NEWTON'S LAW: KITTY KELLEY KNOWS FORMULA FOR WEALTH, IF NOT PHILOSOPHY

Nancy Reagan has lived a good life through the public's benevolence and the tariff on that good life is scrutiny. As was the case with Imelda Marcos and Tammy Faye Bakker, whose own icy pretensions disguised thin resumes, it's hard to work up a great deal of sympathy for the former first lady.

Not that plenty of people aren't making that their job. Legions of her apologists are collectively dropping their jaws this week, appalled by what Kitty Kelley has written about Mrs. Reagan in a new biography.

Occasioned by the release of this book, my thoughts are directed elsewhere. The furor that has arisen over the publication of "Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography" speaks to me not so much about the person who wrote it or the person it was written about, but about the people so anxious to sink their teeth into it.

America, as the song goes, is a nation of noses pressed up against the glass. People play this curiosity for big money, and the fact that Kitty Kelley is one of the leading practitioners of this craft should prompt us to cast a wary eye on her findings.

Even the title of the book should tip us off; "unauthorized" is one of the favorite adjectives in mass publishing, meaning the biography's topic has not sanitized it. At the cash register, "unauthorized" is a nice distinction; it might as well bear a label that says, "Sleaze Found Here."

And who's fault is it for making this book a sensation, with huge first-day sales Monday?

Is it Nancy Reagan's? What is the worst that can be said of her? For a woman coming from modest beginnings, ambition is not an unusual trait. As a young actress in Hollywood, she would not have been the first or last to stray from virtue. As a person in the spotlight of celebrity and politics, she might be excused a measure of vanity.

Still, Nancy Reagan, though never elected to office and bankrupt of personal accomplishments (unless people reevaluate her acting in "Hellcats of the Navy" as poignant), had considerable access to power. She is fair game for a biography of some weight.

Is Kitty Kelley to blame? She has written ill-mannered biographies in the past on the likes of Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis, but her press notices point out she has never been successfully sued by any of them. Jurisprudence aside, we shouldn't confuse such claims with investigative acumen.

Despite Kelley's unabashed admission that sources for her reporting are estranged family members, disaffected former Reagan associates and general unnamed rabble, she has a right to publish her discoveries. The National Enquirer and Geraldo also have their place in the American marketplace of ideas.

Is no one going to take the blame for this? Sad to say, my own profession gets part. Kelley and her publisher played the media like a Stradivarius, keeping the book under tight wraps until the time of publication, leaking it at the appropriate moment to the appropriate journals and then letting the wire services and networks cherry-pick the more tawdry details.

All the while, these respectable news organizations, whose job it should have been to unearth moral decay in the White House for eight years in the 1980s, relaxed their standards to allow the publication of one woman's malignant claims against another woman. The news organizations then absolved themselves of responsibility by claiming 1.) Kitty Kelley was not one of their own, and 2.) the people want to know.

And, for their part, the people do want to know. Plenty of books have been written and will be written on the Reagan presidency. Many will be thoroughly researched, factually written volumes, thoughtful books of substance.

But the ones without the dirt won't sell as well as Kelley's.

What is news if it is not the things people want to know? Do the media drive people to such transom peeking, or do people drive the media to this type of reporting?

All we can say with any certainty is that Kitty Kelley cares not a whit either way ... but understands the formula makes her rich.