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Four years in the making, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography burst onto the scene after a deftly orchestrated public relations buildup. Unlike most major books, which are released to reviewers weeks or months in advance of publication, Kelley's manuscript was carefully withheld from the press. During editing, only five copies of the manuscript were printed; each was numbered and kept track of at all times. Simon & Schuster staff members even took copies home at night to guard against leaks. One special reader got the book a month in advance: cartoonist Garry Trudeau was allowed an early peek so he could prepare a week's worth of Doonesbury strips to coincide with the book's release.
The crowds rushing to buy the book were bigger than anyone could have anticipated. In one day the entire first printing of 600,000 had been shipped; by week's end 925,000 copies were in print. Said Simon & Schuster publisher Jack McKeown: "Booksellers are telling us it's the fastest-selling book they've ever experienced." Enthused Matthew Goldberg, merchandise manager for the Doubleday chain: "It's not only hot, it's supernova hot."
The reaction from the book's subjects has been just as hot. Nancy Reagan has thus far refused any comment, though friends described her as "profoundly upset" at Kelley's attack. Ronald Reagan put out a statement seething with outrage: "The flagrant and absurd falsehoods . . . clearly exceed the bounds of decency." A phalanx of Reagan friends and former advisers lashed out at the book, both in whole and in 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."
Even Barbara Bush, whose relations with Nancy Reagan have been distant at best, attacked the book as "trash and fiction." She specifically disputed one episode: Barbara Bush did not, as the book relates, give Nancy Reagan a white vine wreath one Christmas -- a wreath Nancy supposedly had gift-wrapped and sent to a friend in California. Every window at the White House, the current First Lady pointed out, already has a wreath at Christmastime. "If you're going to make up a story," she said, "you can make up a better one than that." Nancy called Barbara Bush last week to thank her for the comments.
Kelley weathered the weeklong storm by fielding increasingly aggressive questions in TV interviews. "You just spend your time digging up ugliness about people," one audience member scolded on Sally Jessy Raphael. "I don't know how you sleep at night." Kelley's perky, predigested reply: "I didn't live the life. She did." Pressed about the Sinatra/Nancy encounters at the White House, Kelley let the innuendos speak for themselves: "I only take you up to the bedroom door." To the growing chorus of denials from principals in the book, she professed unconcern: "People are going to step forward and try to deny things I have said." Yet by the end of the week the heat seemed to have worn her down: Kelley's publicists abruptly called off a planned seven- city publicity tour, announcing that their "publishing objectives have been accomplished."