Idol Gossip : The once-scholarly craft of biography has mutated into a scramble for scandal. Is nothing--and no one--sacred now?

He was known to be a womanizer. A bully and a flirt. So when Lyndon B. Johnson grabbed her hand and looked into her eyes that sunny day by a lake in Texas, Doris Kearns Goodwin feared the worst.

“He said there was something he’d always wanted to tell me,” recalls Goodwin, who in 1970 was a 27-year-old scholar helping the former President write his memoirs. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, here comes the big seduction scene.’

“And then he said: ‘More than any other woman, you remind me of my mother.’ ”

At first, Goodwin felt relieved and then somewhat foolish. But the incident triggered questions faced by many modern biographers: How should the anecdote be used, if at all? Was it too personal? And did readers need to know?

Ultimately, the young historian left the story out of her book, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” which became a bestseller. But in today’s voyeuristic culture--where millions get a daily dose of sex and scandal on talk shows--a more cynical writer might have turned the incident into juicy tabloid headlines and a guest shot on “Oprah.” Maybe even a movie deal.

In the post-Watergate world, Goodwin suggests, historians have taken up the tools of investigative reporting, with decidedly mixed results. If a biographer’s chief goal is to unmask fools and uncover dirty laundry for its own sake, she says, real history suffers. Instead of showing empathy for a subject and historical perspective, a writer simply moves in for the kill.

It’s a growing concern in literary circles, where some of America’s most prominent biographers are debating the future of their craft. For some, history has always destroyed sacred cows, and thus nothing should be off-limits. Yet others deplore what they call the new “pathography,” contending that a lurid preoccupation with the personal has compromised too many books.

“We live in a society that depends for its meat and drink on the inner, sordid lives of celebrities,” says Justin Kaplan, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his studies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. “So when it comes to these new, sensational biographies, we’re getting exactly what we deserve. And the public can’t seem to get enough.”

Talk about dishing: These days, readers are snapping up life stories of the rich and dysfunctional that would have seemed outrageous 20 years ago. The trend is not surprising at the low end of the scale, where tabloids, instant biographies and TV gossip shows have long featured such material. But now the Rush to Reveal has reached the ranks of more serious writers as well.

In his recent biography of the young John F. Kennedy, “Reckless Youth,” Nigel Hamilton presents the future President’s sexual adventures in steamy, scholarly detail. Much of the research is documented. But at one point, with no hard evidence, he airily suggests that JFK’s father may have given his retarded daughter a lobotomy to prevent her from revealing his sexual abuse of her.

Meanwhile, Blanche Wiesen Cook’s best-selling biography of the young Eleanor Roosevelt speculates--again, without no firm proof--that the former first lady may have had a lesbian affair with a wire service reporter, as well as a heterosexual dalliance while married to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Today, the biography sections of American bookstores are teeming with tales of bed-hopping, childhood abuse and degradation. Elvis was a pill-popping flake and John Lennon a babbling misanthrope, according to their respective Boswells. In her portraits of Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin, author Joan Peyser chronicles public genius and private debauchery. Marilyn Monroe’s biographers could fill a shelf, each telling more X-rated--and unsubstantiated--stories than the last about her sex life.

Many of these books have an impact well beyond the reading public, given the rapid growth of television and radio talk shows. The rumor that surfaces in a new biography can travel a quick route from the publisher’s suite to the Larry King show, and eventually reach millions of Americans.

How else to explain the near-universal acceptance of racy stories about J. Edgar Hoover in Anthony Summers’ recent biography? The author did not fully document his claim that the former FBI director was a gay cross-dresser who paraded about hotel rooms in skirts and feathers. Yet the tale has been retold in a PBS documentary and is now joked about so often on late-night television shows that it has, for all practical purposes, become gospel.

“The irony of all this is that biography has never been more popular with readers, and that’s good,” says Goodwin, who is one of America’s most respected presidential biographers. As she relaxes on an old sofa in her home near Boston, the woman who held Lyndon Johnson at bay laughs and says she’d probably use the anecdote about his mother if she were writing the book today.

But Goodwin worries that some historians would write almost anything negative about a celebrity--without hesitation--in order to boost sales. “At some point, you just have to draw the line and say enough is enough,” she insists. “You can’t just print idle gossip.”

Hamilton’s explosive book on the young JFK is a case in point. At Random House, publishers are delighted that “Reckless Youth” has sold more than 250,000 copies in hardcover. Yet the British-born author, whose ambitious work received mostly favorable reviews, is still smarting over Goodwin’s recent letter about him to the New York Times. She charged that he played loose with the facts and was therefore suspect as a historian.

