Word: gossip
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...parts. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, charged that there are 20 factual errors in the passages involving her alone. She described the purported Nancy Reagan-Frank Sinatra tryst in the White House as "pure horse manure." Michael Reagan, Nancy's stepson, also jumped to her defense. "Gossip is one thing, and smut is another," he said. "This is smut...
Print the quote, whatever the source. For Kelley, all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating thirdhand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses. (And sometimes more weight.) This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have their own axes to grind...
Others point out, however, that Kelley's approach is becoming increasingly common in today's gossip-obsessed press. Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power, attacked the "holier-than-thou" attitude of many journalists over Kelley's work. "What Kitty Kelley represents is what most newspaper and magazine reporting is all about," he said. "Anyone in journalism who criticizes Kitty Kelley should examine themselves first...
...course all novels are gossip novels, and most are rip-offs, generally of the author's friends and relatives. But the ethics of pilferage becomes woozy when too recognizable caricatures of dead grandees wallow in unlikely misbehavior. Ethical questions waft away, though, when the theft works. Then the stolen characters come to life; for instance, the dead King whom Shakespeare slurred as a bottled spider struts in his play as Richard...
...good. Korda's shabby novel is a snooze, perhaps because, having purloined his characters, he never felt they were really his to order around. The story does not wake up fully even when Felicia, as Desdemona, runs wildly from the theater because she objects to being strangled. The gossip supplied is that Felicia was a victim of incest, Vane a man of pallid sexuality and, oh dear, some great British Shakespeareans were homosexuals. A wholly unbelievable murder clears the stage for a mushy, mope-happily-ever-after ending. Tomorrow is another book...