Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  “We had this big discussion about what [that month of spring training] would do in the numbers and what about people who really didn’t want to lose weight,” she said. “And then we decided O. J. was on anyway so we could do what we wanted.” By that time Oprah could do almost anything she wanted and stay at number one. She would soon win a Daytime Emmy for the fifth consecutive year as Best Talk Show Host, and would make her first appearance on the Forbes annual list of the four hundred richest Americans, with a net worth then of $340 million. Life magazine dubbed her “America’s most powerful woman,” and Time named her one of “The Most Influential People of the Century.” As the dramatist Jean Anouilh once said, “Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”

  Taking note of her monthlong workout, The Onion, a parody newspaper, ran a front-page headline announcing, “Oprah Secedes from U.S., Forms Independent Nation of Cheesecake-Eating Housewives.” The tongue-in-cheek story reported that the newly formed republic of “Ugogirl” would be recognized by the UN as a sovereign nation with attitude and sass.

  From the time she started losing weight with Bob Greene in 1993, Oprah talked about writing a book with him, and he began jotting down notes. When she determined the time was right, they found a writer and signed with Hyperion to coauthor Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body—and a Better Life. Oprah wrote the introduction and the front piece for every chapter, sharing photos of herself at her fattest and fittest, as well as poignant entries from her journals about how her weight had consumed her life.

  She whipped up frenzied excitement about the book when Hyperion sponsored a breakfast with her and her trainer in Soldier Field stadium during the 1996 ABA convention in Chicago, which was followed by a mile-long power walk to McCormick Place, the convention center. “I can’t tell you what I ate that morning, who shared my table or what I wore that day,” wrote Renee A. James in the Allentown Morning Call. “But I do remember this very clearly: Oprah Winfrey was incredible. She looked great; she sounded approachable. As she spoke to the assembled masses, she came across as your very best girlfriend. Every woman in the crowd felt like Oprah was connecting specifically with her. We shared the same struggles, including the never-ending weight loss battle, despite the fact that Oprah was (back then) a millionaire with a hit television show and more money than the rest of us would see in several lifetimes. It didn’t faze us that she was an international celebrity. She was just like us. She sounded exactly like each one of us when we talked to our girlfriends. Oprah would fit right in if she wandered into one of our get-together lunches. The whole experience was powerful. The connection she made that day with a couple thousand women was about much more than losing weight.”

  Sadly, James changed her mind about Oprah twelve years later. “Could it have something to do with the difference between the superstar billionaire we see in 2008 and the girlfriend I saw walking around, talking to people on Soldier Field in 1996? Somehow, Oprah is starting to feel a bit too ‘empowered,’ just a little too ‘enlightened’ for the rest of us. To me, this feels like the friend who got a little too impressed with herself and became just a little too good for the rest of us. Makes you sort of mad; but you still miss her.”

  Watching Oprah and her trainer in the summer of 1996 leading all those women huffing and puffing across parking lots, up highway overpasses, and along the lakefront convinced booksellers to place heavy orders for Make the Connection, which had a first printing of two million copies. On publication day Oprah dedicated her show to her book with Bob Greene, and she also posed for a cover story in People: “Oprah Buff: After Four Years with a New Fitness Philosophy Oprah Is Happy at Last.” Within a month, Make the Connection was at the top of every bestseller list in the country.

  Oprah was so convinced she would never gain weight again that she spent the next several months making a motivational home video titled Oprah: Make the Connection in which she talked about having conquered her weight problem. “The sixty-minute tape is less an instructional guide on getting in shape than it is an Oprah-fest,” said the Chicago Sun-Times. “We see Oprah boxing on the beach with Greene. Oprah in a field of flowers with a puppy. Oprah in her dressing room. Oprah dancing. Oprah sitting around the dinner table with her buddies. Oprah finishing the marathon. We see fat Oprah. We see fit Oprah.”

  We also see generous Oprah, who announced that all proceeds from the video would go to A Better Chance, a Boston-based program that provides inner-city students with good grades the opportunity to attend the nation’s best college preparatory schools.

  Days after launching her own book, Oprah launched her book club to feature works of adult contemporary fiction. She made a few exceptions for her friends when she chose Maya Angelou’s nonfiction book The Heart of a Woman and Bill Cosby’s Little Bill children’s stories. When she started featuring nonfiction in 2005, she rejected her “aunt” Katharine’s memoir, Jay Bird Creek, because, according to Mrs. Esters, Oprah said her book was “too trite and mediocre. No drama or excitement.”

  “I self-published the book, and Oprah said she could not consider it for her show unless it was published by a publisher like Random House, Inc….She also said her viewers would not like it.” Mrs. Esters had written about growing up in the Jim Crow South and her fight for civil rights. “My book was too little for Oprah to bother with.”

