exchange for publicity...
...A moderate in a collegium of conservatives, she left her mark on policy, too: urging her husband to ditch the concept of the Soviet Union as "evil empire" and ensuring that his inner circle stayed loyal and deferential...
...Perfumes, watches, pocketbooks with $2,500 price tags—gifts or "borrowings" all...
...After Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, Nancy was appalled by the governor's mansion, particularly its tacky purple chairs...
...Years later, the same group ponied up megabucks to acquire a Bel Air estate for the Reagans' retirement...
...Adolpho suits...
...scheming as a starlet to catch the preoccupied president of the Screen Actors Guild...
...So Reagan's kitchen cabinet bought and lavishly furnished a Sacramento house for the pair—and then donated 11 acres to the state for the construction of a new, $1.4 million mansion (a structure more suited to Nancy's tastes...
...This set in motion a lifelong pattern of trading promotion for possessions...
...Nancy didn't even pay to dye her hair that trademark mousy brown...
...Through a series of canny business transactions, a woman born near the railroad tracks in Queens had parlayed a civil servant's salary into half a century of style...
...Nor was Nancy's dealmaking restricted to material goods...
...Galanos gowns...
Vol. 23 • June 1991 • No. 6
