WHAT QUESTION OF TASTE?

By BRUCE HANDY

What with so many members of the news media putting on hair shirts and repenting the inherent nosiness of their profession, it's refreshing to meet people who go about the dirty business of tattling with a minimum of regret. "If you're going to publish Kitty Kelley, you've got to just do it," says Laurence Kirshbaum, CEO of Warner Books, which has released Kelley's The Royals (547 pages; $27) to even more controversy than was no doubt hoped for when the book was signed. Kelley is the famously prying celebrity biographer whose works include His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, which alleged that the singer's mother was an abortionist, and Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, which alleged that the former First Lady and Sinatra enjoyed a White House dalliance. The author's latest is a multigenerational saga about the House of Windsor, promising dirt on everyone from King George V to the late Princess of Wales. The catch--or the break, depending on your point of view--is Diana's accidental death just three weeks before the book's publication date.

For what it called "obvious" reasons, PEOPLE magazine backed down on plans to run excerpts this week, and even the normally unflinching Kelley is claiming she asked her publisher to hold the book until next January. But Warner (a unit of Time Inc., the publisher of TIME and PEOPLE), citing interest from booksellers, has plunged ahead, rushing The Royals into stores last week--six days early--with no apologies and a jacked-up press run of some 600,000 copies. "Just because the book is unflattering doesn't mean it has no right to be out there," insists Kirshbaum. "This book offers a unique journalistic perspective on some of the most important events of the 20th century."

That's one way of putting it. Alas, not all these events are as "important" as titillation-hungry readers might hope. Queen Elizabeth was a sexually insatiable newlywed? What previously cloistered 21-year-old girl wouldn't be? The Duchess of York may have used cocaine? Not exactly unheard of among party girls in the 1980s. Kelley's repertorial method appears to involve repeating anything anyone ever said to her, no matter how unsubstantiated ("Now, I have no absolute proof of this love affair with the Queen..." says a source in a not untypical passage). She certainly doesn't break a sweat trying to make sense of her narrative, most of which reads like a clip job, despite her vaunted doggedness--illustrating, perhaps, the difficulty of dishing a family so recently adept at dishing itself.

Nevertheless, an oddly sympathetic portrait of the royals emerges, one that sees them less as a family than as a confederation of strange ducks and isolated boobs whose presently debased and demystified state may have been ordained when they made their first bargain with the p.r. devil and changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor during World War I. "We recognize them for what they are," Kelley quotes an anonymous viscountess as saying. "They are undereducated and ill-informed Germans, and they need our help."

--By Bruce Handy