Authors: Kitty Kelley
Oprah (46 page)
Losing ground by the second, Frey stammered. “I think…I-I still think it’s a memoir.”
With barely controlled rage, Oprah continued: “I have been really embarrassed by this and, more importantly, feel that I acted in—in defense of you and, you know, as I said, my judgment was clouded because so many people…seemed to have gotten so much out of this book…but now I feel that you conned us all. Do you?”
Taking their cue from Oprah, the audience began booing. “Okay. Let him speak. Please. Let him speak,” she said.
Frey tried to defend what he had done. “I’ve struggled with the idea of it, and—”
Oprah cut him off. “No, the lie of it. That’s a lie. It’s not an idea, James. That’s a lie.”
Before the next break she ran tape from three journalists, who functioned as her picadors:
“It’s wrong and immoral to pass off a piece of fiction as a memoir,” said Joel Stein of the
Los Angeles Times.
“I wouldn’t do it.”
“Oprah Winfrey is, number one, the queen of goodwill in the United States,” said Stanley Crouch of the New York
Daily News.
“And she was had. It’s that simple.”
“James Frey very clearly lied to promote his book,” said Maureen Dowd of
The New York Times,
“and I don’t think that should get the Oprah seal of approval.”
In the next segment Oprah lambasted Nan Talese as the publisher of the book.
“What responsibility do you take? What did you do as the publisher of this book to make sure that what you were printing was true?”
Talese said that she had read the manuscript and shared it with colleagues, and when they had no questions, she gave it to the editor, Sean McDonald, who, no longer with Doubleday, became the scapegoat.
“That book is so fantastical,” said Oprah, “that…that’s not washing with me….What did you do legally to make sure?”
Talese said the book was vetted by lawyers, but that no one questioned it because “this was James’s memory of the hell he went through, and I believed it.” She tried to explain the subjective thinking that goes into writing a memoir, but Oprah was having none of that, either, nor was her booing audience.
“I think this whole experience is very sad,” said Talese. “It’s very sad for you, it’s very sad for us.”
“It’s not sad for me,” snapped Oprah. “It’s embarrassing and disappointing for me.”
Talese said that Frey would be writing an author’s note to address his made-up recollections in future editions of the book, but this drew more hisses from the audience, whom Talese later characterized as “hyenas.”
During the break, James Frey said that if there was a gun backstage he might as well shoot himself. When Oprah came back on the air she said she appreciated him coming on the show. “I do believe that telling the truth can set you free. You know, you were joking, I hope—that if there’s a gun backstage, whatever—but I know it’s been difficult and I said to you, ‘It’s not worth all that. It’s not worth all that. All you have to do is tell the truth.’ ”
With an understatement not shown in his writing, Frey said, “This hasn’t been a great day for me…but I think I have come out of it better.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Oprah.
“I mean, I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to…”
“Lying,” said Oprah. “To lying.”
Having been publicly flogged, Frey walked back to the green room
as if in a coma. “Dude, I just got slaughtered by Oprah in front of twenty million people,” he said to one of the publicists. They all sat down to watch Oprah tape
After the Show,
a segment for the Oxygen network. A methamphetamine addict stood up.
“Oprah, I don’t care about the exaggerations in the book. I’m an addict and this is my story.”
“I’m glad it helped you,” said Oprah. “That’s why we have the book club. James has apologized, so I’m okay with it.” That comment was later edited out of the tape and deleted from the transcript that Harpo released.
As soon as Oprah finished the segment, she and Ellen Rakieten ran to the green room, where Frey and his publicists were sitting, still shell-shocked.
“Are you okay?” asked Oprah. “Are you okay?”
“This sucks,” said Frey.
“Oh, James. I’m so sorry. I made a huge mistake….If I hadn’t said what I said on the Larry King show, none of this would’ve happened. We had two statements ready to go for me to read—one positive, one negative, depending on how you did on the show. If only I had said it correctly, none of this would’ve happened. But after that show
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
wouldn’t let it go. We had to stop it. I’m so sorry, but they were investigating us. And we just couldn’t have that. If I had said correctly what was on the statement this would not have happened.”
