Meow!(The Repulsive World of Kitty Kelly)

The Family The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley Doubleday, 705 pp., $29.95

"SHE WANTS RESPECTABILITY more than anything else," a friend of Kitty Kelley once told the Washington Post, but if that's true she sure has a funny way of going about it. With each of her celebrity biographies--first there was one on Jackie Kennedy, followed by Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, and the British Royal Family--respectability recedes further from Kitty's chubby little paws. The newsmagazines will no longer serialize her books, and reviewers for the New York Times regularly trash them, most recently in Michiko Kakutani's review last week of her latest, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Even the insouciant Matt Lauer, balding host of the Today show, seems to be losing patience. His producers had booked Kitty for promotional appearances last week on three successive mornings, but instead of encouraging the author in a purring recitation of her new book's many charms, Matt sandbagged her. The face-to-face debunking required more nerve than skill--poking holes in a Kitty Kelley book isn't hard--but it did underscore the rude fact of Kitty's professional status: When respectable pressfolk deal with her, they prefer to use surgeon's gloves and a pair of long-nosed pliers.

It was not always so. There was a brief window in Kitty Kelley's career when respectability hovered within her grasp. His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra (1986), which among much else described Sinatra's mother as an abortionist and depicted Ol' Blue Eyes himself

bellying up, so to speak, to a steak-and-egg breakfast served off the bosom of a Las Vegas prostitute, had been praised in most establishment circles. Then, in 1987, she announced that her next subject would be Nancy Reagan. Within months the Washington Post, whose proprietress Katharine Graham was close to Mrs. Reagan, ordered up the definitive profile of Kitty Kelley. Exhaustively reported and cheekily written by Gerri Hirshey, the story appeared in three installments in October 1988. It ran to over 25,000 words, a sordid tale of personal betrayals and professional malfeasance, and it established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that its subject was a bit of a head case.

The best source on that was Hirshey herself. "Shortly after I'd begun my research," Hirshey wrote in the article's first installment, "anonymous mail began to arrive." There were anonymous phone calls, too, including one from an unnamed woman who shouted, "Do you DARE tell the truth about one of Washington's most esteemed citizens?" But the letters were more frequent and more interesting. They "followed my investigations from Spokane [where Kitty grew up] to Georgetown to New York." They carried various return addresses, some of them nonexistent, and "praised Kitty Kelley, limned her accomplishments, her kindnesses to small and crippled children." Not all the notes were anonymous--some were signed by fabricated names--and not all were flattering; at least one contained a sinister tip about Kelley's personal life, which, bizarrely, proved false. And most of the notes, according to a forensic analysis undertaken by the Post, were typed on typewriters known to have been used by Kitty Kelley for other business correspondence. OF COURSE, Kitty had never been "one of Washington's most esteemed citizens," and now she never would be; respectability slipped forever from her grasp with the publication of the Post profile. The Reagan book, completed in 1991, might have provided some consolation--that, and the $4 million advance she received for it. Her next book, on the Windsors, was much less successful, failing even to find a British publisher willing to risk England's libel laws. This new book on the Bushes, dropped squarely on a president universally disliked by the respectable press and in the midst of a difficult reelection, may be her one last play for respectability--which must make the garroting at the Today show and the Times even more painful. So it goes. As Kitty herself once explained, when people criticize her taste or her reporting or her prose, "I say, 'I'm sorry, I'm on my way to the bank.'" Exactly. How many tummy tucks will respectability buy you?

It's too bad for Kitty that her reputation is now beyond salvage, because The Family shows a writer working at full throttle, in complete command of her gifts. I don't mean this ironically. She is a pathographer: a writer of biographies whose sole editorial principle is to include every unflattering bit of information about a subject she can, while leaving to one side anything that might appear exculpatory or complicating. (The pathographer's motto: If it's a sin, put it in.) Her theme is as ancient as it is implausible--that the rich and

celebrated, the successful and well-endowed, lead lives as squalid and pathetic as the lives of the readers who buy her books. She knows that in the popular culture the mere fact of celebrity is vastly more important than its cause. Whether someone becomes famous for singing good songs, like Frank, or marrying well, like Jackie and Nancy, or marrying often, like Liz, or getting elected president, like the two Bushes--it really doesn't matter. Celebrity itself is enough to bring the chumps into the tent. Celebrity itself justifies a pathography.

