Nancy Reagan watchers used to refer to it as "the gaze." It was that look of rapt attention she fixed on people, a look that implied the recipient was the most important person in the world. Classmates at Smith College may have been the first to notice it; she developed it further in Hollywood while wooing Ronald Reagan. But the gaze became most famous during Nancy Reagan's days in the White House: the frozen, doe-eyed stare of adoration that the First Lady would fix on the President whenever she watched him speak.
The American public has lately become accustomed to another sort of gaze: the all-embracing, unflinching stare of the pop biographer. Unlike Nancy's, this gaze is without mercy or letup. It can go on for hundreds of pages, unearthing skeletons, resurrecting old grudges, exposing big faults and magnifying little blemishes. Few can survive it with reputation intact.
That pitiless gaze was focused on Nancy Reagan last week by Kitty Kelley, America's premier slash biographer. The resulting furor caused even some die- hard Nancy haters to feel a sympathetic twinge or two for the former First Lady. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (Simon & Schuster) went on sale across the nation just as newspapers and TV newscasts began to revel in the book's most sensational allegations. Many bookstores sold out their copies within hours. Aggrieved parties cried foul, Johnny Carson made jokes and guardians of journalistic integrity shook their heads. The New York Times, which trumpeted the book's revelations in a long, uncritical front-page piece on Sunday, sobered up three days later with a condemning editorial. "Lightning rods have had it better than Nancy Reagan," it said. ". . . But truly, nobody deserves this."
In more than 600 pages the book digs up seemingly every tawdry anecdote, unflattering recollection or catty comment ever uttered about Nancy Reagan. The former First Lady was, in Kelley's account, a cold and uncaring parent, a manipulative social climber and an acquisitive arriviste -- who was nonetheless so cheap that she would recycle old gifts and send them to friends. In her Hollywood days, the book contends, Nancy Davis got parts because she was sleeping with MGM's head of casting. In Washington she was a ruthless Marie Antoinette who was the real power behind the President. She rejected her natural father, spied on her kids and lied about her age. In short, she was the Wicked Witch of the West and East coasts. "Believe it or not," says a fashion industry executive who helped outfit Nancy in Adolfo clothes, "Leona Helmsley was nicer."