Scratching Back at Kitty : POISON PEN: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley, <i> By George Carpozi Jr. (Barricade Books: $22; 368 pp.)</i>

I have two recurring nightmares. One is that I’m forced to take algebra again. The other is that Kitty Kelley is writing an unauthorized biography of me. I imagine her interrogating anyone I ever had a cross word with--copy editors, ex-boyfriends, phone solicitors who tried to sell me time shares. And I wake up in a cold sweat.

So I find it astonishing that George Carpozi Jr., author of “Poison Pen: The Unauthorized Biography of Kitty Kelley,” actually made me feel sorry for the queen of the celebrity hatchet job. Not that this was his intention. “She bashed Frank Sinatra,” the book jacket proclaims. “She trashed Nancy Reagan. Now it’s her turn.”

But does anybody--her enemies notwithstanding--really care? There’s a big difference between Kitty Kelley dishing hundreds of pages of dirt about Sinatra, Jackie, Liz or Nancy and George Carpozi Jr. exposing the woman who once said, “Hell, for a million dollars I’d write about Donald Duck.” Kelley is at least hunting big game--and, merits aside, she does supply a commodity. A little lurid gossip is useful social currency, as anyone who dined out on details of the so-called Sinatra/Reagan matinees very well knows.

But an in-depth knowledge of the skeletons in the former Lilac Princess’ closet is hardly going to make you the life of a party. Granted, Carpozi slices up Kelley’s credibility with the artistry of a sushi chef. Among the most damning allegations: Kelley claims to have interviewed Peter Lawford 12 days after he died. And publisher Lyle Stuart, who gave Kelley her big break when he commissioned “Jackie Oh!” (he subsequently got burned), reports to Carpozi that he asked her how she learned about an intimate conversation between Jacqueline Onassis and Pete Hamill:

“Kitty looked down at her shoes as if studying the condition of her shine. ‘I made it up,’ she said.”

Stuart claims that he deleted the offensive passage. But still, he published her book.

Lyle Stuart, it so happens, also published “Poison Pen”--a book so hostile that if it were a person its name would be Moose and he would be holding a gun. Any doubt that this work is revenge disappeared on Page 9. The author recounts a phone conversation in which he told Lyle Stuart that Kitty Kelley is “a no-good ingrate.”

Carpozi has unearthed dozens of unsavory incidents to substantiate this claim. Some of the juicy details: Barbara Howar charges that Kelley stole a manuscript from her home during a garage sale and sold it to Washingtonian magazine (Howar stopped publication by threatening to sue). Barbara Askins, one of Kelley’s former Delta Gamma sorority sisters at the University of Arizona, accuses Kelley of stealing her merry-widow corset (and lots more).

We also are assured that Kelley deliberately left her panties under the bed of a married editor with whom she was having an affair so his wife would find out. She dispatched Mike Edgely, her then-husband, to pick through Elizabeth Taylor’s garbage. And after “Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star” came out, she sent a critic who panned it a gold Gucci box filled with severed fish heads and a card that read “From the Friends of Kitty Kelly.”

Obviously, this is not a woman with whom everyone would want to have lunch. But Carpozi seems to go out of his way to gloat. For instance: “Kitty Kelley’s mother wasn’t just a closet drunk. She was often a nasty public drunk.” Or in debunking Kelley’s claim that Jacqueline Onassis had electroshock therapy: “Another tall tale from the little girl from Spokane.”

Obviously, given libel laws and other constraints, Kelley can’t make all of it up. Her millions of readers expect scandal, sex, intrigue, public controversy--and she delivers. If the author and her methods are less than kosher, well, as the French say, “It takes a pig to find the truffles.” As far as George Carpozi and his “Poison Pen” goes, there’s another saying: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

He had better hope that the pig doesn’t start digging in his back yard.