Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [154]
Sadly, James changed her mind about Oprah twelve years later. “Could it have something to do with the difference between the superstar billionaire we see in 2008 and the girlfriend I saw walking around, talking to people on Soldier Field in 1996? Somehow, Oprah is starting to feel a bit too ‘empowered,’ just a little too ‘enlightened’ for the rest of us. To me, this feels like the friend who got a little too impressed with herself and became just a little too good for the rest of us. Makes you sort of mad; but you still miss her.”
Watching Oprah and her trainer in the summer of 1996 leading all those women huffing and puffing across parking lots, up highway overpasses, and along the lakefront convinced booksellers to place heavy orders for Make the Connection, which had a first printing of two million copies. On publication day Oprah dedicated her show to her book with Bob Greene, and she also posed for a cover story in People: “Oprah Buff: After Four Years with a New Fitness Philosophy Oprah Is Happy at Last.” Within a month, Make the Connection was at the top of every bestseller list in the country.
Oprah was so convinced she would never gain weight again that she spent the next several months making a motivational home video titled Oprah: Make the Connection in which she talked about having conquered her weight problem. “The sixty-minute tape is less an instructional guide on getting in shape than it is an Oprah-fest,” said the Chicago Sun-Times. “We see Oprah boxing on the beach with Greene. Oprah in a field of flowers with a puppy. Oprah in her dressing room. Oprah dancing. Oprah sitting around the dinner table with her buddies. Oprah finishing the marathon. We see fat Oprah. We see fit Oprah.”
We also see generous Oprah, who announced that all proceeds from the video would go to A Better Chance, a Boston-based program that provides inner-city students with good grades the opportunity to attend the nation’s best college preparatory schools.
Days after launching her own book, Oprah launched her book club to feature works of adult contemporary fiction. She made a few exceptions for her friends when she chose Maya Angelou’s nonfiction book The Heart of a Woman and Bill Cosby’s Little Bill children’s stories. When she started featuring nonfiction in 2005, she rejected her “aunt” Katharine’s memoir, Jay Bird Creek, because, according to Mrs. Esters, Oprah said her book was “too trite and mediocre. No drama or excitement.”
“I self-published the book, and Oprah said she could not consider it for her show unless it was published by a publisher like Random House, Inc.… She also said her viewers would not like it.” Mrs. Esters had written about growing up in the Jim Crow South and her fight for civil rights. “My book was too little for Oprah to bother with.”
Inexplicably, Oprah ignored the two women whose contemporary fiction had given her an entrée into acting. Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, and Gloria Naylor, who wrote The Women of Brewster Place, were never selected for Oprah’s Book Club for any of their subsequent works. Particularly puzzling was the distance Oprah put between herself and Alice Walker, because The Color Purple had been such a significant part of Oprah’s success, expanding and, in many ways, making her career. Her homage to the movie could be seen in the “Color Purple” meadow she created at her Indiana farm. Yet she never invited Alice Walker