Behind the Times Read Online Free Page B

printed.”
    I asked Frankel his reactions to the Anna Quindlen column criticizing his decisions, and whether the
Times’
policy on the anonymity of rape victims had changed. “If she wants to debate our policy, fine,” he replied. “I think she’s wrong. I still don’t think it was a mistake to name the victim, under the circumstances. I think the story could have been written better. What I resented was that Quindlen didn’t come to me first to find out what she was disagreeing about. But that’s her business.”
    The uncritical handling of Kitty Kelley’s
Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography
resulted from another conjunction of old
Times
and new
Times.
Normally, major publishing houses send review copies of new books to newspapers and magazines well in advance of publication date. No one worries much about reviews that “break” the news-release date because 999 out of one thousand new books contain no stop-press news worth breaking. Not so with the oeuvre of Kelley, “America’s premier slash biographer.” Simon & Schuster had a major investment in the Nancy Reagan book, paying Kelley a reported $3.5 million advance against royalties. Together, author and publisher devised a clever promotion plan to insure that everyone would get a big payday. To build early suspense, the publishers tightly controlled the book’s galleys and held back all review copies—except two. The week before the official Monday, April 8, publication date, one of these copies was, in the press’s patois, “made available” to the
Times.
The second advance copy went to Garry Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” which at the time was syndicated to seven hundred newspapers around the world. The pairing was exquisite. Kelley and her publishers stood to get a
Times
news story over the weekend, which meant highroad exposure for the book. The next week, when Simon & Schuster shipped books to the stores, millions of “Doonesbury” readers could check out a series of Trudeau’s strips based on materials in the book. It was the kind of masterly manipulation of the media that Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s publicity specialist, would have appreciated.
    The scheme generated the expected attention, and more. Frankel and his editors decided to messenger the book to Maureen Dowd of the Washington bureau. “I got the book at midnight,” Dowd later told the journalist Jeffrey Goodell. “I stayed up all night and read it.” According to Dowd, her editors told her to “write it out straight”—no analysis or interpretation. Her story was placed on page one of the
Sunday Times
of April 7. The idea, once again, was fine in the abstract: A Kitty Kelley unauthorized biography was guaranteed to be an enticement-newsevent. No matter how familiar and trashed-over the celebrities that Kelley chooses for her subjects, she usually manages to scrape up a few malignant specimens of scandal in the private recesses of their lives. In
Jackie Oh!
Kelley “disclosed” that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis received electroshock treatments for depression. And in
His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra
, Kelley replayed the old legends of the singer’s friendship with organized crime figures, while adding the indispensable “news” from yellowed newspaper clips that his mother, Dolly, was the neighborhood abortionist back home in Hoboken, New Jersey, a half century before.
    Maureen Dowd seemed like the right person to handle the Kelley book. In the spring of 1991 Dowd was one of the
Times’
White House correspondents. She was a thirty-one-year-old reporter for
Time
magazine when the
Times
hired her as a metro desk reporter in 1983; three years later she joined the Washington bureau in time to cover the last years of the Reagan presidency. While working for the
Times
, she kept her hand in magazine work, contributing a satirical advice column to the monthly
Mademoiselle
(Dowd used the pen name “Rebecca Sharp,” after the plucky,