Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [143]
Oprah reconsidered going public with her youthful tiptoe into prostitution, and after listening to her closest friends, she decided to cancel publication of her memoir. She later said it was the smartest thing she ever did, and from her point of view, she was absolutely right, although the writer Gretchen Reynolds said she “called down upon herself the worst publicity of her career.” That characterization seemed a bit overblown for the relatively mild press reaction to Oprah’s announcement, but it certainly captured Oprah’s own excessive descriptions of her personal experiences, which were always “the most devastating,” “the most difficult,” “the worst,” “the most painful,” “the most awful.”
Yet, while she always seemed to reach for the superlative to describe her feelings as a victim, she felt her book lacked the emotional insight to make it resonate with readers. She was unable to convey the beguiling contradictions that made her so fascinating, particularly the intriguing composition of a deeply secretive woman whose universal appeal sprang from her openness and her supposed spontaneity. It’s part of the human condition to have two selves in the same psyche, but Oprah felt she could not chance exposing her dark self and possibly diminish the luminosity of her bright self.
She also worried that canceling the book would make “all the people at Knopf hate me,” so the following year she gave the publisher her chef’s book of low-fat recipes and wrote the foreword for In the Kitchen with Rosie. Oprah’s newly slimmed body was the book’s best advertisement, but she also invited Rosie onto the show on the day of publication. As a result, the book sold more than a million copies within the first three weeks. A year later it was in its thirty-sixth printing, with 5.9 million copies sold.
“I told Knopf, ‘I think this is going to be big.’ They were only printing about 400,000 copies,” said Oprah. “I called Sonny Mehta and said, ‘I don’t think that’s going to be enough.’ He said, ‘Oprah, you don’t understand. We’ve done Julia Child, all the great cookbooks, and I’m telling you, 400,000 is an extraordinary amount for a cookbook. It’s unheard of.’ And I go, ‘OK. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.’ I had been dieting ten years straight on TV. People saw this book as the answer.… It [became] the fastest selling book in the history of publishing. I can’t resist an I-Told-You-So. That’s really a character flaw. Wooo, I can’t resist. Kinda live for that moment when an I-Told-You-So has to come up. So when you couldn’t find the book in the stores, and there were waiting lists everywhere, I couldn’t resist calling up Sonny Mehta, who’s operating presses 24 hours a day, and saying, ‘Sonny, I recall telling you …’ And he said … ‘Never in the history of publishing have we seen anything like it. Never. It’s a phenomenon. No one could have predicted it.’ [I said,] ‘I tried to tell you.’ ”
With her own book canceled and her wedding now on hold, Oprah said she needed a grand Hollywood party to celebrate her fortieth birthday on January 29, 1994. She turned the planning over to Debra DiMaio, a maniac for detail, with only one request: that the weekend include a slumber party. This childhood ritual had been a surprise gift for her birthday the year before. “We even had her favorite Dr. Denton’s footie pajamas waiting for her,” recalled Gayle King. “As a kid, she never