Oprah: A Biography
by Kitty Kelley
The Crown Publishing Group
Hardcover, $30.00
560 pages
ISBN: 978-0-307-39486-6
Review by Kam Williams
"I’ve tried to … penetrate the myth in order to answer the
eternal question: What’s she really like? In the process, I found a
remarkable woman, hugely complicated and contradictory. Sometimes
generous, magnanimous, and deeply caring. Sometimes petty,
small-minded, and self-centered.
She has done an extraordinary amount of good and also backed
products and ideas that are not only controversial but considered by
many to be harmful. There is a warm side to Oprah and a side that
can only be called as cold as ice.”
Excerpted from the Foreword (pg. xiv)
It was recently suggested that I was anti-Semitic by a
highly-respected, Jewish intellectual who disagreed with my review
of a documentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since the
allegations were totally unfounded, I contacted my accuser who
nonetheless refused to retract his remarks. Both embarrassed and
hurt, I ended up frustrated by the fact that I had nowhere to turn
to get my reputation back.
I bring my up my painful experience as a prelude to a discussion of
this sensational tell-all only to remind folks that despite the fact
that Oprah is very rich and famous, she’s still a human being
with feelings, too. Who knows how many of the unflattering
revelations in this unauthorized tome are accurate, even if the
author brags about never having been successfully sued for libel
before?
I’ll say this, it certainly doesn’t seem as though anybody very
close to Oprah cooperated with the project. But that didn’t prevent
Kitty Kelley from coming up with enough scandalous material
to keep you on the edge of your seat for the duration of her
shocking 500+ page-turner.
Over the years, the poison-penned biographer has dished the dirt on
everyone from Jackie Onassis to Elizabeth Taylor to
Frank Sinatra to Nancy Reagan to the Royal and
Bush Families. In fact, on the first page of this one’s
Foreword, Ms. Kelley hints that the book might be overdue payback
for Oprah’s having disapproved of “Jackie Oh!” to her face on the
set of a Baltimore morning show over a quarter century ago.
Regardless, this relentlessly-entertaining opus arrives laced with
lots of juicy gossip for anyone interested in insinuation. For among
the rumors given credence here are the notions that Oprah was never
sexually-abused as a child, but rather that she was boy crazy and a
teen prostitute. It also hints that she’s gay and had her gal pal
Gayle King deliver $50,000 in cash to pay someone to keep quiet
about her lesbian affairs. And she doesn’t share a bedroom with her
longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham who is supposedly
homosexual, too.
As to her eating issues, the book describes a vacation during which
Oprah ate a couple of pecan pies in an hour while Stedman was out on
the golf course. On another occasion, a hostess allegedly couldn’t
get her last guest to leave a party at the end of the evening only
because there was still a huge platter of food that hadn’t been
touched.
According to this account, Oprah wouldn’t go, “until she devoured
the whole thing.”
This flipside of the Winfrey you see on TV is said to be “cold,
standoffish and very difficult.” Plus, she has a bad habit of lying
about and turning her back on her friends. An endlessly amusing bio
that's tons of fun to read until you pause to ponder whether this
might merely be a case of character assassination.
To order a copy of Oprah: A Biography, visit:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307394867?ie=UTF8&tag=thslfofire-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307394867
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Lloyd
Kam Williams 