Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography

Description for NANCY REAGAN: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY by Kitty Kelley:

There were First Ladies, and then there was Nancy Reagan---perhaps the most powerful and influential woman in the history of the United States.

Kitty Kelley, author of the best-selling HIS WAY: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF FRANK SINATRA, has fashioned a portrait worthy of the lady and her singular position. NANCY REAGAN is a shrewd, psychologically perceptive and meticulously researched attempt to truly understand the complex woman who stood---for eight years---at the power center of American life. Through over 1,000 interviews collected during four years of exhaustive research and reporting, Kitty Kelley has succeeded in unmasking Nancy Reagan "as she is", her husband's truest ally. Kelley reveals Nancy Reagan as a superb public performer; a vain, materialistic social climber; a bitter foe and formidable strategist---and American Phenomenon. Rarely has a writer captured her subject so authoritatively. Rarely has the American public had so much to learn about someone we thought we knew so well.

NANCY REAGAN is a story that takes place in the highest reaches of public life---from the world of the movies to Capitol Hill. But it begins with a lonely girl, a daughter who learned the power of fantasy and self-creation from the mother who invented herself. Kitty Kelley shows how this lesson shaped Nancy---as a Smith College coed; as a Hollywood starlet (who pursued Ronald Reagan with a determination that bordered on obsession); as an ambitious governor's wife who reigned over California for eight years; and finally as the First Lady of the land. Kelley shows that Nancy was the first person to see Ronald Reagan for what he could become and explains how this clever, ambitious woman went on to create the two most spectacular careers in modern politics: her husband's and her own.

NANCY REAGAN is Kitty Kelley's most important, most engrossing---and most revelatory---book yet.