Kitty Kelley

• Born: April 4, 1942
• Place of Birth: Spokane, Washington

Kelley first made her reputation in the 1970s and 1980s as the author of unauthorized, sensationalistic, and best-selling biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra but perhaps became the most famous biographer of the 1990s with her controversial books on Nancy Reagan and the British royal family.

Kitty Kelley is often cited as one of the factors in the growth of books about famous people and celebrities beginning in the 1990s. A former reporter for The Washington Post, Kelley made a major impact on how biographies are written with the publication of Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (1991), an account that purported to reveal intimate new details about the couple’s private life. President Ronald Reagan repudiated Kelley’s biography of his wife, disputing her reports that the couple smoked marijuana and that Nancy had had an affair with Frank Sinatra, but many of Kelley’s discoveries were later confirmed, including the fact that Nancy had relied on astrologers.

Unusual for a biographer, Kelley became a public figure in her own right, making news and appearing in numerous shows on television and radio. So iconic was she that she was spoofed on Saturday Night Live and then became the subject of a biography attempting to expose her lies and half-truths. However, the biographer hardly dented Kelley’s reputation—in part because even though she has often been attacked for publishing unsubstantiated stories, she has never lost a lawsuit or had to retract what she has published. Although most reviews of Kelley’s work in the 1990s were negative, many journalists nevertheless admired her tenacity in researching her subjects’ lives and bringing to biography a new level of candor.

In 1997, Kelley turned her attention to the British royal family in The Royals, a book that could not be published in Great Britain because of libel laws, which put the onus on the writer and publisher to prove they have not libeled the subject. In the United States, the law is just the opposite, so that the burden of proof is placed on the plaintiff. The Royals became the fourth best-selling nonfiction title of the year in the United States, according to Publishers Weekly. Essentially a history of the Windsors, a German family who sought to obscure their roots on the European continent, Kelley’s biography portrayed the royals as self-indulgent, scandal-ridden, and incompetent. Attacked by historians of the British royal family, Kelley’s book nevertheless typified much of the negative press surrounding the royal family in the 1990s.

Next, Kelley pursued the history of an American political dynasty: the Bush family, beginning with its patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, and continuing with his son, former President George H. W. Bush, and grandson, then President George W. Bush. The resulting multi-person biography, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, was published in 2004 and met with scorn from the White House.

Kelley's unauthorized 2010 biography Oprah; A Biography, about self-made media mogul Oprah Winfrey, largely drew on her subject's past interviews as well as her own conversations with Winfrey's father and older cousin. She ran into difficulty in getting the work published and subsequently in obtaining interviews with media outlets to market it, however, because of Winfrey's clout in the industry. Nonetheless, the book became a bestseller.

Kelley went on to reissue her earlier biographies in the early to mid-2010s and update some of them. She also authored Capturing Camelot: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the Kennedys (2012) andLet Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington (2013), both of which collect press photographs taken by her then-deceased friend. She went on to publish a children’s book, Martin’s Dream Day (2017), also with Tretick images of the 1963 March on Washington. In 2019, she published an article in the New Yorker, "A Reparations Movement Begat at Georgetown." In 2022, she was rumored to have been working on a biography of Jeff Bezos.

In addition to her work in print, Kelley appeared on the short-lived Reelz channel show The Kitty Kelley Files in 2017, and in the 2020 documentary series The Reagans.

Impact

Although Kelley’s brand of biography was frequently deplored in the 1990s, a minority of critics—chiefly journalists—admired her tenacity and campaigns to reveal in more candid form the lives of public figures. She has received multiple awards for her work, most notably the PEN Oakland Censorship Award in 2005 and a Washington Independent Review of Books Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. In April 2023, Kelley won the Biographers International Organization 14th Annual BIO Award.

Bibliography

Carpozi, George. Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley. Barricade Books, 1991.

Harris, Paul. “Oprah Winfrey’s Power Crushes Kitty Kelley’s Latest Muck-Racking Biography.” The Guardian, 17 Apr. 2010, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/apr/18/oprah-winfrey-kitty-kelley-biography. Accessed 22 May 2024. ‌

Kelley, Kitty. "A Reparations Movement Begat at Georgetown." The New Yorker, 13 May 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/a-reparations-movement-begat-at-georgetown. Accessed 22 May 2024.

"Kitty Kelley Wins 2023 BIO Award." The New Yorker, 14 Feb. 2023, www.kittykelleywriter.com/category/the-family. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Rollyson, Carl. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography. Ivan R. Dee, 2005.