Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [1]
Yet I’ve never felt completely comfortable with the term unauthorized, probably because it sounds slightly nefarious, almost as if it involves breaking and entering. Admittedly, biography is, by its very nature, an invasion of a life—an intimate examination by the biographer, who tries to burrow into the marrow of the bone to probe the unknown and reveal the unseen. Despite my discomfort with the term, I understand why the unauthorized biography raises the hackles of its subjects, for it means an independent presentation of their lives, irrespective of their demands and decrees. It is not bended-knee biography. It does not genuflect to fame or curtsy to celebrity, and powerful public figures, accustomed to deference, quite naturally resist the scrutiny that such a biography requires. Oprah Winfrey was no exception.
At first she seemed sanguine when Crown Publishers announced in December 2006 that I would be writing her biography. She was asked her reaction, and her publicist responded, “She is aware of the book but has no plans to contribute.” Six months later Oprah told the New York Daily News, “I’m not cooperating with it, but if she wants to write a book, fine. This is America. I’m not discouraging it or encouraging it.” Then, with a wink, she added, “And you know I can encourage.”
By April 2008 she had changed her attitude. In a webcast with Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, she said, “I live in a world where people write things that are not true all the time. Somebody’s working on a biography of me now, unauthorized. So I know it’s going to be lots of things in there that are not true.”
I immediately wrote to Oprah, saying the truth was as important to me as it was to her. I repeated my intention to be fair, honest, and accurate, and again asked for an interview. I had written to her before—first as a matter of courtesy, to say that I was working on the book and hoped to present her life with empathy and insight. I wrote several times later, asking for an interview, but did not receive a response. I should not have been surprised, considering Oprah had written her own autobiography years earlier but withdrew it before publication because she felt it had revealed too much. Still, I kept trying, but after several more unanswered letters, I remembered what John Updike said when he was stonewalled by baseball great Ted Williams: “Gods do not answer letters.”
Midway into my research, I finally received a call from Oprah’s publicist, Lisa Halliday, who said, “Ms. Winfrey has asked me to tell you she declines to be interviewed.” By then I had learned from Chicago reporters that Oprah had stopped giving interviews and responded to the press mostly through publicists rather than directly. If reporters persisted, as Cheryl Reed did when she was editor of the editorial page of the Chicago Sun-Times, Oprah’s publicists provided a list of prepared questions and canned answers. “[Oprah is] always asked the same questions,” the publicist told Ms. Reed. “[This is] how Miss Winfrey prefers to respond.”
I told Ms. Halliday that I needed to be accurate in what I wrote and asked if Ms. Winfrey would be willing to check facts. Ms. Halliday said, “If you have questions of fact, you can reach out to me.” So I tried, but each time I called Harpo, Ms. Halliday was unavailable. In the end it was Oprah herself who turned out to be a major source of information.
In lieu of speaking to her directly and having to rely on fragmented memories, I decided to gather every interview she had given in the last twenty-five years to newspapers and magazines and on radio and television in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Canada and Australia. I filed each—and there were hundreds—by names, dates, and topics, for a total of 2,732 files. From this resource I was able to use Oprah’s own words with surety. Laid out on a grid, the information