Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [141]
Oprah acknowledged that her fiancé, understandably, was not enthusiastic about what she had written. “He didn’t say anything was too explicit or shouldn’t be said. He said it wasn’t powerful enough.” She felt her book lacked “clarity” and “introspection,” and Stedman, a devotee of self-help and how-to books, said that it lacked “inspiration.” He wanted her book to be more than an autobiography. “My experiences were meant to empower people,” she said, “and make sense of life.”
Yet Stedman’s objections to the tone and content of her book were not the sole justifications for the cancellation. In a private conversation with a man who had received a telephone call from Oprah, she said, “The reason I pulled my book was because Maya Angelou came to me after the big ABA announcement and said, ‘Is there anything in that book that is exaggerated? Is there anything that is not true in that book?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, some things are written to read well. You know that. Some things are, you know …’
“No, baby, I don’t know,” said Maya. “I only know that you cannot have one exaggerated story, one untruth, one embroidered recollection. You cannot. If you do, take that book back. Do not publish it.”
Angelou understood her friend’s tendency to embellish for effect, perhaps pad a story for a laugh or a little sympathy. Angelou, who loved Oprah like a daughter, did not want her to be publicly humiliated by the media, which she said would peck her to death if they found manufactured anecdotes.
Interestingly, one of the publishers who read the manuscript, but whose company did not acquire it, was more concerned about Oprah’s hard truths than her soft lies, particularly what she wrote about being a prostitute—the first time she had ever used that word to describe her adolescent promiscuity.
“I told her at the time she didn’t need to tell people about that,” said the publisher. “It was not necessary for everyone to know she had been a prostitute. Besides, I knew that she’d see it in print and pull back, which is exactly what she did. I’ve published enough celebrity memoirs to know what can happen between the initial excitement of selling their story and then actually publishing it. Once they see the seamy stuff down on the page that they left behind in their crawl to the top, they pull back. They either delete it or rewrite it.… It’s called revisionist history.”
The story of Oprah’s days as an adolescent prostitute had been partially disclosed by her sister in the National Enquirer in 1990, but the tabloid revelation was ignored by the mainstream media, so those who did not read the grocery store press had no idea about Oprah’s sordid past beyond what she chose to share on her show. For her now to admit in her autobiography that she had once been a prostitute—that was the hard truth; the unvarnished version of what her sister had described as Oprah making money by sneaking men into the house to do “The Horse”—was guaranteed to be headline-making news. Such an admission would be particularly difficult for her father, who still could not bring himself to use the word prostitute to describe his teenage daughter. To this day he cannot face that truth. Instead, he characterizes that troubled period of Oprah’s life as one of her “dark secrets.”
Oprah was so concerned about Angelou’s warning that she summoned her and six other equally close friends to her farm in Indiana for the weekend after ABA. She gave all seven, including Stedman and Gayle, copies of the manuscript and asked for their honest assessment of whether she should go forward with publication. To a person, each recommended she cancel. During that weekend she was made to see that some people might not react kindly to finding out that what she had