There is a hint of farce lurking behind the otherwise somber content of the four relatively recent books on the Bingham family of Louisville. Not only did the four tread on each other's heels but the authors must have been thrown so close together that they could have formed a club. By consulting endnotes, it can be ascertained that the authors of book four, the Susan E. Tifft/Alex S. Jones team, interviewed Barry Bingham, Jr., on January 13, 1986, and that Marie Brenner, author of book two, did the same four days later. The David Leon Chandler/Mary Voelz Chandler team, authors of book one, interviewed Barry Bingham, Sr., on January 27, 1986, three days after Brenner. The Chandlers and Brenner both interviewed Sallie Bingham on the same day, January 23, 1986. One sees the Chandlers leaving by the kitchen door as Brenner is ushered in at the front, or vice versa. And, of course, at the same time Sallie Bingham, a professional writer, was in a sense interviewing herself, for her memoir, book three, must already have been in gestation.

That there were writers buzzing around the Binghams early in 1986 was no coincidence. On January 9, Barry Bingham, Sr., had announced that the family's holdings -- the two Louisville newspapers, its television and radio stations, and a few other subsidiaries -- were for sale. The attraction for the writers, of course, was not the sale itself, but the publicized family dissension that had led to it -- and behind that the lights and darks of the history of the Binghams, a mingled yarn of sudden or mysterious death, with each generation mixing glittering success and dereliction, and finally an irresolvable struggle for dominance.

Book one, that of the Chandlers, was the first out, in January 1988. It would have appeared even earlier had not Barry Bingham, Sr., the head of the family, waged a determined legal battle to block it, for it reconstructed (falsely, he contended) the darkest episode of family history. He succeeded in persuading, or pressuring, the Macmillan Company to take it off the press but said he was too weary for another fight when Crown brought it out as The Binghams of Louisville: The Dark History Behind One of America's Great Fortunes.

The cause of the senior Bingham's consternation was the Chandler's concentration on the death of his first stepmother, his father's second wife. Mary Lily Kenan Flagler happened to be the richest widow in America, having survived the magnate Henry Flagler, when she married Colonel Robert Worth Bingham, a member of a North Carolina family of aristocratic pretensions, in 1916. She died eight months later under much-disputed circumstances -- there were whispers of drug addiction, medical neglect, syphilis, poisoning -- after having allocated a splinter, five million dollars, of her fortune to her husband. This pittance let him pay off his debts and, later, acquire the Louisville newspapers. In his 1986 biography of Henry Flagler, David Chandler had passed off Mary Lily's death as "an apparent heart attack," but that was then. The Chandlers' book on the Binghams two years later concluded that while her death "may not be a 100 percent murder, it is certainly a 100 percent killing." But for the Chandlers, as for the other writers, the possible key to the mystery, the report from a secret autopsy, remains locked in the archives of her family.

Book two was Marie Brenner's House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (Random House), published a few months later. Where the Chandlers scarcely glanced at recent and current Binghams in their concentration on the scandal, Brenner wrote an almost novelistic Scenes from a Marriage, on the union, lasting fifty-seven years, of Barry Bingham, Sr., and Mary Caperton. She drew on hundreds of letters they had written to each other over the decades, all available for scrutiny in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. It was a marriage of durability, mutual affection, and considerable glamour that was able to survive such severe blows as the accidental deaths of two of their three sons. It also may have been strong enough, she suggests, to crush everything in its path.

Barry Bingham, Sr., did not live to see book three, the work of their renegade daughter, Sallie, whose conflicts with her surviving brother and parents precipitated the dissolution of the family empire. Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir (Knopf), if it had stood alone rather than in the thicket of books about family discord, might have been regarded merely as a somewhat embittered reminiscence. Inevitably, it was regarded as another blow against the empire, consistent with Sallie's support of the Chandlers in their dispute with her father. To its credit, Passion and Prejudice does not fish much in the troubled waters of Mary Lily's death. Besides its review of family history, it contains the one account so far of the breakup of a participant, particularly telling in its recounting of the critical episodes when Sallie's brother, Barry Bingham, Jr., editor and publisher of the newspapers, forced her (with her mother, sister, and sister-in-law, for consistency) off the board of directors -- the point, the chroniclers agree, when the damage became irreparable.

Book four, appearing this spring, is Tifft/Jones, which, Brenner complained mildly in her book, was destined to be the "authorized" account. Like Brenner, Tifft and Jones rely on hundreds of hours of interviews; they may have had slightly, but only slightly, better access than Brenner, who was initially held at arm's length. Their edge is in thoroughness, their use not only of the Barry-Mary Bingham correspondence but of every available archival resource, down to and including school records. They were stopped only by that autopsy report. Even so, they arrive at a well-argued conclusion about Mary Lily -- that she had died of cardiovascular syphilis, probably transmitted by Flagler.

That matter is dealt with in the first eighth of the book. The career of Judge Bingham, who eventually became Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain, is covered in the first third. At that point, Barry Bingham, Sr., the patriarch of the title, becomes and remains the dominant figure. And a rather splendid figure he is, strikingly handsome even in old age, gracious to all, a symbol of virtue and achievement in his field.