Sheri Salata and Jill Adams, the producers who had worked with Frey, felt awful. “I can’t believe this happened,” said one. “You went from the best book club ever to the worst. I can’t believe it.”
In the limousine taking everyone back to the airport Frey’s cell phone rang, but he did not take the call. The message was from Larry King, who said to call him as soon as possible.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you, James,” said King. “That was awful. Oprah should never have done that to you. Never.”
The next day Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column she was surprised “that Oprah didn’t simply hand Mr. Frey a gun and make him shoot himself on her show to make up for his ‘deception’ of her.” In an email years later she said she liked and admired Oprah, but “My
only caveat is ‘absolute power corrupts,’ and in something like the matter…with James Frey…it was that kind of power. Very nerve wracking. I didn’t really think it was a matter of defending the nation whether or not he was totally accurate in his so-called memoir. It was a wonderful book and I didn’t feel his public humiliation was necessary. She originally recommended the book in good faith and nobody blamed her for that.”
Two years later, when Jessica Seinfeld appeared on
Oprah
with her vegetables-for-kids cookbook and was sued for plagiarism, Liz Smith wrote another column: “[I]f Jessica loses her fight…does this mean that Oprah will sit her down in her studio some day and lambaste Ms. Seinfeld the way she devoured author James Frey for not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but in his ‘memoir’? Maybe Jessica Seinfeld will win the lawsuit [she did], and that will make everything all right with Oprah. And these days, making everything all right with Oprah is practically the publishing world’s 11th Commandment.”
Harold Evans, who was president of Random House from 1990 to 1997 and just incidentally married to Oprah’s nemesis Tina Brown, faulted Oprah as much as anyone. “I think [she] did harm to the concept of the book as a valuable artifact,” he said. “It was irresponsible of her, before she blessed this piece of nonsense, not to do some checking.”
The message boards at
Oprah.com
had lit up with hundreds of messages after the second show with James Frey, and most of them were against Oprah for being so harsh. Many acknowledged that while Frey had lied, she had been too hard on him simply because she had been embarrassed by the media. The next day she called Frey at home and, according to someone in the room at the time, she said: “I just want to make sure you’re okay, James. You are not going to hurt yourself, are you? I’m really worried you’re going to do something to yourself.” She then shared her own personal history with drugs. “Listen, James, I, too, smoked crack when I was in Baltimore, and I did cocaine in Chicago. I, too, had a drug problem, but I finally achieved peace with my drug past and I’m hoping you can, too.”
Oprah’s phone call was of little consolation to Frey, who was fired by his agent at Brillstein-Grey and lost his movie deal with Warner Bros. Fox TV withdrew from the television drama they had signed to
do, and Viking Penguin canceled his two-book publishing contract. In addition, a judge approved a settlement in which the publisher agreed to refund readers of
A Million Little Pieces,
but of the millions of copies sold, Random House received only 1,729 requests for reimbursement. At the end of the debacle the one person left standing in James Frey’s corner was his revered publisher, Nan Talese, who said Oprah had been “mean and self-serving,” and that she should be the one apologizing for her “holier-than-thou” attitude and her “fiercely bad manners.”
Having been accused in the past of lacking certain social graces, Oprah proved that she had at least mastered the niceties of thank-you note etiquette. The day after the show, Nan Talese received a one-page letter:
Dear Nan,
Thanks for being on the show.
Sincerely,
Oprah
“I got this tip from Bill Clinton,” Oprah said later. “You know, Bill Clinton, former president of the United States, which is to write a note on one page so it can be framed. So that’s what I do now.”
ixteen
P
HIL DONAHUE
hung up his microphone on May 2, 1996, and when television gathered to honor the talk show grandee at the Twenty-third Annual Daytime Emmy Awards in New York, Oprah presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. She probably owed him more than any of his other imitators because his show was the competition that whipped hers into the winner’s circle. “I want to thank you for opening the door so wide, wide enough for me to walk through,” she said. “I hope I can carry on the legacy that [you] began.” Donahue blew her a kiss. His good friend Gloria Steinem later recalled, “He always said that if he did his job really well, that the next big talk show host would be a black woman.”
