“I
have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they
have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.”
– Kitty Kelley
Born this date in 1942, Katherine
“Kitty” Kelley is the author of several best-selling unauthorized biographies,
including those on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, and
the British Royal Family.
Kitty Kelley 
Born and raised in a wealthy Seattle
family, she bounced around to several schools before earning a degree from the
University of Washington and going to work in Washington, DC. There she worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy
for several years before taking a job at the Washington Post. It was
while there that she started to put together ideas for what would become her special
writing niche.
“The rumors of Frank Sinatra's
violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in
print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I
proceeded to write his biography,” she said.
Sinatra filed a $2 million lawsuit to prevent
it from being published but subsequently dropped it and the book became a worldwide
best seller. New York Times columnist
William Safire called it "the most eye-opening celebrity biography of our
time."
“People forget that unauthorized
does not mean untrue,” Kelley said, “just like ‘authorized’ does not necessarily
mean authentic.”
Share A Writer’s
Moment with a friend by clicking the g+1 button below.
No comments:
Post a Comment