The only one of the judge's three children spared the curse of self-destructiveness, he survived Harvard and in 1931 married Mary Caperton, of Radcliffe and Richmond. He was already in the family business, first at the radio station, then in Washington, where he covered Roosevelt's "Hundred Days" and consolidated family relations with the administration, then back in Louisville as associate publisher. There he put together the team -- headed by Mark F. Ethridge on the news side and Lisle Baker in business -- that lifted the Courier-Journal from a dingy, provincial Democratic daily to a newspaper of national importance, distinguished by ambitious news coverage and outspokenly liberal editorializing. He had an interval in England during World War II, when he was a naval press officer and a social star. At the end, he contrived to be the officer in charge of American press relations on the Missouri when Japan surrendered. The two decades after the war were the golden era of the Courier-Journal and Times, when they basked in prosperity born of local monopoly and a growing national reputation, climaxed by a Pulitzer Prize for the Courier-Journal for public service in 1967.

Already, the story had darkened. Ethridge left in 1963, unhappy, making way for the eldest son, Worth Bingham. Tifft and Jones see Ethridge's departure as portentous: "From the moment he arrived in 1936 until this cool autumn day in 1963, everything had gone exquisitely, almost inexplicably right. The papers had become synonymous with courage and quality even as Barry, Sr., Mary, and their five children had glided from one triumph to another." In any case, the Binghams no longer seemed to draw all the good cards. In March 1964, the youngest son, Jonathan, still struggling his way through college, was accidentally electrocuted. In 1966, Worth Bingham, Prince Hal to Barry Bingham's Henry IV, died in a one-in-a-million mishap on Cape Cod.

When Barry Bingham, Sr., stepped out of direct command in 1971, after thirty-five years in charge, his and Mary's remaining son, Barry Bingham, Jr., was given his wish to become editor and publisher. As depicted by Tifft and Jones, Barry, Jr., displayed little natural aptitude for the business, but had towering determination, exemplified not only by his triumph over Hodgkin's disease soon after he became publisher, but also by his didacticism, his imposition of ever more inflexible ethical precepts for the newspapers and their employees. By the late 1970s, his two sisters had returned to Louisville, and the senior Barry Bingham had seen to it that they not only had seats on the board of directors, but that they should become seriously involved. Their father is quoted here as saying: "I kept feeling that the family could be brought close together by a common association in the enterprises."

It was a gigantic miscalculation. Resentments carried over from early years made the children oil and water. Barry, Jr., was so tormented by his sisters' presence on the board, and in particular by Sallie Bingham's apparent scorn for him, that he engineered their removal in 1984. Sallie Bingham's response was to decide to sell her interest in the companies, and she made her plans public early in 1985. Her chosen instrument was The New York Times, for which Alex Jones was the media reporter, and he persuaded her to read over the phone a confidential evaluation of the closely held properties. Tifft and Jones remark: "Sallie did not seem to have the foggiest notion of what she was reading." Moral: Do not expect thanks for providing an exclusive.

After a year of churning, the senior Bingham put the newspapers and allied properties on the market; five months later, Gannett became the buyer. Tifft and Jones say that the clincher came when the newspapers' senior managers told Barry Bingham, Sr., that they would not stay on if Barry, Jr., succeeded him as head of the company. The writers add that Barry, Jr., himself did not find this out until more than three years after the sale of the papers and after his father's death in August 1988; the implication is that Tifft and Jones told him. His response was to say that if he were ever in business with his children he would be much more candid with them.

Rather surprisingly, Tifft and Jones have produced a story that is not strikingly different, at its core, from Marie Brenner's or Sallie Bingham's. They labor dutifully at interviewing people who have worked at the Louisville newspapers and they provide a share of office politics, but it is the nuances of family life and the glimpses of the rich and famous that remain their staple. The view is rarely from the newsroom, sometimes from the executive offices, but most frequently from the manse.

Taken together, three of these four books -- exempting Sallie Bingham's on the ground that she at least is entitled to write about her own family -- would under other circumstances seem to be a massive invasion of privacy. Not so: the Binghams themselves cooperated and participated determinedly at every stage. There is a telling little anecdote in Brenner's House of Dreams: when Barry and Mary Bingham found out in 1987 that Alex Jones's long article in the Times, "The Fall of the House of Bingham," was about to win a Pulitzer Prize, they were not chagrined at this further revelation of their trials; instead, they were "thrilled that their [my emphasis added] story had won yet another award."

It is a puzzle. Consider the senior Binghams in those days after they announced that the newspapers would be sold: they opened their doors and their most intimate correspondence to those they knew would expose them unsparingly. Were they showing grace under the weight of tragedy or, as Brenner has proposed, was something "terribly wrong with this family, the coldness beneath the warm surface, the clinical attitude toward its own collapse"?

Perhaps the question to ask is whether the family disorder -- this failure to protect what many people would consider private -- is something that could have happened to any wealthy family. Or is it an affliction of those -- those in the arts, in politics, in the media -- who suffer a kind of anomie, an ability to believe in themselves only as they exist on the public stage? It is saddening to think of those two elderly Binghams struggling under the delusion that if everything about them were to become known they would be understood, that they would win a favorable verdict from a distant jury that never finished its deliberations.

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