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But they’re not biographies at all. They are huge pieces of gossip journalism: massively researched cuttings-jobs, sourced from books, magazines and face-to-face lunches (which Kelley has said she mostly doesn’t tape-record) with anybody prepared to pass on snippets. I’ve read that she interviewed 857 people for His Way (Sinatra), 1,002 for Nancy Reagan and 988 for the Bushes. One can only marvel.
The bulk of her sources are anonymous, while others are named in (lengthy) appendices or thanked in (hefty) acknowledgments but without being connected to the main text at all. I guess this might be because many of them are hairdressers. What they give her is what journalists call ‘background’ — the mythopeic mesh of information-nuggets that clings to famous people, part fact, part legend, part wishful thinking — that they have to wade through before getting to the real insights.
Kitty Kelley can’t tell background from foreground. She has a loose connection with chronology, too. The book is almost impossible to follow: you have to flick-read it as though it was 700 copies of The National Enquirer. Across two pages, for example, she has the first President George Bush (in 1990) causing political upset in his own party by reneging on his famous campaign promise (‘Read my lips. No new taxes’). Sensing that this sudden burst of politics might be dull, she then sets up a gossipy paragraph about a Democrat who had used the same Washington gym as the President, noticed that he had only a ‘little stick’, and made bawdy speeches about it (in l992). The next paragraph has Margaret Thatcher (in l990) helping him ‘recoup his manhood’ via Desert Storm. Backwards reels the mind.
Kelley decided to do her Heat job on the Bush family when the second George Bush won the 2000 presidential election (or, in her choice of words, ‘after the Supreme Court decision of 2000’). ‘Suddenly, by fiat, they had become interesting.’
Not nearly as interesting as you’d want, believe me, because the book begins in l908 (heaven help us), and the first third is all about George W’s grand-daddy, Prescott S. Bush, who seems like a nice enough millionaire with a good singing voice. Kelley then proceeds down five generations of Bushes, Walkers and Pierces, ferreting for what lies beneath the family fa
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