For example, Goodwin blasted a passage where Hamilton equated the young JFK’s tyrannization by his father, Joe, with Josef Stalin’s tyrannization of the Russian people. The two men, he wrote, even shared the same first name.

That kind of flippant observation, Goodwin charged, “is unconscionable. It cannot be dismissed as merely sloppy language.” More important, she argued, biographers must rise above “the contemporary idea, spawned by popular culture and television talk shows, that we all come from dysfunctional families.”

Firing back, Hamilton says he was making a humorous observation and that the Stalin line has been misunderstood. Then, warming up for combat, he snaps that Goodwin is the last person who should criticize him as a historian.

“The truth is, she’s the authorized chronicler of the Kennedy family,” Hamilton says. “And that puts her in an iniquitous position, where in order to maintain the favor of that family, she has to criticize me in public.”

Hamilton refers to the extraordinary access that Goodwin had to family members and personal papers in her much-praised 1987 book, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.” No other writer has ever received such help, he says, adding that Goodwin’s husband, Richard, is a longtime Kennedy family confidante.

“That’s ridiculous,” Goodwin retorts. “I was given access to that material with no strings attached. He (Hamilton) seems to forget that, and so he attacks me instead of my book. My reputation as a historian matters more to me than my relationship with the Kennedy family.”

Although the JFK flap shows no signs of abating, it pales in comparison to the furor over Cook’s provocative and much-praised biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The controversy erupted last year, when Cook told readers in her introduction that the book would be about passion as much as politics. Eleanor Roosevelt, she wrote, has been falsely portrayed by male historians as a chilly, distant woman who hated sex and never again slept with her husband after learning in 1918 that he had had an affair with his secretary.

Relying heavily on private letters, Cook suggests that the first lady may have had a protracted affair with Lorena Hickok, an Associated Press reporter who covered the White House. She also suggests that there may have been an affair with Earl Miller, a New York state policeman who once guarded her husband. May is the key word, because Cook says repeatedly that she has no proof.

But that’s been enough to set off other biographers, who seem apoplectic at the thought that good, gray Eleanor could have had such a wild private life.

In a stinging article in the New York Review of Books, historian Geoffrey Ward criticized Cook for presenting the young FDR as a “tippler,” a “womanizer,” a “bottom-pincher” and a “knee-holder.” More important, he dismissed her speculation about Eleanor Roosevelt’s extramarital sexuality. Ward, who has written a two-volume biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, said responsible historians should follow a higher standard of proof.

“Bottom line: Geoffrey Ward hates Eleanor Roosevelt,” wrote Cook, in a tart response. “I do not flinch from the possibilities of pleasure, satisfaction and lust in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life. My interpretation has not been throttled by the limits of the traditional penile imagination.”

Enter Goodwin, who is finishing a biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. She has her own thoughts on the controversy.

“I wish Eleanor had been free enough to have these affairs,” she says. “But I just don’t think she was. And by saying you’re just putting it out there for the reader to decide, I don’t think you can get away with that. She (Cook) is either saying it or not saying it. If not, what’s the point?”

And so the bio-wars continue. Like Cook and Hamilton, Goodwin ran into stiff criticism when her books appeared, especially from the Kennedy family. She learned that some members were furious with her for revealing that Joe Kennedy forced his daughter to get a lobotomy. They also weren’t pleased when she unearthed an anti-Semitic letter written by the patriarch.

Ultimately, Goodwin says, scholars have an easier time when their subjects are all dead. After the controversy sparked by her previous books, she confesses, it’s been a relief to write pure history about the Roosevelts.

Yet gossip and speculation haunt even the most resolute biographer. Recently, Goodwin spoke about her work to an audience of newspaper publishers at Harvard University and took several questions from the audience.

Inevitably, a woman rose from her seat and asked about Hillary Rodham Clinton: How does she compare as a political figure to Eleanor Roosevelt?

Goodwin touched on their similarities and then noted pointedly that Eleanor Roosevelt was free to live her own life--because President Roosevelt felt guilty about what he had done to her years before.

“Eleanor always had a moral edge over Franklin,” the historian noted. “And today, I suspect Hillary has that same moral edge.”

The audience broke into noisy laughter and sustained applause. As Goodwin left the podium, a woman in the crowd turned to her companion and grinned.

“Now, that’s great stuff!” she gushed. “I just love biography.”