BOOKS

Tired of hearing about that ambitious woman who climbed her way from a humble background to fame, fortune and a White House closetful of red Adolfo suits? Try this for a hot biography. There's this poor little rich girl in Spokane, kind of a Shirley Temple type. Dad's a lawyer, Mom's a tough lady who likes to nip at the bottle. Despite the kid's pitiful efforts to please her mom, all she gets is a hard time.

Home is a trap, but at school the kid shucks all that and really blossoms. She's everywhere. The school dances, the annual town parade, the pep squad, the pick of the boys. O.K., so she's not an Einstein, gradewise, but she gets a college degree and dumps that dreary town and her painful homelife and heads for the Big Time.

A job or so later, she's in Washington, working for a real U.S. Senator and salivating around the powerful. She's primarily a receptionist, but it looks better on her resume to say press secretary. It's no big deal. Then it's on to a newspaper and a career in journalism. This leads to writing books jammed with dirt on famous people. Soon she's pulling in zillions. She owns a mansion, wears designer clothes, chums with notables at glittering parties. Makes a lot of friends. Makes a lot more enemies, thanks to her inimitable way with the rumors that she gathers for her best sellers. Maybe sends a few anonymous letters to warn off folks who are searching for the real person behind all that pizazz. The lady's got the world on a leash.

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 you.

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 on the same machine that Kelley used for her business mail. (Reached by TIME last week, the expert confirmed the analysis.) When Hirshey queried Kelley's lawyer about the typewriter, he replied, "No such machine is owned."

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.

The former, of course, decline to be named but readily stamp Kelley as someone you'd hate to have for a dinner partner, let alone a confidant: "She will suck you into her world and then betray you . . . She craves attention." Or, "She exploits people, and I don't like to mess with her."

On the other hand, says Washington columnist Marianne Means, Kitty is "very warm. She's not secretive, but she doesn't talk about herself a lot. She's fun to be with." Jack Limpert, editor of Washingtonian magazine, which lists Kelley on the masthead, says, "She's a relentless reporter. You've got to give it to her. She works very hard." Limpert does not discuss the widespread conviction of other journalists, as well as Kelley's own subjects, that she too frequently fails to bring perspective or analysis to the fruits of her reporting and at times lards her work with dollops of questionable inferences and innuendos.

This is not the same sweet, pudgy, pig-tailed little girl who grew up in a fashionable district of Spokane, the oldest of seven children of a prosperous Irish lawyer. Kitty's homelife, according to Gerri Hirshey, was mean and hard. She did not get along well with her heavy-drinking mother, a strict disciplinarian who padlocked the family refrigerator.

At Holy Names Academy she was gregarious and peppy; Sister Bernadine Casey remembers a "pleasant, lovely and active student" who had a "gift for writing." Kitty made the cheerleading squad and was elected "Friendliest Girl" for four years running. She was chosen the school's "Lilac Princess," and rode a float in the annual Lilac Festival parade.

"She was always somebody who couldn't be ignored," says Phil Shinnick, a school chum and currently a research scientist in Brooklyn. "She was queen of the prom and a street fighter. She had an aura about her. She was physically well endowed and always got the best guy." Her beau in those days was Tom Shine, now a Spokane architect. The romance did not last. "We came from different backgrounds," Shine recalled last week. "I knew she wanted to leave Spokane and do other things."

In 1964 Kitty graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a bachelor's degree in English. She taught school briefly and then headed East, first to New York City, where she was a hostess at the World's Fair, then to Washington, where she joined the staff of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Was she McCarthy's press secretary, as the book jacket on her biography of Jackie Onassis claimed? "She was a good receptionist," said McCarthy, but she also handed out press releases. The jacket blurb was later revised.

In 1969 Kelley moved over to the Washington Post as an editorial-page researcher; two years later, she was asked to resign for making notes unrelated to her job. One day in 1973 she turned up at Washingtonian magazine with an unpublished book written by the novelist Barbara Howar. Kitty claimed that she had found the manuscript in the drawer of a table sold at Howar's yard sale and wanted the Washingtonian to print excerpts. When Howar heard about it, she raised a mighty fuss; only one copy of the manuscript existed, she said, and this she kept on the third floor of her house, far from the milling buyers in the yard. The magazine dropped the project, but not before Howar spent $16,000 in legal fees to reclaim her work.

By now, Kelley was finding her metier: rummaging through people's secrets, real and imagined. She wrote a free-lance article about resorts where the rich and famous frolicked, and parlayed the piece into The Glamour Spas, a book flecked with naughty gossip. This brought her to the attention of New Jersey celebrity-book publisher Lyle Stuart, who sent her off to do a job on Jackie Onassis. Kelley's friend at the time, gossip columnist Liz Smith, gave her voluminous files on Jackie, and Kitty set out on a tireless quest for the down and dirty. The book, Jackie Oh!, revealed little that had not been told before, but it was a best seller nonetheless.

Next, Kitty wanted to take on an easy target, Liz Taylor, but Stuart balked. Kitty aced herself out of her contract with him, took her proposal to Simon & Schuster, got an advance of $150,000 and in 1981 produced another prurient best seller.

What surprised critics and readers, and possibly even Kelley herself, was the thoroughness of her next effort, His Way, a devastating biography of Frank Sinatra. Even before the manuscript was completed, the singer had mounted an all-out campaign to dry up Kelley's sources. When that did not prove sufficient, he filed suit claiming that Kitty was misrepresenting herself to sources and failing to disclose her reasons for writing the book. But Sinatra had never had to deal with so determined an opponent. Kelley argued that Sinatra was trying to prevent her from publishing freely; Sinatra's lawyers finally dropped the suit. The book, which detailed Sinatra's fabled womanizing, his alleged Mob connections and two suicide attempts, received respectful reviews. More than 3 million copies have been printed in hard-cover and paperback.

That was the first time, and possibly the last, that Kelley would be credited with a well-documented and largely accurate portrayal of her subject. Dan Moldea, a Washington author who specializes in organized crime and who supplied Kelley with sources, admires the book, though he is annoyed, he says, because Kitty undermined him by telling a competitor when his own book was due to be published. "One thing Kitty has always wanted," he says now, "is public respect and legitimacy as an author and a journalist. She achieved that with the Sinatra book, but Nancy Reagan is not going to stand up."

Meanwhile, readers who cannot get enough of slasher bios will have a chance later this spring to buy another one. Tentative title: Poison Pen: The * Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley. The book will be published by Lyle Stuart, who is still chafing over Kitty's defection; the writer is George Carpozi Jr., who works for the tabloid Star. Kitty professes to be unconcerned. The book may not be destined for the best-seller lists, but at least it should bring a smile to four people named Jackie, Liz, Frank and Nancy.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

CAPTION: THE TWO NANCYS AND JACKSON