NEW YORK - C. David Heymann, a literary biographer turned best-selling celebrity biographer who came to wide attention in 1983 after his life of the heiress Barbara Hutton was withdrawn by its publisher because of factual errors, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 67.

Mr. Heymann died after collapsing in the lobby of his apartment building, said his wife, Beatrice Schwartz. The cause was believed to be cardiopulmonary failure.

Trained as a literary scholar, Mr. Heymann began his career with “Ezra Pound, the Last Rower: A Political Profile,’’ published in 1976; continued it with “American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell’’ four years later; and then had an epiphany:

“I learned from this,’’ he told The New York Observer in 1999, “never write a book about a poet if you want to sell books.’’

What followed included three New York Times best-sellers: “A Woman Named Jackie’’ (1989), a life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that reached number one; “Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor’’ (1995); and “Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story’’ (2009), in which Mr. Heymann argued that the widow of the slain president had an affair with her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy after her husband’s assassination.

Mr. Heymann’s lives of Hutton, Onassis, and Taylor were made into television movies starring, respectively, Farrah Fawcett, Roma Downey, and Sherilyn Fenn.

Though some critics admired Mr. Heymann’s biographies for their comprehensiveness, others were far more caustic. Their concerns included his use of single rather than multiple sources in reconstructing historical events and his reliance on hearsay accounts by people not directly involved in incidents he was describing.