For twenty-nine years Donahue had been jumping into his audiences with a microphone, asking for their opinions (“Help me out here”) and taking questions from his viewers (“Is the caller there?”). He was the king of talk show television until Oprah arrived on the national scene in 1986 and immediately began trouncing him in the ratings. “She changed the ball game,” said Penn State professor Vicki Abt. “She started the down-and-dirty exploitative show, the trailer trash, the unwashed parading of dysfunction….He tried to compete but he couldn’t do it as well or as badly. He was too smart.”
From the beginning Donahue was controversial and sometimes outrageous. His shows provoked thought and discussion, starting with his first guest, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists. Presenting a blunt denier of God to God-fearing America in 1967 was audacious, and it launched a new kind of talk show that all of his successors, including Oprah, would (try to) imitate. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader appeared on
Donahue
thirty-six times and personified the issue-oriented guest he most enjoyed interviewing. Unafraid to engage politicians, Donahue pressed the presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 about his extramarital affairs. His audience booed him, and Clinton berated him, saying, “You are responsible for the cynicism in this country.” But Donahue did not flinch.
Oprah, on the other hand, refused to have politicians on her show for many years because she was afraid of losing viewers. When Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.) asked to appear during the 1996 presidential campaign, she turned him down. “I don’t do politicians,” she said, because their interviews “would lack genuineness and real dialogue.” After rejecting Dole, Oprah polled her audience. “Those of you who’ve been watching
The Oprah Winfrey Show
over the last decade know that I don’t interview politicians while they’re campaigning. The question that’s been causing such a big stir…is whether or not I should break my long-standing policy and invite President Bill Clinton and Senator Bob Dole to be guests on the show. It’s [the issue] been making headlines….I think one [newspaper]…even said ‘Oprah Bounces Bob.’ I did not—it’s just a long-standing policy.” The audience indicated they did not want her to go political.
“Maybe she realized I was too quick-witted and might steal the show,” Dole joked years later. Known for his rapier wit, he once pointed to a photo of Presidents Carter, Ford, and Nixon standing side by side at a White House ceremony. “There they are,” Dole said. “See no evil, hear no evil, and evil.” After losing to Clinton in 1996, Dole went on
The Late Show with David Letterman,
where the host noted that Clinton was “fat” and probably weighed “three hundred pounds.” Dole did not miss a beat. “I never tried to lift him. I just tried to beat him.”
The senator again asked to go on Oprah’s show in 2005, when he published his memoir
One Soldier’s Story.
“It wasn’t a political book but
a story about growing up in Russell, Kansas, and serving in World War II. It’s about my wartime injuries and overcoming adversity, which I thought would appeal to her audience. The book was already a best seller, but it would have been more of a best seller had I been able to get on her show. But she wouldn’t take me because I am a Republican.”
In contrast, Donahue once gave Senator Dole a full hour, and offered a platform to politicians of both parties, engaging in spirited debates with Gerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton. By the time his show was canceled in New York due to low ratings, talk show television had changed, becoming less thoughtful; the terrain had been invaded by men like Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Morton Downey, Jr., Montel Williams, and Maury Povich, who presided over screamers and chair-throwers. The goal was no longer to combine education with entertainment, but rather to pander to the lowest taste to get the highest ratings. “They’re all my illegitimate children,” Donahue said of his successors, “and I love them all equally.” He never criticized his competitors, including Oprah, but he did acknowledge that she had muddied the turf. “After she hit…the talk show game took a significant turn toward the sensational and the bizarre,” he said. His most frequent guest, Ralph Nader, was blunter in blaming her for plunging talk shows into the sewer, but Donahue said that daytime television was closer to the street, more irreverent than any other spot on the dial. “Does it mean that everything on daytime television is wonderful and deserves a Nobel Prize? No,” he said. “There are sins. But I’m saying, let the wildflowers grow.”
