Meeeow! The Saga Of Kitty

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Tired of hearing about that ambitious woman who climbed her way from a humble background to fame, fortune and a White House closetful of red Adolfo suits? Try this for a hot biography. There's this poor little rich girl in Spokane, kind of a Shirley Temple type. Dad's a lawyer, Mom's a tough lady who likes to nip at the bottle. Despite the kid's pitiful efforts to please her mom, all she gets is a hard time.

Home is a trap, but at school the kid shucks all that and really blossoms. She's everywhere. The school dances, the annual town parade, the pep squad, the pick of the boys. O.K., so she's not an Einstein, gradewise, but she gets a college degree and dumps that dreary town and her painful homelife and heads for the Big Time.

A job or so later, she's in Washington, working for a real U.S. Senator and salivating around the powerful. She's primarily a receptionist, but it looks better on her resume to say press secretary. It's no big deal. Then it's on to a newspaper and a career in journalism. This leads to writing books jammed with dirt on famous people. Soon she's pulling in zillions. She owns a mansion, wears designer clothes, chums with notables at glittering parties. Makes a lot of friends. Makes a lot more enemies, thanks to her inimitable way with the rumors that she gathers for her best sellers. Maybe sends a few anonymous letters to warn off folks who are searching for the real person behind all that pizazz. The lady's got the world on a leash.

Could this be the real-life story of Kitty Kelley? Only if it falls into the category of vacuum-cleaner journalism, sucking up every stray fact and innuendo and without trying to sift the important from the trivial. Kelley has raised the practice of prattling about the rich and famous to high artifice, so perhaps that is why she dodges full-dress interviews about her past with the nimbleness of a faun in a forest fire.

"Sources," the journalist's staple, are not much help either in piecing together Kelley's life. They fall into two categories: praise from admiring friends and unkind remarks from a larger number of uneasy people, most of whom insist on anonymity, often because they fear Kelley's wrath. In Washington, where gossip is never in deficit, Kitty Kelley, 49, commands clout. She could write a book. About you.

Journalists who have limned her, or tried, believe Kelley is capable of the ^ same kind of petty reprisals and organized stonewalling that she herself has confronted over the years in her incessant Hoovering of famous figures. After Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley panned Kelley's biography of Elizabeth Taylor in 1981, he received a gilded Gucci box wrapped with gold ribbon. "Inside," says Yardley, "was a bag of fish heads and a postcard of Liz Taylor giving me the finger." The card was signed, "From the friends of Kitty Kelley."