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The image of the Reagans' wholesome, all-American marriage takes a thorough beating. Before marrying Nancy, Kelley claims, Reagan was one of Hollywood's busiest woman chasers; one former starlet even claims Reagan forced himself on her one night in her apartment. "They call it date rape today," the actress is quoted as saying. When Reagan married Nancy in 1952, it was only after his proposal to another actress, Christine Larson, had been rejected. On the day Nancy was in the hospital giving birth to daughter Patti, Kelley says, Reagan was at Christine's, sobbing that his life was ruined. In perhaps the book's most sensational allegation, Kelley asserts that Nancy had an extramarital fling of her own: with Frank Sinatra, who used to come up to the White House for private "lunches" -- winkingly placed in quotes by Kelley -- that lasted three or more hours.
The stories go on. When her grandmother died, a cousin relates, Nancy pleaded that she couldn't help pay for a gravestone, even though no one else in the family could afford one. In the White House Nancy was such a perfectionist that she could spend "an entire day deliberating on the amount of nutmeg to be shaved into a chicken veloute sauce." Her much vaunted anti- drug crusade, Kelley suggests, was little more than a public relations ploy.
And that's not all. Or maybe it's quite enough. The portrait of Nancy Reagan in Kelley's book is so lavishly, unrelentingly negative that it has set off a pair of fierce debates. The first centers on the former First Lady herself. Criticizing Nancy Reagan -- a First Lady America never really warmed to -- has become something of a cottage industry, and many of Kelley's charges merely reinforce and embellish those in earlier memoirs such as For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington by former White House chief of staff Donald Regan. "Had people liked Nancy Reagan in the first place they wouldn't be susceptible to all this dirt," says James Rosebush, the First Lady's former chief of staff. The question is whether Kelley's savage portrayal is gross overkill. Could Nancy Reagan -- could anyone -- have been such a monster?
But a growing part of the debate has focused on Kelley and her research tactics. A former Washington Post researcher who has written titillating bios of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Sinatra, Kelley claims more than 1,000 people were interviewed for the book, and she flaunts a monstrous list of "acknowledgments" of people she alleges helped her (many of whom say they never spoke with her). But as readers inside and outside the Washington Beltway pored over the book last week, Kelley's journalistic methods were coming under sharp scrutiny. Did she write a responsible work of journalism or a sleazy hatchet job?