In that unruly garden with Oprah were Rosie O’Donnell, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jenny Jones, Joan Rivers, and Rolonda Watts. Each strained to do the kind of memorable television Donahue did at his best. He once lay in a satin-lined coffin to interview a funeral home director. Another time he and his cameras followed a couple as they gave birth. They showed the mother in labor, pushing as hard as she could, with her husband helping, while their three-year-old wandered around the living room. Just as the baby was born, the toddler came into view and shouted, “Mommy, it’s a puppy!”
At the time, Oprah was getting high ratings with titillating shows on homosexuality, up to then a taboo subject for talk show television.
Reflecting her interest in the subject, she continued to explore the topic of gay men and lesbians over the next two decades. Here is only a partial list:
| 11/13/86 | “Homophobia” |
| 1988 | “Women Who Turn to Lesbianism” |
| 2/88 | Lesbian separatists |
| 1990 | “Gay Adoption” |
| 1991 | “All the Family Is Gay” |
| 2/24/92 | “Straight Spouses and Gay Ex-Husbands” |
| 1993 | “Lesbian and Gay Baby Boom” |
| 5/4/94 | “School for Gay Teens” |
| 2/27/95 | Greg Louganis, Olympic diver, on revealing his homosexuality and AIDS |
| 7/11/96 | “Why I Married a Gay Man” |
| 4/30/97 | Ellen DeGeneres’s coming-out episode |
| 5/5/97 | “Are You Born Gay?” |
| 1998 | Cher and Chastity Bono regarding Chastity being outed as lesbian |
| 4/16/04 | “Secret Sex World: Living on the Down Low” |
| 10/27/04 | “My Husband’s Gay” |
| 10/20/05 | “Gay for 30 Days” |
| 11/9/05 | “Bestselling Author Terry McMillan Confronts Her Gay Ex-Husband” |
| 11/17/05 | “When I Knew I Was Gay” |
| 7/7/06 | “The Stars of Brokeback Mountain and Tyler Perry’s Next Big Thing” |
| 9/19/06 | “Former Governor Jim McGreevey, His Gay Sex Scandal” |
| 10/2/06 | “Gay Wives Confess” |
| 1/29/07 | “Fascinating Families” (including a gay male couple in California who are foster parents) |
| 5/1/07 | “Dana McGreevey, Estranged Wife of the Gay Governor” |
| 6/6/07 | “Left for Dead: The Gay Man Who Befriended His Attacker” |
| 10/24/07 | “Gay Around the World” |
| 2/1/08 | “America’s Toughest Matchmaker, Plus Katherine Heigl,” including video of T. R. Knight after Isaiah Washington referred to him as “a faggot” on the set of Grey’s Anatomy |
| 11/14/08 | “Oprah Fridays Live” (with Melissa Etheridge on Prop. 8, the anti–gay marriage amendment) |
| 1/28/09 | “Evangelist Ted Haggard, His Wife, and the Gay Sex Scandal” |
| 3/06/09 | “Women Leaving Men for Other Women” |
| 3/25/09 | Rerun of “Women Leaving Men for Other Women” |
In 1997, long before Ellen DeGeneres entered the talk show arena, she decided that she was going to make television history on her ABC sitcom by coming out as a lesbian. She called Oprah and asked her to appear on the show as the therapist to whom Ellen confides her sexual feelings for women. Oprah agreed, but Ellen was nervous because she had seen one of Oprah’s shows on lesbians and thought the host had been quite judgmental. “I was so afraid you would find out I was gay and not like me,” said Ellen.
Hers was to be the first prime-time series to feature an openly homosexual lead character, and for eight weeks the publicity leading up to the show saturated the media. Before her character came out on television, Ellen outed herself on the cover of
Time
under the headline “Yep. I’m Gay.” General Motors, Chrysler, and Johnson & Johnson, which had aired commercials on previous episodes of
Ellen,
would not buy ads for the coming-out episode, and Oprah later told DeGeneres that she received more hate mail for doing that show than for anything she had done to date. But she frequently made this claim about her more controversial shows.
