Here's an amusingly brutal dissection of attack biographer Kitty Kelley's The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, authored by Sally Bedell Smith, who is herself no slouch at celebrity profiles.
To understand a Kelley book, it is necessary to crack the code of her technique. She is not so much a biographer as an illusionist who, for just long enough to get newspaper headlines, makes her audience believe she is actually sawing a body in two. Her cocaine allegations show the method she uses throughout the book -- relying on anonymous sources backed up with marginal sources who have names but no firsthand information about the allegations they are "confirming."Kelley assumes all pretensions of a bona fide biographer, providing 35 pages of notes at the end of her book. This sort of documentation is supposed to prove to readers (and future scholars) that the author can back up new material with solid primary sources and support old material with authoritative secondary sources.
But instead of giving citations by key phrases and page numbers, Kelley only offers lists for each chapter -- a classic dodge when an author wants to blur exact sourcing. These maddeningly vague end notes are virtually useless as a result. The reader is supposed to take Kelley's word for it, despite the fact that the narrative bristles with hostility and resentment toward a family born to privilege.
Kelley claims to have interviewed nearly 1,000 people. But quantity matters far less than quality. Missing from her account are those sources who offer genuine insights and understand the subject deeply. Instead, she relies inordinately on acquaintances, disaffected distant relatives, aggrieved former spouses, political adversaries, disgruntled former business associates and an array of cameo characters who don't seem to be in a position to speak with authority. At times it appears as if Kelley flipped through a telephone book and asked random people what they thought of the Bushes. Beyond those who are named is a vast tomb of unknown sources, who supply wisps of rumor, innuendo and assertions masked as proof.
Likewise, versatile Ann Coulter ably demonstrates how to apply Kelley's biographical technique.
The New York Times review blamed Kelley's gossip mongering on "a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet." Kelley has been writing these books for decades, so apparently, like the Texas Air National Guard, Kelley was on the Internet -- and being influenced by it -- back in the '70s. As I remember it, for the past few years it has been the Internet that keeps dissecting and discrediting the gossip and innuendo that the major media put out.Curiously, all this comes at the precise moment that speculation is at a fever pitch about whether Kitty Kelley is in the advanced stages of syphilis. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: "Approximately 3 percent to 7 percent of persons with untreated syphilis develop neurosyphilis, a sometimes serious disorder of the nervous system.
Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has found there is an "inter-relationship" between STDs and truck routes in Baltimore. I'm not at liberty to reveal the names of my sources, but there are three or four highly placed individuals in the publishing industry who say Miss Kelley or someone who closely resembles her is a habitue of truck routes in Baltimore.
While opinions differ as to whether Miss Kelley's behavior can be explained by syphilis or some other STD, people who went to Harvard -- and Harvard is one of the top universities in the nation -- say her path is consistent with someone in the advanced stages.
Amid the swirling dispute over her STDs, there is only one way for Kelley to address this issue: Release her medical records. As someone who would like to be thought of as her friend said anonymously: "For your own good, Ms. Kelley, I would get those medical records out yesterday."
Seems only fair.
Posted by Alan at September 26, 2004 12:20 PM