Kitty Kelley Dishes Dirt On British Royal Family

NEW YORK - Kitty Kelley and her husband were at their Virginia country home on the Shenandoah River a few weeks ago when the call came: "Turn on CNN right away." She watched for three hours as information about the fatal accident in Paris dribbled in.

"I was sick about it," she says.

And for more than the usual reasons. Aside from her shock at the violent death of the Princess of Wales, there was the matter of Kelley's latest celebrity biography, "The Royals" - a hefty group portrait of the Windsor dynasty that the Washington writer had spent four years researching. It was to be shipped to stores in three weeks, and now it might face even more carping and catcalls than Kelley's exposes usually provoke.

"It gives a very inside, unvarnished look at the royal family," Kelley says. "And I don't know how that will play."

Given the weeks of televised pomp, the tributes floral and verbal, the general gushing, is there much appetite for Kelley's contention that King George VI and his wife conceived both Queen Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, through artificial insemination? Her discussions of Prince Philip's rumored affairs? Her characterization of Sarah Ferguson as a sometime cocaine user who was addicted to diet pills?

Or of the not-yet-canonized Diana Spencer as a woman who could be petty, shallow and manipulative as well as gracious and glam?

Her preference, Kelley says, was to delay the book until January. Warner Books decided to proceed, but Larry Kirshbaum, chairman of Time Warner Trade Publishing, initially said the Sept. 23 publication date would not be pushed up.

"We didn't want to appear to be exploiting a tragic situation about which we all feel terrible," he said a few days before Diana's funeral.

But reports of customers flooding bookstores in search of royal-related literature effected a corporate change of heart. So here is Kelley's "The Royals," which goes on sale today at most bookstores. It arrives in a welter of daunting statistics: 600,000 shipped copies of a 502-page tome based on 800 interviews.

And here is its author in her black Chanel suit with its trademark white camellia, holding court in Manhattan's Four Seasons hotel, receiving a dozen journalists on the first day of a promotional marathon. She's looking distinctly ticked at People magazine's decision not to run the first-serial excerpt it bought months ago for $25,000 (a People spokeswoman said, "It's just obvious that it's inappropriate at this time.") She's describing herself as "an American who doesn't curtsy."

The Windsors, whose reign she chronicles from 1917 - when King George V began his whitewash of the clan's Germanic origins, renaming it after a storied castle - are "probably the most powerful family in the world and they hold themselves out as unique, special; they put themselves forward as a symbol of rectitude," Kelley says.

"I looked to see how they represented family values and how they didn't." Her unsurprising conclusion: "I couldn't say they fare well at all."

A new Kitty Kelley book presents a conundrum for the media. Her huge sales numbers - Warner Books expects the copies in print to jump to a million very shortly - turn publication into an event. Her disclosures have frequently proved too entertaining, and occasionally too important, to ignore.

Yet they also make mainstream journalists uneasy because they are often impossible to verify. Her subjects or their allies protest loudly that the books are too tawdry to merit attention: "Trash and fiction," was how former first lady Barbara Bush called Kelley's previous offering, "Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography."

(Kelley doesn't help her credibility with low-level revisionism: The author bio with review copies of "The Royals" calls it her fifth book, overlooking her 1975 nonblockbuster "The Glamour Spas." That makes "The Royals" her sixth book. "Oh, you're counting the first one," Kelley says, asked about the discrepancy.)

Several British journalists who helped Kelley gain access to the right circles offer testimonials to her indefatigability as she attempted to track 80 years of royal rumors.

"She worked jolly hard over here, spent ages and ages, speaking to everyone she could lay her hands on," says Francis Wheen. He's a columnist for the Guardian, which last week ran a front-page headline warning, "U.S. Blockbuster Threatens New Royal Crisis," illustrated with a photo of Kelley, "the notorious American author."

"I've seen her at work," says Anthony Holden, a royal biographer and columnist for the Express. Holden, an anti-monarchist, gave two dinner parties so Kelley could meet useful people.

The result is a grab bag: some well-worn history, numerous episodes already reported, various scandals widely gossiped about in Britain but unpublishable there because of strict libel laws, new allegations that will raise eyebrows but probably not foment revolution. Much must be taken on faith, since many sources (but by no means all) are unnamed.

Chapter notes at the end of the book, listing the people Kelley interviewed and the articles and books she used, do little to help an average reader gauge who provided which piece of information. At Buckingham Palace, a spokesman declined to respond to Kelley's book with a polite, "We never do offer comment on those types of books or articles."

Among the more startling claims is that Queen Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, were conceived via "manual fertilization" after their sickly father, George VI, failed to impregnate their mother, now the Queen Mum, in the more usual fashion.

Though the sisters were born in 1926 and 1930, respectively, decades before artificial insemination became a widely used medical procedure, several prominent U.S. medical specialists contacted by The Post say the story's not implausible.

Kelley quotes "a royal family friend" and "a relative of the Earl of Arran" who say they knew of the circumstances at the time. But whether they're correct, even if their memories are trustworthy, is unknowable. (Whether it matters is another issue.)

"I have two reliable sources," Kelley says. The palace issued a strong denial when word leaked of Kelley's disclosure in the Express. But then, one contribution of "The Royals" is a record of the many times the palace denied things that were true.

Britons will be very interested in Kelley's allegation that Prince Philip "conducted discreet affairs with many other women," mostly aristocrats or actresses. She names few but does quote John Barratt, private secretary to Lord Mountbatten, saying Mountbatten's nephew Philip has been "long involved" with a specific well-known member of the aristocracy. Assuming Barratt did provide this morsel, how did he know? Barratt, an oft-quoted Kelley source, died in 1993.

Did Princess Margaret suffer a nervous breakdown and threaten suicide as her marriage to Lord Snowdon disintegrated? Kelley says she did - "she's told biographers this before" - but doesn't cite a source.

Did Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, sniff cocaine and develop an addiction to diet pills? Kelley says so, quoting one of the "healers" she turned to and society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who socialized with the Yorks. Ferguson's U.S. spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, calls the story "ridiculous" and says Ferguson hasn't ruled out legal action against the book.

"When you're taking an unblinking look at powerful people whose reach is long - you take an icon out of the moonlight and look at it in the sunlight - some people don't like what they see," Kelley says, shrugging. "Some people are invested in the myth."

Kelley would like to point out that she worked under a serious handicap - much of the British press pays for information; despite her $4.4 million advance, she doesn't - and still wangled a tour of Princess Margaret's private living quarters in Kensington Palace, provided by a staff member while Margaret was traveling abroad. (Kelley was disappointed to find, instead of grandeur, "plastic flowers arranged in vases on the windowsills and an electric heater with a badly frayed cord.")

Nor can much be inferred from Warner Books' decision not to publish "The Royals" in Britain. Several top London libel lawyers called it a prudent choice, even if everything in Kelley's book were factual.

British libel laws put the burden of proof on the defendant. And because lack of "malice" is no defense, there's none of the protection American libel law offers when the person under discussion is a public figure. Besides, there is what London attorney Mark Stephens calls "the cultural thing" - namely, "it would be very surprising if a British court found on behalf of Kitty Kelley against the royal family. The odds are about as close to zero as you can get."

The imponderable in this case is the marketing effect of weeks of very public mourning for the young woman who was only nominally an ex-royal.

When Kelley began work on the book in 1992, "I thought the monarchy was finished and over. Dead. I'd be writing about the end of an ancient institution," she says.

"I don't believe that now. People want to see (Diana's) dream fulfilled, to put her son on the throne."