“I got more heat than I’ve ever gotten,” Oprah said.
“And did you think you would get that?” Ellen asked.
“No, I really didn’t, but it was okay because I did it for you and I did it because I believe I should have done it…so it didn’t really bother me…but at the time it was really shocking to me why [anyone] would write hate mail for that.”
Two days before Ellen’s coming-out episode on April 30, 1997, Liz Smith ran a blind item in her gossip column:
They do say that one of the biggest and longest-running TV stars is seriously contemplating making the same move that put Ellen DeGeneres on the cover of every magazine in the country and in the nation’s newspapers.
The star’s sexual orientation has been hidden under a glare of publicity for years. But when—ok—if this announcement occurs, it will make the seismic tremors of Ellen’s “Yep, I’m gay” statement look like small potatoes. It will be the furor to end all furors. (This celeb is an icon and role model to millions.) Remember, you heard it here first, even if we don’t want to say the name. People should be allowed to “out” themselves.
The same day Oprah appeared on
Ellen
as the therapist, who said, “Good for you, you’re gay,” Ellen appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
where Oprah told her, “A lot of people said me being on your show was me promoting lesbianism. I simply wanted to support you in being what you believe was the truth for yourself.”
“Everybody thinks I’m a freak,” Ellen said, looking beleaguered.
Oprah’s audience chastised her for guest-starring in the coming-out episode and then criticized Ellen for being a lesbian and making it public. Yet that night, when the “Ellen” character came out of the closet, she packed America’s living rooms with thirty-six million viewers, and Oprah’s show earlier that day, featuring Ellen and her then-girlfriend Anne Heche, also won high ratings. But Oprah’s cameo appearance, plus the blind item, burned up the Internet for weeks with rumors about her sexuality, the most outlandish being that she was going to come out in
Newsweek
the way Ellen came out in
Time.
Oprah finally issued an official statement denying that she was a lesbian, thereby making her sexual orientation a public issue for years to come. Before her public denial she had denied the lesbian rumors to her audience after taping a show with Rosie O’Donnell, and she again addressed the subject in a keynote speech to a convention of seven thousand broadcasting executives in Chicago. Her words appeared under coy headlines around the country:
“Oprah Denies Rampant Gay Rumor” (
Variety
)
“Rumblings Behind the Oprah Rumor” (
New York Post
)
“Oprah Says She’s Playing It Straight” (
Intelligencer Journal
)
The week before that speech, her ratings had slipped 9 percent. “Since my appearance on the ‘Ellen’ show, there have been rumors circulating that I’m gay,” Oprah said in her press release. “I’ve addressed this on my show, but the rumor mill still churns. Several weeks ago, syndicated columnist Liz Smith wrote that ‘one of the biggest and longest-running TV stars is contemplating coming out….’ Apparently, people assume that it’s me. It’s not.
“As I’ve said, I appeared on the Ellen show because I wanted to support her in her desire to free herself—and I thought it was a really good script. I am not in the closet. I am not coming out of the closet. I am not gay.”
Unintentionally or not, Oprah issued her statement during Gay Pride Week, which Barney’s downtown store in New York City celebrated with a window showing mannequins of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche popping out of a volcano. The Ellen mannequin is reading a copy of the
New York Post
’s front page reporting that the Walt Disney Company, which owned ABC, was getting bashed by Baptists over its “gay-friendly” policies. Flying above the whole scene is Oprah Winfrey in an airplane trailing a banner that reads, “I Am Not Gay.” In certain gay circles those words became as infamous as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”
Years later Rosie O’Donnell, who had come out as a lesbian, speculated on Oprah’s relationship with her best friend: “I don’t know that she and Gayle are necessarily doing each other, but I think they are the emotional equivalent of [a gay couple]….When they did that road trip together [“Oprah and Gayle’s Big Adventure,” featured in five episodes on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in 2006], that’s as gay as it gets, and I don’t mean it to be an insult, either. I’m just saying, listen, if you ask me, that’s a [gay] couple.”