Edward Klein's next three books

The noted biographer of Hillary Clinton, Jackie Kennedy and, most recently, Katie Couric takes on three more power-crazed sluts, uh, powerful women.

By someone who is not Edward Klein

Read more: Books, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Katie Couric, Books Features

Sept. 19, 2007 | Edward Klein's new biography of CBS News anchor Katie Couric, "Katie: The Real Story," is the latest entry in a unique and controversial oeuvre. In a series of biographies, Klein has painted various famous females -- Hillary Clinton, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy -- matching shades of bitch. Klein's subjects often turn out to be grasping harpies who aren't above using their lady parts to beat the competition. The Klein approach to Understanding Important Women is encapsulated in the title of his 2005 biography of Clinton, "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President." In his newest profile, Katie Couric is sleeping her way to success -- and wrecking a home -- before Page 10. Through an anonymous source, Salon recently received the opening pages of Klein's next three books. You read them here first. -- ed.

No Happy Homemaker: The Real Betty Ford

Elizabeth "Betty" Ann Bloomer Warren suddenly knew she'd made a mistake. She'd hitched her star to the wrong man.

Her mother had never liked Betty's husband Bill. But that had been, the new Mrs. Warren suspected, one of the reasons that she'd married him.

She'd only been back in Grand Rapids a short while before she'd seen Bill again -- Bill, who'd taken her to her first dance when she was 12, when she was gangly and boyish, years before she'd gone off to the glamorous brand-new women's college in Bennington, and then gone down to New York to dance with Martha Graham.

None of her time in the Gamma Delta Tau service sorority or the Junior League back in Michigan had prepared her in the slightest for the rough and tumble of New York City in 1938.

"She couldn't make it as a dancer," recalled a Bennington schoolmate who was clearly not a friend. "She was just a failure in the big city."

That was true. She had been just a big swan in a tiny pond back home.

She told herself she'd come back home to Grand Rapids as a promise to her domineering mother. Living with her mother again -- the woman who'd made her wear white gloves while shopping? Really she'd come back because she just couldn't cut the mustard.

Bill Warren had been her attempt to regroup, to start over. But now she would be a divorced failure, too.

Bill didn't treat her well -- it started nearly right after their marriage in April of 1942. He didn't have enough money. They'd even got married in her mother's home. But it wouldn't have looked right if she'd left him so soon, after only a couple of years of marriage. What would people say?

Plus he'd fallen into that coma.

So she waited another few years, nursing him, surely with resentment.

"I took a dollar in settlement and it was finished," Betty would write later, with what must have been her customary mercenary tone.

And so, with her age on her mind, she moved on fast. Right away, she slipped out for assignations with a Navy man named Jerry Ford. She met with him in "an out of the way bar," in August of 1947, a full month before she was even a divorced woman.

She knew right away that her long personal nightmare was over.

"She had to handle Jerry Ford absolutely right," recalled a friend of a cousin of the wife of the Episcopalian minister who conducted the wedding. "After all, she was 29 -- a divorced, desperate former dancer."

She got Ford, a former footballing lummox, to propose to her just a short while later, in February of 1948.

Ford had been born Leslie Lynch King Jr., something he hadn't known himself until he was an adult. Discovering the secret of his adoption had nearly shattered him -- and in this vulnerable state, he was the perfect choice, just waiting for a woman with a steely grip to arrive and bend him to her will.

This was, she saw, a man who could go all the way in his new career in politics. A guy's guy, a temperate man, and those two years on the USS Monterey? Perfect material for molding.

She spurred his workaholism on the campaign trail as a young politician -- he left their rehearsal dinner to go campaigning.

"He was even late for their wedding," recalled one apparently still-bitter attendee.

But the new Mrs. Ford didn't utter a word in protest. She knew he could go all the way -- maybe even to Congress. He just had to.

But even she, in almost desperately grasping dreams of power, could barely imagine that someday she would be anointed the first lady of the United States of America.

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