Dirty Dishing : Washington is caught up in the hype and hoopla surrounding the Nancy Reagan biography.And center stage is author Kitty Kelley.

WASHINGTON —  William Shakespeare, if he could fast-forward a few centuries, would have a bang-up time in Washington this week observing the long-delayed denouement of the Nancy Reagan drama.

In a finale akin to Act V of “Macbeth,” when the “fiend-like queen” gets it--and gets it good--author Kitty Kelley has released the gossipy “Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography” and become this town’s version of the angel of justice, avenging all of the former First Lady’s reputed wrongs.

Washington is slurping it up.

Indeed, the impact is as if someone had rolled a hand grenade down Pennsylvania Avenue: Every publication has a take on it; no one talks about anything else; the White House is appalled. And almost 1,000 people swarmed to Kelley’s book party at a sweaty ballroom Monday night, ate mystery food and, most important, feasted on the dirty dish.

Even to get into the party at the National Press Club, just hours after the tattletale tome was released nationwide, took some aerobic strength. Party-goers had to squeeze past a long line of people buying the book at $24.95 a clip--and then past a bottleneck of readers wildly paging through the 24 chapters and epilogue to get to the footnote that contains the book’s most lurid details about Mrs. Reagan’s alleged sexual activities in 1940s Hollywood.

But in assessing the greater importance to history of this book, Washington’s cocktail circuit continues to insist that there is something serious, very serious, in Kelley’s 603 pages of allegations, hearsay and innuendo.

There is more, they stress, than just sex.

“This book shatters the whole racket of the Reagan years, that these were warm-hearted, loving people,” says Christopher Hitchens, a Fleet Street expatriate journalist with Potomac fever.

“In contrast to the official line of the Reagan myth, these are cold, ruthless, lonely, wretched people whose children and friends don’t like them. All Kitty has done is make what we all already knew reach critical mass.”

Lyn Nofziger, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan, seemed to be the only person at the party proudly baring his Republican stripes--while at the same time making sure he let every reporter in search of quotes know that he was playing this one right down the middle:

“I like them both, Kitty and the former First Lady. I guess that’s my only reason for being here. That makes me different, huh?”

The crowd was composed mostly of Democrats, defenders of the dowdy Jimmy Carter years, who still went to all the fancy parties thrown during the splashier Reagan era even though they resented the Reagans. At the same time, a lot of Kelley’s allies--her pharmacist, her dry cleaner, her sister, her girlfriends--were there.

Yet no one seemed more astonished by the turnout than the author herself, all decked out in a black dinner suit with hot-pink satin trim and little black velvet bows at the wrists.

“I’m so happy to see all of you, because most of you in this room have lived with me through this four years (of working on the book),” she announced mid-party in her baby-doll voice. “It’s been like a terrible four-year pregnancy.”

Thrilled as she was, Kelley also seemed stunned by the type of attention the book was getting in the media--although considering the publicity machine that Simon & Schuster had unleashed to promote the book, which it reportedly paid Kelley a $3.5-million advance to write, it’s no wonder that reporters from the National Enquirer to the New Republic were onto it.

“I was absolutely ecstatic with the front page of the New York Times taking it sooooooo seriously,” Kelley told reporters.

“Legitimacy, legitimacy,” gasped one of the author’s friends. “She’s finally got it.”

But Kelley was mum about the account of her book that appeared in her hometown paper, the Washington Post. “I didn’t read it,” she said dismissively.

The Post story Monday revealed a far more skeptical approach than the New York Times had taken Sunday. In fact, Post reporters had attempted, with varying degrees of success, to chase some of the allegations in the book.

They also noted that the book’s claim that Mrs. Reagan had an affair with Frank Sinatra had been rehashed from Kelley’s earlier unauthorized biography of him, and they were aggressively unflattering about the author’s reputation as the prima donna of unauthorized celebrity biographies. Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis also have survived La Kelley--though barely.

Speculation also has been considerable--although denials are heavy--that people involved in publication of the book slipped a copy of it to the New York Times and the New York Daily News, which both ran stories Sunday. Most other press accounts, including one in The Los Angeles Times, did not appear until Monday because of an embargo.

Advance copies of the book were given to reporters who signed an embargo agreement not to publish until Monday. After signing the agreement, they were invited to one-on-one interviews with Kelley in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. The New York Times refused to sign the agreement and was not given an interview, and it was unclear whether the New York Daily News was asked to sign the embargo.

As to the prominent play of the New York Times story, Howell Raines, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, said he wasn’t part of the decision-making process that landed the story on Page 1.

In discussing the Times story, Raines said, “I think where we came down was to be as intellectually rigorous reporting both the journalism and the context of this book and the allegations within the confines of the time we had to do it.”

If nothing else, the reportage around the scandalous biography demonstrated again that White House affairs and astrologers can still command attention in the nation’s capital on a par with any number of disquisitions on taxes and what the self-important would call the “truly substantive.”

That the Reagans are in the middle of all this, however, does not shock Washington insiders.

“They were never political people in the ordinary sense in Washington,” said one prominent historian who didn’t want his name associated with a story on Kelley. “They were considered ‘Hollywood types’--and therefore, some here believe it is appropriate that the other subjects of biography of their Boswell were also from Hollywood.”

This is not Carl Sandburg on Abraham Lincoln, nor James MacGregor Burns on Franklin D. Roosevelt nor even Robert Caro, whose relentlessly negative spin on some facts about Lyndon B. Johnson’s life has recently created controversy.

But Lou Cannon, the Washington Post’s former White House reporter who has devoted the last two years to writing a newly published 948-page book, “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” cautions readers about Kelley’s primary themes and what they mean to modern history.

Kelley asserts that Nancy Reagan was the most influential First Lady ever and that she really was “our President for eight years.” Cannon disagrees.

“The view that Nancy Reagan was really President does not withstand even a small examination,” Cannon contends, “especially if you look, as I did on my section on her, at the things she wanted. She wanted (Defense Secretary) Caspar Weinberger fired. He wasn’t. She didn’t think much of (the Nicaraguan rebels, known as Contras). Reagan was committed to them. . . .”

Cannon gives several examples of where the record goes against Kelley’s thesis and then sighs:

“The point is, if you examine the record with meticulous detail, anyone could see that while Nancy had opinions on everything--which is not different from other First Ladies--and while she could be a pain in the knee to staffers, the fact of the matter is that on a lot of big decisions about policy and people, Reagan did exactly the opposite.”

But to look for news nuggets in Kelley’s book may be to miss the point.

Said one source in the New York publishing world, which was also engulfed in Nancy Reagan scuttlebutt last week: “(Kelley’s) basic portrait of Nancy Reagan is correct, and it’s Nancy Reagan’s own portrait of herself for the 350,000 or so people who read her own book, ‘My Turn.’ What Kelley has done is the bells and whistles and a lot of rumor.”

But the only person from the Reagan White House who was willing to be quoted by name in Kelley’s book--Shirley Watkins, a former secretary in the East Wing--begged to differ.

Watkins, the wife of a Baptist pastor in suburban Falls Church, Va., said she felt Kelley tried to capture something that it was important for America to understand about Nancy Reagan.

“I feel very much that the taxpayers have a right to receive something for having a First Lady, and from Nancy Reagan they got nothing but disdain,” said Watkins, who says she was pushed out of her job by Mrs. Reagan’s top staff. Watkins’ testimony in the book described how Mrs. Reagan’s staff allegedly cared more about “royalty or her rich friends” than the little people.

According to Watkins, her husband hadn’t wanted her to talk to Kelley, but she believed it was important.

“I felt it was the public’s right to know,” she said. “To know all.”