That's one reason her books all end up resembling one another, regardless of the particulars of the lives she examines. Character types recur. In The Family, veteran Kitty readers will see that Barbara Bush is Dolly Sinatra, minus the abortions--cold, ambitious, calculating, steeped in ethnic resentments--and both resemble Mrs. Reagan's mother, too, who's a lot like Liz Taylor's stage-door mom. The pre-presidential George W. has much in common with poor Frank Sinatra Jr.: feckless, fun-loving, driven by the neglect of a distant dad to drunkenness and worse, while clawing the apron strings of a monstrous mom. Ronald Reagan is George H.W. Bush: amiable, a bit clueless, uxorious. Prescott Bush, the patriarch, is Lloyd Davis, Mrs. Reagan's stepfather, who (if I'm not mistaken) is the same as Liz's Conrad Hilton: austere and honorable and aloof and rich, presiding over a clan torn apart by dark secrets that even they themselves dare not reveal! And around them orbit the minor characters, the walk-ons drawn from melodrama, caught in their stock storylines: the shady businessman, the mousy virginal daughter, the well-meaning boob--the black sheep and the sacrificial lamb, the tragedy and dysfunction, the heartbreak and sorrow. And tons of sex.

In The Family, Kitty runs this repertoire with great confidence and skill. Yet as a pathographer she understands that many tasks required of the conventional biographer are beyond her talents, so she doesn't even try to pull them off. She may be nuts, but she's not stupid. Like her other books, The Family is haphazardly organized; she starts telling a straightforward chronological tale, and maintains it with failing strength for nearly two-thirds of the book, until at last she says the hell with it and begins tossing in stuff almost at random--whatever pops out of her card file: In the middle of a discussion about George H.W. Bush and taxes, we get an unexpected story about a California congressman who once saw the elder Bush in the shower and describes the president's "little stick"; in a discussion of the Lewinsky scandal, Kitty suddenly lets drop that Laura Bush, in college, was a dope dealer. As a narrative strategy it's chaos, but it does keep a reader on his toes. Doze off reading a Kitty Kelley book, and you're bound to miss something.

IN THE SAME WAY, she makes no more than a cursory gesture at placing her story in a larger context: historical, social, political, all that jazz. She's not a big-picture gal, and of course she doesn't need to be. When she feels forced to stand back and summarize, for the sake of her readers, some larger political current or historical epoch--"The class of 1964 had watched a dizzying swirl of history: Roger Maris hitting his sixty-first home run on October 1, 1961; John Glenn's three-orbit space mission in Mercury Friendship on February 20, 1962; the Cuban missile crisis eight months later; Martin Luther King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' in April 1963; and the U.S. arrival of the mop-top Beatles in February 1964"--you can't help but think, "Oh no! Kitty's been watching the History Channel again!" It's as if in such passages she's winking at her reader: I've got to toss in this high-brow jive for Michiko Kakutani, she's saying, but you and I both know why we're here, so hang on, there's something good coming up soon. (You also think, if you're like me, Did she say "mop-top"?)

And there is something good coming up soon, always. The good stuff isn't necessarily what Kitty thinks it is, however. I particularly enjoyed discovering untypical signs of fanciness in her prose; in The Family Kitty litters her text with far-fetched similes and metaphors as never before. "George was as smooth as an eel slithering through oil." Bill Clinton, during the 2000 presidential campaign, "was the dog's mess in the living room." When George H.W. Bush learned of the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" decision in 1964, "their ruling fell back in his lap like a bowl of rich cream." Is it surprising that a writer so often accused of sleaziness has become obsessed with dry-cleaning?

THE WORLD by now has learned of the other "good stuff," what Kitty herself calls her book's "major revelations"--and if the world hasn't, it's because her sources are so transparently feeble that the respectable press has declined to transmit them. Kitty's use of unnamed sources is a marker of all her books, but of the sources that are identified in The Family, some are surprising even for her.

Her account of George W. Bush procuring an abortion for a girlfriend in the 1970s comes from, believe it or not, Larry Flynt. Other sources, while named, are insufficiently identified. Evidence for Barbara Bush's "anti-Semitism"--"'There'll be no Jews in our family,' she said"--comes from the testimony of Cody Shearer, whom Kitty calls a "former journalist." Yes, indeed: Shearer's previous journalistic coup was the discovery of Brett Kimberlin, the convicted bomber and pathological liar who became briefly famous for saying he'd sold pot to Dan Quayle.

Another frequently used source, surfacing here and there to make snippy remarks about George W.'s boorishness in college and after ("It was just like talking to a Sears repairman") is a man named Mark Soler, identified as a member of Bush's Yale class of '68. Kitty declines to tell her readers that Soler has grown up to be an avowed political enemy of Bush's, as president of a "public-interest" law firm funded in part by George Soros, who's not crazy about Bush either. For her account of Bush's tour in the National Guard she relies on Bill Burkett, identified last week as the possible source of the forged documents used by Dan Rather and CBS News.

