Word: kelley
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Could this be the real-life story of Kitty Kelley? Only if it falls into the category of vacuum-cleaner journalism, sucking up every stray fact and innuendo and without trying to sift the important from the trivial. Kelley has raised the practice of prattling about the rich and famous to high artifice, so perhaps that is why she dodges full-dress interviews about her past with the nimbleness of a faun in a forest fire...
...Sources," the journalist's staple, are not much help either in piecing together Kelley's life. They fall into two categories: praise from admiring friends and unkind remarks from a larger number of uneasy people, most of whom insist on anonymity, often because they fear Kelley's wrath. In Washington, where gossip is never in deficit, Kitty Kelley, 49, commands clout. She could write a book. About...
Journalists who have limned her, or tried, believe Kelley is capable of the ^ same kind of petty reprisals and organized stonewalling that she herself has confronted over the years in her incessant Hoovering of famous figures. After Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley panned Kelley's biography of Elizabeth Taylor in 1981, he received a gilded Gucci box wrapped with gold ribbon. "Inside," says Yardley, "was a bag of fish heads and a postcard of Liz Taylor giving me the finger." The card was signed, "From the friends of Kitty Kelley...
Even more curious was the experience of free-lancer Gerri Hirshey, who wrote a 9,000-word article on Kelley for the Washington Post Magazine in 1988 without, despite repeated efforts, interviewing Kelley; she was too busy. While researching the story, however, Hirshey received a number of unsolicited letters, some unsigned, all postmarked from different parts of the country, most offering flattering tidbits about Kelley's childhood and professional life. Hirshey sent the notes to a former CIA forensics expert, along with samples of Kelley's business correspondence. The expert concluded that three of the letters had been typed...
...What Kelley would probably admit she possesses, apart from blond cotton- candy hair, a breathless voice and a historic mansion in Washington's fancy Georgetown ghetto, is a drive for nonstop work and a tenacity that borders on obsession. Enemies and friends agree on that...