  Inexplicably, Oprah ignored the two women whose contemporary fiction had given her an entrée into acting. Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, and Gloria Naylor, who wrote The Women of Brewster Place, were never selected for Oprah’s Book Club for any of their subsequent works. Particularly puzzling was the distance Oprah put between herself and Alice Walker, because The Color Purple had been such a significant part of Oprah’s success, expanding and, in many ways, making her career. Her homage to the movie could be seen in the “Color Purple” meadow she created at her Indiana farm. Yet she never invited Alice Walker to see the landscaped hymn of praise to her novel.

  “I love Oprah and I admire her and I think she’s a gift to the planet,” Walker said in 2008, “but she’s put a huge remove between us that I don’t understand….Maybe my views are just too out there for her.”

  Equally inexplicable was what looked like Oprah’s total usurping of the novel when it became a musical and opened on Broadway in 2005. The marquee blared: “Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple.” Only in the smallest print in the programs and in the full-page ads that ran in newspapers were the words “Based upon the novel written by Alice Walker.”

  “Perhaps in claiming The Color Purple in this way she was healing a wound she had acquired when Steven [Spielberg] refused to put her name on the marquee for the movie,” Walker suggested. “I know that hurt Oprah very deeply, and I think that she was trying to get back at him and gain some ground that she felt was lost. So she took over the whole thing, the whole marquee, without really thinking about me, or about whether it was fair….It was not particularly graceful on her part or Scott’s [Scott Sanders, the producer] part. I don’t know how they could do it, but since they did, I expect that they will live with it. You know I can.”

  Neither Alice Walker nor Gloria Naylor could explain being omitted from Oprah’s Book Club, which from 1996 until she temporarily discontinued it in 2002 concentrated on fiction by living authors, mostly female. She would announce her pick and then give viewers a month to read it. In the interim, her producers filmed the author at home, and over dinner with Oprah and a few fans discussing the book, scenes that were later woven into the show that was done about the book. Her first book club choice was The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, a story about a mother whose child is kidnapped. Mitchard’s publicity director at Viking Penguin remembered Oprah calling her to say, “We’re gonna create the biggest book club in the world,” which was no exaggeration since The Oprah Winfrey Show was then broadcast in 130 countries. Oprah knew enough from previous book promotions to warn the publicist to print thousands of extra
copies and then to get out of the way of the stampede. Mitchard’s book, which had a first run of sixty-eight thousand copies, sold more than four million copies after being chosen by Oprah’s Book Club.

  “I want to get the country reading,” said Oprah, who recognized her power as a cultural force. For the next six years she chose books that mirrored her own interests, which some critics called “middle brow,” “sentimental,” and “commercial.” Mostly she chose sad stories written by women about women who survived misery and pain to find redemption. They were women like her, who triumphed over sexual abuse, careless mothering, racism, poverty, unrequited love, weak men, unwanted pregnancy, drugs, even obesity. “Reading is like everything else,” Oprah said. “You’re drawn to people who are like yourself.”

  Oprah may have seen herself in Wally Lamb’s debut novel, She’s Come Undone, about an obese teenager overcoming rape and self-hatred, which became a 1997 book club choice. Twelve years later she joined forces with Tyler Perry to coproduce Precious, a film about an obese, pregnant Harlem teenage mother who overcomes rape, illiteracy, and an evil mother to make a new life for herself. The film was based on the novel Push, by Sapphire. For the most part, Oprah’s book club choices featured women who had been raped, molested, or murdered by men who committed adultery or acted abusively toward their families. In several of the novels, the men were threatening and the women nurturing. The New York Times literary critic Tom Shone said, “The Oprah list offers us that rather ominous thing: not a world without pity, but a world composed of nothing but.”

  1996–2002

  1. The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  2. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

  3. The Book of Ruth, by Jane Hamilton

  4. She’s Come Undone, by Wally Lamb

  5. Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi

  6. The Rapture of Canaan, by Sheri Reynolds

  7. The Heart of a Woman, by Maya Angelou

  8. Songs in Ordinary Time, by Mary McGarry Morris

  9. A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines

  10. Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons

  11. A Virtuous Woman, by Kaye Gibbons

  12. The Meanest Thing to Say, by Bill Cosby

  13. The Treasure Hunt, by Bill Cosby

  14. The Best Way to Play, by Bill Cosby

  15. Paradise, by Toni Morrison

  16. Here on Earth, by Alice Hoffman

  17. Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen

  18. Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat

  19. I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb

  20. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, by Pearl Cleage

  21. Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian

  22. Where the Heart Is, by Billie Letts

  23. Jewel, by Bret Lott

  24. The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink

  25. The Pilot’s Wife, by Anita Shreve

  26. White Oleander, by Janet Fitch

  27. Mother of Pearl, by Melinda Haynes

  28. Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy

  29. River, Cross My Heart, by Breena Clarke

  30. Vinegar Hill, by A. Manette Ansay

  31. A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton

  32. Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan

  33. Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

  34. Back Roads, by Tawni O’Dell

  35. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

  36. While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller

  37. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

  38. Open House, by Elizabeth Berg

  39. Drowning Ruth, by Christina Schwarz

  40. House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III

  41. We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates

  42. Icy Sparks, by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  43. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, by Malika Oufkir

  44. Cane River, by Lalita Tademy

  45. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

  46. A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry

  47. Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  48. Sula, by Toni Morrison

  Within the first year, Oprah’s Book Club had sold almost twelve million copies of contemporary fiction, a genre that typically sold no more than a few thousand copies per title per year, and according to Publishing Trends, an industry newsletter, she was responsible for $130 million in book sales. Consequently, she became known as “The Midas of the Midlist” for her ability to turn modestly successful novels into raging bestsellers. “This is a revolution,” said Toni Morrison, the first black writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oprah introduced Morrison to her audience in 1996 as “the greatest living American writer, male or female, white or black.” Over the next six years she selected Morrison for the book club four times, even hosting a master class so the erudite writer could instruct Oprah’s audience on how to read a novel. Oprah began that show by reassuring viewers that she, too, had difficulty reading Toni Morrison, and revealed her conversation with the writer.

  “Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?” Oprah said.

  “That, my dear,” said Toni Morrison, “is called reading.”

  By the end of the first year of Oprah’s Book Club, publishers were reeling. “It’s like waking up in the morning and finding your husband has changed into Kevin Costner,” said one female publisher. They turned themselves inside out to accommodate Oprah, signing confidentiality agreements to keep secret her selection until she announced it on her show. They agreed to contribute five hundred free copies of the book for her to distribute to her audience, and to donate ten thousand copies to libraries. They dispatched sales reps to sell blindly: “There will be an Oprah Book Club selection in two months. I don’t know what it is. How many copies do you want to order?” In turn, booksellers had to sign confidentiality agreements not to open the boxes shipped with the Oprah stencil until the minute she announced her selection on the air. The anointed authors also signed affidavits swearing not to reveal their good fortune until Oprah had announced their books. They were permitted to tell their spouses but no one else, including parents, siblings, and children. In addition, publishers had to cede Oprah cover approval of the placement of the book club logo (a big yellow O with a white center) and agree to stop stamping books with the logo once the month was up. After that time, they could not even mention her book club in advertisements.

  It’s hard to believe that Oprah’s crusade for literacy would trigger any criticism, but within months she had drilled into the raw nerves of literary elites. “Yes, her book club is a societal boon,” stated The New Republic, “but her taste for the soap-operatically uplifting is not.” The New York literary critic Alfred Kazin dismissed her book club as a “carpet bombing of the American mind.” But culture critic Camille Paglia defended Oprah: “I think the reaction against her is sheer intellectual snobbery. The idea that a black woman with a devoted audience could have this kind of impact jeopardizes [her critics’] role as tastemakers.” The carping reached a crescendo in 2001, when Oprah selected The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, for book club beatification. Franzen, whose first two novels combined sold a total of fifty thousand copies, seemed poised for gigantic commercial success as an Oprah pick, but he did not leap at the opportunity.

  “The first weekend after I heard, I considered turning it down,” he said later. “Yes, I was very serious. I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it….It’s not [just] a sticker. It’s part of the cover. They redo the whole cover. You can’t take it off. I know it says Oprah’s Book Club, but it’s an implied endorsement, both for me and for her. The reason I got into this business is because I’m an independent writer, and I didn’t want that corporate logo on my book.”

  He went on to say that being selected for Oprah’s Book Club did as much for her as it did for him. “[My book with three hundred thousand copies in print] was already on the best-seller list and the reviews were p
retty much all in. What this means for us is that she’s bumped the sales up to another level and gotten the book into Walmart and Costco and places like that. It means a lot more money for me and my publisher, [and] it gets that book—that kind of book into the hands of people who might like it.”

  Franzen defined his book—“that kind of book”—as in the “high-art literary tradition,” whereas he said most of Oprah’s books were merely “entertaining.” He added, “She’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she’s really smart and really fighting the good fight.”

  Franzen seemed to have publicly dismissed Oprah as a carnival barker, and she reacted by rescinding her invitation. She announced to her viewers, “Jonathan Franzen will not be on The Oprah Winfrey Show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict….We’re moving on to the next book.”