Going behind the Bushes

Kitty Kelley is the Heat maga- zine of celebrity biographers. Spectator readers who may not be familiar with this unpleasant (but very popular) weekly should know that public taste has moved on from Hello!. Heat doesn’t do airbrushed celebrities looking gorgeous in their celebrity homes. Heat gives you the celeb ‘as she [or he] really is’ i. e. preferably sweaty, hag-ridden and running to fat, or displaying signs of a) extensive rehab, b) a coup de vieux or c) recent arrest. Heat is a ‘post-celebrity’ celeb mag, which aims to show that despite all their fame and money celebs are sad losers just like the rest of us.

Before The Family, Kelley did Heat-style jobs on Jackie Oh!, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan and the royal family. (I know, I know, the royal family aren’t ‘celebrities’. But Kelley’s an American; they’re celebrities to her.) Her books are all unfeasibly long (it took me three wasted days to plough through the Bush tome) and are written in a way that makes them seem curiously like biographies, in that the central characters are born, live out their spans and are beset by myriad troubles.

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.