Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [159]
On October 26, 2005, she introduced the thirty-six-year-old bearded writer as “the child you pray you never have to raise. At age ten he was drinking alcohol, by twelve he’s doing drugs, and from there he spends almost every day the same: drunk and high on crack.… He does it all: freebases cocaine, drops acid, eats mushrooms, takes meth, smokes PCP, snorts glue, and inhales nitrous oxide.”
Frey also wrote about boarding a plane drunk and bloodied from a brawl, having two root canal operations without anesthesia, and finding his dead girlfriend hanging from a rope. He wrote graphically about the violence he had witnessed, suffered, and perpetuated at Hazelden during his rehabilitation, and about a crack-fueled confrontation with Ohio police that resulted in seven felony charges and eighty-seven days in jail. “I was a bad guy,” he told Oprah.
Several book reviewers challenged his accounts as “lacking credibility,” but they gave him high marks for vivid imagination. Others were not so forgiving. “Absolutely false,” Dr. Scott Lingle, president of the Minnesota Dental Association, told Deborah Caulfield Rybak of the Minneapolis StarTribune. He said that no dentist in the state would perform surgery without Novocain: “No way. Nohow. Nowhere,” said a former spokesman for Northwest Airlines about Frey’s contention that he had boarded a plane wounded and inebriated. Counselors from Hazelden denied his claims of violence, and Ohio police laughed at his so-called criminal record, which consisted of a DUI when he was twenty-three years old. For that he had simply posted bond of $733, with no jail time. His “crimes” consisted of driving without a license and driving with an open container of beer, as opposed to being the chief target of an FBI narcotics probe, as he claimed. “He thinks he’s a bit of a desperado,” said David Baer, a former Ohio police officer amused by the bad-guy portrait Frey limned of himself.
Frey’s publishers (Doubleday in hardcover and Anchor in paperback) gave Oprah’s producers a copy of Rybak’s damning article from the Minneapolis StarTribune when Oprah was considering the booking, but according to the reporter, she was never contacted by anyone at Harpo. “I was quite surprised by the lack of vetting done by her organization,” Rybak recalled a few years later. At the time, Oprah didn’t seem to care. She said she loved the book and wanted to make it her next selection.
During the narrated video segment that introduced Frey to her audience, seven of her employees extolled the book, bringing Oprah to tears. “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family and we all love the book so much.” The book went on to sell two million copies in the next three months, impressing even Oprah. “Within hours of our book club announcement, readers across the country raced to get the book,” she announced. “A Million Little Pieces hit number one on USA Today, The New York Times, and Publishers Weekly, the triple crown of books.”
Then came the explosion from the website The Smoking Gun, which posted a story on January 8, 2006: “A Million Little Lies: The Man Who Conned Oprah.” Citing a six-week investigation into Frey’s so-called criminal record and his inability to explain the disparities between what he had written and what official records showed, the website stated, “[H]e has demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book, which could—and probably should—cause discerning readers … to wonder what is true.” The next day Frey’s publishers responded with a statement of support, which prompted Edward Wyatt’s story in The New York Times to lead, “And on the second day Doubleday shrugged.”
For the next seventeen days the James Frey story dominated the national news cycle, especially in The New York Times, which published thirty-one articles inside of a month questioning Frey’s honesty, his publisher’s credibility, and