DATE: April 15th, 1991
SUBJECT: Nancy Reagan/Kitty Kelley Book Review
COMMENTS: Cancel
The Taming of the Shrew
There are some things, Jann, that we know in our hearts are Ugly, and this book is one of them. It is old swill in a new bottle, a squalid tale from a squalid time that unfortunately seems to be ours. There is something weird about any calendar that has the Year of the Weasel happening thirteen times in a row.
Anyway, thanx for the review copy of Kelley’s book on Nancy. It was good for a few laughs, but not many. And there is meaning in it, for sure, but not much. It is an ugly, mean little package that made me feel cheap for just reading it or even holding the thing in my hands.
This book is a monument to everything low and mean in the human spirit. It is a marketing triumph for that dingbat from Simon and Schuster, but it is far too wrong and repugnant to keep around the house, and last night I had to get rid of it. My friend Semmes Luckett took it away and jammed it into a garbage compactor, along with a case of old beer bottles. He was shocked and deeply embarrassed when he opened the book to page 14 and saw the Nancy Davis Reagan family tree, which shows that both he and Nancy are descended from the same family of Lucketts that left Maryland and fled westward around the turn of the century, when the family name came under a cloud of scandal. “My mama never talked about it,” he said, “but she always left the room whenever that woman appeared on our TV set ... Good Lord, I hope she never sees this book.” He seized it off the table and stood up to leave. “Don’t worry,” he muttered. “I’ll put it where it belongs.”
Let’s give Nancy all the credit she deserves. The Democrats have lost five out of the last six presidential elections, so maybe they can learn something from this book instead of just giggling about it. Kitty Dukakis, among others, might have put this evil handbook to good use if it had been available back in 1988. But, alas . . .
If politics is the art of controlling your environment, Nancy is a master politician and probably a lot more fun to live and work and travel with than I ever suspected. She has been the Best That She Can Be, and she has come a Very Long Way for a Size 2 Anorexic Dwarf. Jesus! What if she’d looked like Marilyn Monroe?
She (allegedly) had the morals of a slut on acid and behaved like a beast while the president was stoned day and night; and all that time she was talking about remodeling the White House in the style of Dolley Madison or Grandma Moses, she was acting like Linda Lovelace and Christine Keeler and Madame Defarge all at once.
They turned the whole East Wing of the White House into a Cave of Orgies and a dope den worse than anything in Singapore ... It was horrible ... and the press never noticed. They called him John Wayne, but he was weirder than Caligula, and the weirder he got, the more the voters loved him and the more respect he got from Ted Koppel.
Lyndon LaRouche was atomized and the Deviate Reverend Jim Bakker was sent to prison for forty-five years for just dabbling in the kind of brazen, low-rent crimes that were apparently taken for granted and pursued with relentless zeal—day and night, 366 days of the year, in full view of the servants and the Secret Service—by the folks who lived in the White House.
Just folks. No different from you or me or the Mitchell brothers. And they never claimed to be anything else, really. Just Good Ol’ Dutch and What’s Her Name, the maniac little sex doll who squawked openly (allegedly) with Frank Sinatra on dim-lit couches in TV studios, where she went constantly to tape public-service announcements about Just Say No.
It was a very wild act in a very fast lane, and I have to admire it for the Heaviness. It is no small thing in some circles to make headlines lewd and shocking enough to bump a new Kennedy/Palm Beach rape case off the front page of the tabloids ... That is Strong ... That is Charles Manson country.
Remember, they laughed at Thomas Edison. And don’t forget that Deep Throat was a box-office hit in the same years that Nancy spent grooming her mongrel stud for the Real Derby, the biggest race of them all . . . and They Won!!! Twice!!!
So, never mind that review we were talking about. The book is a shitrain of old gossip and sleazy little stories that we read a long time ago and never quite believed ... for good or ill.
So what if the former First Lady was a relentless fellatrix with the soul of a Pod and the style of a chicken in heat? She was, in her time, perhaps the highest and finest expression of the American Dream in action ... and that is worth noting. Some people are Born to Win and others are spewed out like tadpoles. This is all ye know and all ye need to know—except that weasels speak English and God is a King Snake, and if Kitty Kelley and Nancy Reagan are what America is all about these days, there is light at the end of the tunnel.