Going behind the Bushes

Kitty Kelley is the Heat maga- zine of celebrity biographers. Spectator readers who may not be familiar with this unpleasant (but very popular) weekly should know that public taste has moved on from Hello!. Heat doesn’t do airbrushed celebrities looking gorgeous in their celebrity homes. Heat gives you the celeb ‘as she [or he] really is’ i. e. preferably sweaty, hag-ridden and running to fat, or displaying signs of a) extensive rehab, b) a coup de vieux or c) recent arrest. Heat is a ‘post-celebrity’ celeb mag, which aims to show that despite all their fame and money celebs are sad losers just like the rest of us.

Before The Family, Kelley did Heat-style jobs on Jackie Oh!, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan and the royal family. (I know, I know, the royal family aren’t ‘celebrities’. But Kelley’s an American; they’re celebrities to her.) Her books are all unfeasibly long (it took me three wasted days to plough through the Bush tome) and are written in a way that makes them seem curiously like biographies, in that the central characters are born, live out their spans and are beset by myriad troubles.