Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [0]
Jackie Oh!
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Copyright © 2010, 2011 by H.B. Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-307-71877-8
COVER DESIGN BY DAVID TRAN
AUTHOR PHOTO BY BLACKMORE
v3.1
AGAIN AND ALWAYS–
FOR MY HUSBAND, JOHN
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Foreword
ne
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Photo Insert 1
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Photo Insert 2
Nineteen
Twenty
Afterword
Some Oprah Credits, 1984–2009
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Photograph Credits
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a revised and updated edition of the original book published in 2010. All additions to the text run throughout the book and have been set in boldfaced type.
Foreword
I MET OPRAH WINFREY when I was on a book promotion tour in Baltimore in 1981, and she was cohosting WJZ’s morning show, People Are Talking, with Richard Sher. We sat down before the show began, and as I recall, Richard did most of the talking, while Oprah seemed a bit standoffish, which I didn’t understand until later. He interviewed me on the air and then joined Oprah on the set with a compliment about our lively exchange. Oprah shook her head with displeasure. “I don’t approve of that kind of book,” she said. “I have relatives she wrote a book about and they didn’t like it at all.”
I looked at the producer and asked what in the world she was talking about. I understood what she meant by “that kind of book”—an unauthorized biography written without the subject’s cooperation or control—but I was perplexed by her reference to my having written a book about her relatives. The only biography I had written at the time was the life story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Jackie Oh!), and my research had not turned up any Winfrey relatives in that family tree.
The producer looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well … Oprah is close to Maria Shriver, plus she’s very much in awe of the Kennedys.… I guess she considers herself part of the family in a way and … she knows they were upset by your book because it was so revealing … and … well, that’s why we decided to have Richard do your segment.”
I jotted down the exchange on the back of my book-promotion schedule, just in case the publisher asked how things had gone in Baltimore. I had no idea that twenty-five years later Oprah Winfrey would be a supernova in our firmament, and I would devote four years to writing “that kind of book” about her.
For the last three decades I’ve chosen to write biographies of living icons without their cooperation and independent of their control. These people are not merely celebrities, but titans of society who have left their imprint on our culture. With each biography the challenge has been to answer the question John F. Kennedy posed when he said, “What makes journalism so fascinating and biography so interesting is the struggle to answer the question: ‘What’s he like?’ ” In writing about contemporary figures, I’ve found the unauthorized biography avoids the pureed truths of revisionist history—the pitfall of authorized biography. Without having to follow the dictates of the subject, the unauthorized biographer has a much better chance to penetrate the manufactured public image, which