Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [155]
“I love Oprah and I admire her and I think she’s a gift to the planet,” Walker said in 2008, “but she’s put a huge remove between us that I don’t understand.… Maybe my views are just too out there for her.”
Equally inexplicable was what looked like Oprah’s total usurping of the novel when it became a musical and opened on Broadway in 2005. The marquee blared: “Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple.” Only in the smallest print in the programs and in the full-page ads that ran in newspapers were the words “Based upon the novel written by Alice Walker.”
“Perhaps in claiming The Color Purple in this way she was healing a wound she had acquired when Steven [Spielberg] refused to put her name on the marquee for the movie,” Walker suggested. “I know that hurt Oprah very deeply, and I think that she was trying to get back at him and gain some ground that she felt was lost. So she took over the whole thing, the whole marquee, without really thinking about me, or about whether it was fair.… It was not particularly graceful on her part or Scott’s [Scott Sanders, the producer] part. I don’t know how they could do it, but since they did, I expect that they will live with it. You know I can.”
Neither Alice Walker nor Gloria Naylor could explain being omitted from Oprah’s Book Club, which from 1996 until she temporarily discontinued it in 2002 concentrated on fiction by living authors, mostly female. She would announce her pick and then give viewers a month to read it. In the interim, her producers filmed the author at home, and over dinner with Oprah and a few fans discussing the book, scenes that were later woven into the show that was done about the book. Her first book club choice was The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, a story about a mother whose child is kidnapped. Mitchard’s publicity director at Viking Penguin remembered Oprah calling her to say, “We’re gonna create the biggest book club in the world,” which was no exaggeration since The Oprah Winfrey Show was then broadcast in 130 countries. Oprah knew enough from previous book promotions to warn the publicist to print thousands of extra copies and then to get out of the way of the stampede. Mitchard’s book, which had a first run of sixty-eight thousand copies, sold more than four million copies after being chosen by Oprah’s Book Club.
“I want to get the country reading,” said Oprah, who recognized her power as a cultural force. For the next six years she chose books that mirrored her own interests, which some critics called “middle brow,” “sentimental,” and “commercial.” Mostly she chose sad stories written by women about women who survived misery and pain to find redemption. They were women like her, who triumphed over sexual abuse, careless mothering, racism, poverty, unrequited love, weak men, unwanted pregnancy, drugs, even obesity. “Reading is like everything else,” Oprah said. “You’re drawn to people who are like yourself.”
Oprah may have seen herself in Wally Lamb’s debut novel, She’s Come Undone, about an obese teenager overcoming rape and self-hatred, which became a 1997 book club choice. Twelve years later she joined forces with Tyler Perry to coproduce Precious, a film about an obese, pregnant Harlem teenage mother who overcomes rape, illiteracy, and an evil mother to make a new life for herself. The film was based on the novel Push, by Sapphire. For the most part, Oprah’s book club choices featured women who had been raped, molested, or murdered by men who committed adultery or acted abusively toward their families. In several of the novels, the men were threatening and the women nurturing. The New York Times literary critic Tom Shone said, “The Oprah list offers us that rather ominous thing: not a world without pity, but a world composed of nothing but.”
1996–2002
1. The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard
2. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
3. The Book of Ruth, by Jane Hamilton
4. She’s Come Undone, by Wally Lamb
5. Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi
6. The Rapture