If You Can't Trust Your Publisher . . .

By PAUL GRAY/

Kitty Kelley, who has compiled best-selling and decidedly unauthorized biographies of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, will next month finish the manuscript of her life of Nancy Reagan. And, after four years of work and some 900 interviews, the tattletale author is worried about -- of all things -- leaks to gossip columnists. Editors at Simon & Schuster, which paid a reported $3 million advance for the book, have naturally been eager to look at chapters as Kelley completed them. Fearful that contents might get out, she has refused to send any portion of the manuscript to Manhattan. Instead, S&S editors have regularly shuttled to Washington, where they have perused pages in Kelley's Georgetown living room and then gone back to Manhattan empty-handed. Once she submits her final version, the author is at the mercy of Manhattan's notorious literary gossip. The book is scheduled to appear in the fall of 1991 -- although details may well hit print a lot earlier.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen