Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  Franzen told USA Today that he felt “awful” about what he had done. “To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero—not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general—I feel bad in a public-spirited way.”

  Flabbergasted, The Washington Post’s literary critic, Jonathan Yardley, called Franzen’s words “so stupid as to defy comprehension. He did everything he could to take Oprah Winfrey’s money and then run as far away from her as possible.” Chris Bohjalian, whose novel Midwives was the twenty-first book chosen by Oprah, said, “I was angry on behalf of the book club, and I was appalled as a reader who appreciates the incredible amount that Oprah Winfrey has done for books.” He added that sales of Midwives jumped from 100,000 copies to 1.6 million after it became an Oprah pick.

  Franzen was reviled from coast to coast. Newsweek called him “a pompous prick,” The Boston Globe called him an “ego-blinded snob,” and the Chicago Tribune called him “a spoiled, whiny little brat.” Stepping in to defend him, David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker, said, “I think the world of Jonathan. I think he’s sorry about Oprah, but it’s not a monumental issue. Everyone steps on someone’s toes sometimes.” E. Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News, also came to Franzen’s defense. “Jon was so right,” she said. “He objected because he didn’t like a lot of Oprah’s choices. And I can say this because I know none of my books will ever make Oprah’s list. Some of the books she picks are a bit sentimental. I see where she’s coming from, and she’s done marvelous things for books and readers. But for someone to think that it’s no kudo to be accepted on a list of sentimental books is understandable.”

  In November 2001, a month after his disinvitation by Oprah, Jonathan Franzen won a National Book Award for The Corrections, and a few months later she decided to discontinue her book club. Our Lady of Literacy had had it. “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share,” she said. “I will continue featuring books on The Oprah Winfrey Show when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation.”

  If she appeared overly sensitive to public criticism, it was because she had become accustomed to getting perpetual praise from the press—laudatory profiles, admiring interviews, adoring cover stories. With the exception of the tabloids, the U.S.S. Oprah sailed mostly smooth seas. Now she had hit a little turbulence over her lack of literary taste, and being derided as Our Lady of the Lowbrows had nicked her in a vulnerable spot. Never particularly proud of her education from the historic black college of Tennessee State University, she felt inferior around her Ivy League contemporaries. She knew her success and celebrity lifted her into most social circles, because, as she said many times, money opens every door in America. But the one marked “High-Art Literary” seemed to have slammed shut on her.

  Oprah gave the publishing industry ten months to miss her book club before she announced that she was bringing it back. This time, though, she made herself immune to literary attacks by concentrating solely on the classics. For the next two years she rallied her viewers around some of literature’s finest writers:

  2003–2005

  49. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

  50. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton

  51. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

  52. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers

  53. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

  54. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

  55. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

  56. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

  57. Light in August, by William Faulkner

  By 2005, America’s literary community was starving. More than 150 writers, mostly female novelists such as Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and Jane Smiley, signed a petition to Oprah, saying “the landscape of literary fiction is now a gloomy place.” They begged her to come back, and she agreed because she said she missed interviewing authors about their books. Interestingly, all of her next selections were books by men.

  2005–2008

  58. A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

  59. Night, by Elie Wiesel

  60. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier

  61. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

  62. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

  63. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez

  64. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett

  65. A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle

  66. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

  When she opened the 2005 season with her selection of A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, she had no idea that she would become embroiled in a controversy that would trigger thirteen class-action lawsuits, a bruising clash with a prestigious publisher and a revered editor, plus a tirade from The New York Times that would make the Franzen fracas look like sweet potato pie. As Jonathan Franzen remarked a few years later, “Oprah should keep away from white guys with the initials J.F.”

  In the beginning, Oprah was bewitched by James Frey’s harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. For three months she gave him the full love treatment. “The book…kept me up for two nights straight,” she told her audience on September 22, 2005, when she announced A Million Little Pieces as her next book club selection. “It’s a wild ride through addiction and rehab that has been electrifying, intense, mesmerizing, and even gruesome.”

  On October 26, 2005, she introduced the thirty-six-year-old bearded writer as “the child you pray you never have to raise. At age ten he was drinking alcohol, by twelve he’s doing drugs, and from there he spends almost every day the same: drunk and high on crack….He does it all: freebases cocaine, drops acid, eats mushrooms, takes meth, smokes PCP, snorts glue, and inhales nitrous oxide.”

  Frey also wrote about boarding a plane drunk and bloodied from a brawl, having two root canal operations without anesthesia, and finding his dead girlfriend hanging from a rope. He wrote graphically about the violence he had witnessed, suffered, and perpetuated at Hazelden during his rehabilitation, and about a crack-fueled confrontation with Ohio police that resulted in seven felony charges and eighty-seven days in jail. “I was a bad guy,” he told Oprah.

  Several book reviewers challenged his accounts as “lacking credibility,” but they gave him high marks for vivid imagination. Others were not so forgiving. “Absolutely false,” Dr. Scott Lingle, president of the Minnesota Dental Association, told Deborah Caulfield Rybak of the Minneapolis StarTribune. He said that no dentist in the state would perform surgery without Novocain: “No way. Nohow. Nowhere,” said a former spokesman for Northwest Airlines about Frey’s contention that he had boarded a plane wounded and inebriated. Counselors from Hazelden denied his claims of violence, and Ohio police laughed at his so-called criminal record, which consisted of a DUI when he was twenty-three years old. For that he had simply posted bond of $733, with no jail time. His “crimes” consisted of driving without a license and driving with an open container of beer, as opposed to being the chief target of an FBI narcotics probe, as he claimed. “He thinks he’s a bit of a desperado,” said David Baer, a former Ohio police officer amused by the bad-guy portrait Frey limned of himself.

  Frey’s publishers (Doubleday in hardcover and Anchor in paperback) gave Oprah’s producers a copy of Rybak’s damning article from the Minneapolis StarTribune when Oprah was considering the booking, but according to the reporter, she was never contacted by anyone at Harpo. “I was quite surprised by the lack of vetting done by her organization,” Rybak recalled a few years later. At the time, Oprah didn’t seem to care. She said she loved the book and wanted to make it her next selection.

  During the narrated video segment that introduced Frey to her audience, seven of her employees extolled the book, bringing Oprah to tears. “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family and we all love the book so much.” The book went on to sell two mil
lion copies in the next three months, impressing even Oprah. “Within hours of our book club announcement, readers across the country raced to get the book,” she announced. “A Million Little Pieces hit number one on USA Today, The New York Times, and Publishers Weekly, the triple crown of books.”

  Then came the explosion from the website The Smoking Gun, which posted a story on January 8, 2006: “A Million Little Lies: The Man Who Conned Oprah.” Citing a six-week investigation into Frey’s so-called criminal record and his inability to explain the disparities between what he had written and what official records showed, the website stated, “[H]e has demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book, which could—and probably should—cause discerning readers…to wonder what is true.” The next day Frey’s publishers responded with a statement of support, which prompted Edward Wyatt’s story in The New York Times to lead, “And on the second day Doubleday shrugged.”

  For the next seventeen days the James Frey story dominated the national news cycle, especially in The New York Times, which published thirty-one articles inside of a month questioning Frey’s honesty, his publisher’s credibility, and Oprah’s complicity. Many at the publishing house felt the negative coverage was a way for the media to take on Oprah without doing so directly. “It was a veiled attack on her that kept the story going,” said a vice president of Random House, Inc., the umbrella company of Doubleday and Anchor.

  Oprah’s producers, especially Ellen Rakieten, Sheri Salata, and Jill Adams, stayed in close touch with Frey, calling him every day and sending emails. “We love the book, James. We don’t care what they say. It’s irrelevant. Really.” But the continual drubbing so unsettled Oprah that she finally insisted Frey go on Larry King Live to defend himself. She made the arrangements for his appearance herself and promised to call in at the end of the show with a statement. She had two prepared—one for him and one against him—and her decision of which she would read depended on how he did. “Go on with your mother,” she told him. “You’ll look more sympathetic.”

  So, on January 11, 2006, accompanied by his mom and two publicists from Anchor, James Frey appeared on CNN to discuss the controversy surrounding his book, now described as a “fraud” and “a scandal.” Polite and low-key, he said he was a flawed person with a troubled past. He pleaded “a very subjective memory” due to his drug addiction and acknowledged that he had “changed some things” in the book but that it was “the essential truth” of his life. He would not admit to any lies or distortions. King pointed out that while Frey had the support of his publisher, he had yet to hear from Oprah. One of his callers asked, “Do you think [she] will support you?”

  By the end of the hour there was still no call from Oprah, and Frey looked like a whipped dog, with his mother close to tears. Just as Larry was to turn the next hour over to Anderson Cooper, he announced, “I’m going to hold the show a little longer because I understand we have Oprah on the phone. Let’s see what she has to say. Are you there, my friend?” The host leaned forward, straining his suspenders to hear whether Frey would live another day.

  “I wanted to say because everyone’s been asking me to release a statement,” said Oprah. “I first wanted to hear what James had to say….He’s had many conversations with my producers, who do fully support him and obviously we support the book because we recognize that there have been thousands and hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been changed by this book….I feel about A Million Little Pieces that although some of the facts have been questioned…that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me….Whether or not…he hit the police officer or didn’t hit the police officer is irrelevant to me….” She added, “To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing….It’s irrelevant discussing, you know, what happened or did not happen to the police.”

  “It’s still an Oprah recommend, right?” said Larry King.

  “Well, I certainly do recommend it for all.”

  The book remained number one on The New York Times bestseller list but not in the paper’s newsroom, which was still reeling from the journalistic fraud of Jayson Blair, whose widespread fabrications and plagiarisms represented a profound betrayal of trust for the readers of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper. Maureen Dowd struck first, with a column titled “Oprah! How Could Ya?” in which she compared the talk show host to George W. Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, who had told lies on behalf of the president about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “She should have said: ‘Had I known that many parts were fake, I wouldn’t have recommended the book to millions of loyal viewers. I wouldn’t have made this liar a lot of money.”

  Three days later came a blast from The Washington Post, in a column by Richard Cohen titled “Oprah’s Grand Delusion”: “[F]ame and wealth has lulled her into believing that she possesses something akin to papal infallibility. She finds herself incapable of seeing that she has been twice fooled—once by Frey, a second time by herself.”

  The deathblow was delivered by Frank Rich’s “Truthiness” column in The New York Times, in which he connected Frey’s lies and Oprah’s defense of him to the kind of propaganda that can lead a nation morally astray. “Ms. Winfrey’s blithe re-endorsement of the book is less laughable once you start to imagine some Holocaust denier using her imprimatur to discount Elie Wiesel’s incarceration at Auschwitz in her next book club selection, Night.”

  This was too much for the woman who saw herself as the paragon of truth and honesty. Her producers stopped communicating with Frey and demanded the publishers defend their disputed book. Anchor and Doubleday quickly offered the New York Times interviews with two men from Hazelden to support Frey’s accounts, which they basically did, but there was still no editorial support for Frey anywhere in the country, and Oprah, according to her producers, felt trapped. “They were getting too close,” said one. “We started to get investigated, and Oprah said we had to put a stop to it.”

  The producers summoned Frey and his publisher, plus some of the columnists who had condemned Oprah’s defense of the book, for a show on January 26, 2006, which they said was to be titled “Truth in America.”

  Nan Talese, publisher of Frey’s hardback, and two of Doubleday’s publicists accompanied Frey to Chicago. Seconds after they walked into Harpo they were separated: Frey was sent to one dressing room, the publishing representatives to another. Right before the show, Ellen Rakieten dashed into Frey’s room and, in front of someone present, said, “Hey. We changed the show to ‘James Frey and the A Million Little Pieces Controversy.’ You are going to be on the entire hour. It’s going to get pretty rough, but hang on. I promise you, there will be redemption for you at the end.” Rakieten was right—about the rough part.

  For the next hour Oprah gave her viewers a startling performance of fire-breathing indignation. She ran a statement from William Bastone of The Smoking Gun, who said, “Turns out he’s a well-to-do frat boy who…isn’t kind of this desperado that he’d like people to think he was….He has been promoting the book for two and a half years and basically has lied continuously for two and half years.” She then ran Frey’s response on Larry King Live that he had written “the essential truth” of his life. She also ran a portion of her call to the show defending Frey and his book. Then she dropped the hammer.

  “I regret that phone call,” she said. “I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book….” She turned to face him. “It is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped. But more importantly I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”

  She spent the rest of the show chastising Frey and then his publisher.

  “Why did you lie?” she asked him. “Why do you have to lie about the time you spent in jail? Why do you have to do that?”

  She wanted to know about the suicide death of his girlfriend. “So ho
w did she do it?”

  “She cut her wrists,” said Frey.

  “And so—hanging is more dramatic than cutting your wrists? Is that why you chose hanging? Why do you have to lie about that? Why didn’t you just write a novel?”

  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?”