MIT DEADLY DESIRE INDEX Love knows no bounds for the protagonist of Slavenka Drakulic's "The Taste of a Man." E10 RSVP "In Out's" premiere raised money for gay and lesbian rights. E2 EJ Ann Landers E3 E9 Comics. E8-9 Laugh Lines. E3 Reunions. E2 4 Cos Angeles Slimes orange county SECTION FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1997 Kitty Kelley's Book Crowns Windsors a Royal Shame ByJOSHGETLIN TIMES STAFF WRITER NEW YORK-The timing is to die for.
A stunning event rocks the world, and you just happen to have a new book on the subject ready to go. One million copies, in fact, and a publicity blitz driven by prime-time TV. Normally, you'd beg for such good fortune. But not when the event is Princess Diana's death. And not, perhaps, when the author is Kitty Kelley, queen of the unauthorized biography.
Today, Kelley's latest work, "The Royals" (Warner Books), hits stores across 1 1 HIM ft I 7 V-- -'1. JZ-t- ll 1 k. i America, and her decidedly unkind look at the House of Windsor is similar to her previous treatments of Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Indeed, she alleges that Queen Elizabeth may have been conceived by "Every night it's homework, laundry "baths flights out," says Amy Waldroop, whose 3-year-old, Donavin, is growing up with uncles, from left, Tony, Joey and Adam, artificial insemination; she suggests that the queen mother was born out of wedlock; she teases readers with allegations of Prince Philip's bisexuality; and she tells a disturbing story painting Princess Margaret as an anti-Semite. There also are nasty tales about Diana, and Kelley is now facing questions she never dreamed would arise: Do we really need this book? Haven't we bashed the royals enough? Already there have been media repercussions.
People magazine abruptly canceled an excerpt from the book it had planned to run this week, citing bad timing and "tragic circ*mstances." Meanwhile, the New York Daily News trashed the book Tuesday with a caustic prediction: "New Yorkers Won't Read It." Kelley's publisher is counting on huge American sales, but "The Royals" won't appear in England, where strict libel laws would all but guarantee lawsuits. In the days leading up to publication, British tabloids have been filled with gossip over the book, some hinting that a backlash may develop. "I worried about this," Kelley said this week during a day of nonstop media interviews in a Manhattan hotel. "I worked hard on this book, and I didn't want it to come out in a time of grieving and mourning for the princess. It was very sad.
"Diana is the only one in the book who comes out like royalty. But I thought Please see KELLEY, E2 Amy Waldroop of Anaheim might have been a UCLA graduate by now. But the 23-year-old gave up a college scholarship to raise her three brothers 13, 11 and 8. JVlom rxm: 1 I'M -JL. it 'CI'! nr7br- Chasing Beauty No Matter the Risks 1 l-r- --Jr 1 By KATHRYN BOLD, special to the times Almost five years ago, Amy Waldroop came as close as she ever has to realizing her dream of having a carefree, normal ilife- A.
jbl. She was about to graduate from Villa Park High School and had been offered a scholarship to UCLA, thanks to her stellar performance in the classroom and on the track team. Then Waldroop was called into the school administrator's office. She was told social workers were planning to remove her younger siblings from their grandmother's house and put them in foster care. A I ven if you could have ignored those newspaper .1 i' t3 SANDY Waldroop found herself flooded with memories of her chaotic childhood a world of living out of cars and motels, of being shuttled from foster family to foster family or, when nobody wanted the children, to a juvenile detention center.
It was a world that re ads promising "safe, proven, no hunger" weight loss it was hard to avoid the personal accounts. Your neighbor's hairdresser lost the 30 pounds she'd been carrying since her last baby. A co-worker "Everything you do, you have to do four times," says Waldroop, who applied to Habitat for Humanity for a house. "I'd build the whole thing myself," she says, "but there's a big ol' waiting list." Life As We Live It i volved around her mother, "My brothers. call me Amy.
So does who lost her battle against Donavin, but he's learning," she says, drugs again and again, stumbling in and out of prison, in and out of their lives. Waldroop had dreamed of escaping that world many times. But on that day in 1993, toward the end of her senior year, Waldroop made a decision: She would take care of her three younger brothers and sister herself. "There was no way I was going to let them grow up that way," she said. Two days after her high school graduation she became her siblings' Please see SISTER, E2 bought a bikini this summer for the first time in 15 years.
The fat guy in your husband's carpool shrunk before your eyes, shedding 50 pounds without missing a meal. What Prozac is to depression, fen-phen became to the battle of the bulge a magic bullet, a quick fix, a way to defy time and biology. Until this week, that is, when our fen-phen-fueled fantasies crashed into a wall of hard medical realities, and the drugs disappeared amid a haze of stories about heart failure and untimely death. It is a hallmark of our culture, this preoccupation with body size and shape, this fanaticism that has led teenage girls to starve themselves and grown women to accept heart damage as an acceptable risk, if the payoff resembles Elle McPherson. "In our society, women will do anything to get thin, men will do anything to get Please see BANKS, E2 Photos by CHRISTINE COTTER, Los Angeles Tunes.
