Author upends neighbor’s plants
Careful Georgetowners: That creature sneaking around your yard late at night may not simply be a raccoon — it could be Kitty Kelley!
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The author has made a career out of reporting the sensational exploits of the rich and famous, from Jackie Onassis to Elizabeth Taylor to Nancy Reagan. But here’s a little dirt — literally — on Kelley: We’re told that cameras recently recorded Kelley sneaking into her neighbor’s yard late at night with disheveled hair and a bathrobe, uprooting some plants, tossing them away and quickly sneaking back home.
Allow us to explain. …
One of Georgetown’s long-running cat fights is between Kelley and her next-door neighbor, Candyce Martin, a great-granddaughter of San Francisco Chronicle founder Michael de Young. Martin bought her home from the estate of the late J. Carter Brown (the National Gallery of Art director with whom Kitty also had an uneasy relationship).
Martin’s sizable wealth helped her recently fund a massive renovation of the house, and the noisy and messy construction irked some of her neighbors.
Kelley was certainly one of the irked, but what she didn’t know is that part of the renovations included the installation of a security system — with cameras — and it was those very cameras that picked up Kelley’s childish trashing of Martin’s backyard.
For her part, Martin decided not to confront Kelley personally, but she did phone Kelley’s lawyer and inform him that, although she wouldn’t take action this time, she would keep that video on hand just in case the author trespassed onto her property again. After all, Martin’s got the damning video.
When reached for comment, an agitated Martin would neither confirm nor deny the story, simply stating that “I never go public about any of my neighbors.” Phone calls and an e-mail to Kelley went unreturned.
This isn’t the first time that Martin’s home renovations have bothered her neighbors: In 1999, People magazine reported that actress Sharon Stone and her then-husband, Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein, fought Martin over her plans for a 1,300-square-foot addition to her San Francisco house, which the couple claimed obstructed their view of the Golden Gate Bridge. But when we spoke to Bronstein on Wednesday, he said that Martin was a “perfectly fine neighbor.”