Some readers might conclude from Kitty's promiscuous use of such sources--and from the far-fetched, unsubstantiated stories she tells from other sources she doesn't name--that this particular pathographer, perky though she is, has no standards. Not true! In one amazing passage, in the middle of the book, after the unverifiable tales of adultery and drunkenness and deceit, Kitty suddenly assumes the role of hard-headed fact-checker. She repeats a revealing story frequently told about George W. Bush's college years, and then, her ethical antennae quivering with outrage, she sets about to debunk it. For those of us who have followed Kitty's career, this is a rare privilege--seeing her take the trouble to marshal evidence and weigh probabilities in full view of the reader, rather than just asserting a casual slander, attributing it to an anonymous source, and moving on.

Unfortunately, the story that rouses Kitty's unusual skepticism is told by George W. Bush, and the person slandered by it, so Kitty thinks, isn't Bush but the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a once-famous antiwar activist who was chaplain during W.'s years at Yale. Bush's story goes like this: In 1964, following his father's loss to a liberal Democrat, Ralph Yarborough, in the Texas Senate race, W. had a brief chat with Coffin on the Yale campus. "Oh, yes," Coffin said, "I know your father. Frankly he was beaten by a better man."

Bush has told this story often as an illustration of Yalie elitism and left-wing self-satisfaction, but Kitty--well, frankly, she's not buying it. She grabs her big magnifying glass, she tugs on her Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, and she gets to work. "The first time George mentioned the incident with Coffin to anyone was when he was being interviewed by Texas Monthly in 1994," she writes. This isn't true, as it happens, since Bush had mentioned it to both his parents at the time, as Barbara Bush has made clear elsewhere, but anyway, Kitty's busy theorizing: "Running for governor of Texas, George may have felt he needed to country-boy his Ivy League credentials" by making up such a story.

In 1999, when Bush's mother confirmed the story to the Washington Post, Coffin denied it. Bush, now governor, wrote Coffin a note: "I believe my recollection is correct. But I also know time passes, and I bear no ill will."

Maybe that sounds kindly to you, maybe it sounds gracious. Not to Kitty--to Kitty it sounds mighty defensive. So she continues to gather evidence. Even though she has said elsewhere that many of them declined to be interviewed by her, she announces that none of W.'s dorm mates--"not one"!--has a contemporaneous recollection, thirty years later, of the young Bush relating the Coffin story in 1964. She quotes "one Yale man in George's class" (Mark Soler?) who doubts the incident took place. She notes that Mrs. Bush didn't mention the story in her own memoir. And finally comes the QED, the final nail in the coffin of this lie: "To those who know William Sloane Coffin, an avowed human rights activist, the story seems preposterous."

Actually, this isn't true either. To those who know William Sloane Coffin, a preening and vainglorious blowhard, the story is perfectly plausible. But it is a wonderful thing, in all the thousands of pages of all the pathographies that Kitty has written, to discover her, at last, applying rules of evidence and standards of proof. Yes, the standards are low and the rules are rigged, but still. This odd method is, to her, revealing: "By the time George W. Bush told his Reverend Coffin story in 1994, he had entered the political arena in which truth was frequently the first casualty."

I thought Ann Coulter said it best:

In a book out this week, Kelley details many anonymous charges against the Bush family, such as that Laura Bush was a pot dealer in college, George W. Bush was the first person in America to use cocaine back in 1968, and he also regularly consorted with a prostitute in Texas who was then silenced by the CIA.

Kelley backs up her shocking allegations with names of highly credentialed people -- who have absolutely no connection to the events she is describing. No one directly involved is on the record, and the people on the record have never met anyone in the Bush family. In other words, her stories have been "vetted" enough to be included on tonight's "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather.

The New York Times review blamed Kelley's gossip mongering on "a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet." Kelley has been writing these books for decades, so apparently, like the Texas Air National Guard, Kelley was on the Internet -- and being influenced by it -- back in the '70s. As I remember it, for the past few years it has been the Internet that keeps dissecting and discrediting the gossip and innuendo that the major media put out.

Curiously, all this comes at the precise moment that speculation is at a fever pitch about whether Kitty Kelley is in the advanced stages of syphilis. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: "Approximately 3 percent to 7 percent of persons with untreated syphilis develop neurosyphilis, a sometimes serious disorder of the nervous system.

Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has found there is an "inter-relationship" between STDs and truck routes in Baltimore. I'm not at liberty to reveal the names of my sources, but there are three or four highly placed individuals in the publishing industry who say Miss Kelley or someone who closely resembles her is a habitue of truck routes in Baltimore.

While opinions differ as to whether Miss Kelley's behavior can be explained by syphilis or some other STD, people who went to Harvard -- and Harvard is one of the top universities in the nation -- say her path is consistent with someone in the advanced stages.

Amid the swirling dispute over her STDs, there is only one way for Kelley to address this issue: Release her medical records. As someone who would like to be thought of as her friend said anonymously: "For your own good, Ms. Kelley, I would get those medical records out yesterday." This doesn't have to be public. She may release her medical records to me, or if she'd be more comfortable, to my brothers.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.