Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [216]
Behind-the-scenes competition became fierce when the talk show titans battled for exclusive “gets.” In 2003, Oprah and Katie Couric went to the mat over Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old girl who was snatched from her bed in Salt Lake City, hidden in a hole, chained to a tree, and not allowed to bathe for nine months. Upon Smart’s rescue by police, her parents asked the media for privacy so that she might recover. Seven months later, Ed and Lois Smart had written a book, Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope, and sold television rights to CBS for a movie. Publication was set for October, to be followed by the movie in November. The promotion campaign set by the publisher (Doubleday) gave Katie Couric, then with NBC, the prime-time interview for Dateline, to be followed by Oprah for daytime. The ground rules, set by the Smarts for their interviews, prohibited any on-camera interview with their daughter, although silent footage of Elizabeth was allowed.
The book’s publication created such a media frenzy that CBS decided to air the interview with the Smarts that was to accompany the movie as a network special before Katie or Oprah had aired their interviews. Oprah’s producers flew to Utah to get footage of Elizabeth’s bedroom, zooming in on the white patchwork quilt, ruffled pillows, and Raggedy Ann dolls, and also filmed the filthy hole where she was chained for nine months. Katie Couric accompanied her producers to Utah, and after interviewing the Smarts, she persuaded them to allow her verbal exchange with Elizabeth to be shown on the air, which gave NBC an exclusive no one else had. Couric tried to circle the subject of sexual abuse with the youngster without getting explicit:
COURIC: How do your friends treat you, Elizabeth? I mean, obviously, you know …
ELIZABETH: Regular.
COURIC: Do they ever ask you anything or …
ELIZABETH: No.
COURIC: You must have been frightened …
ELIZABETH: Yeah …
COURIC: Do you think you have changed?
ELIZABETH: No.
Oprah was enraged when she found out about the interview, but instead of calling Katie Couric to scream, she telephoned Suzanne Herz, then head of publicity for Doubleday. “Oprah reamed her,” recalled a Doubleday employee. “Just laid her out … It was quite traumatic for Suzanne to be treated that way by Oprah Winfrey.” Herz later said, “It was more bad behavior on the part of Katie Couric, not Oprah. Katie was the one who broke the rules to get the exclusive. Oprah was angry because she followed the rules and then got screwed.… I don’t blame her.… In the end, both of them got huge ratings.”
Couric’s interview with Elizabeth Smart and her parents won the hour for NBC, with 12.3 million viewers, handily beating Barbara Walters’s ABC 20/20 interview with Princess Diana’s butler. Oprah retaliated by releasing footage from her show before it aired, for two segments on ABC’s Good Morning America, the show that competed directly with Katie Couric and The Today Show. “It wasn’t vengeance,” said Oprah’s publicist. “Just promotion.”
Not everybody enjoyed being on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “I represented Anne Robinson, who wrote Memoir of an Unfit Mother in 2001, when she got a call from Oprah’s producers four years later to go on the show,” recalled literary agent Ed Victor. “Anne asked me if she should do it, and I told her yes, because as soon as her publisher [Pocket Books] heard that Oprah wanted her and her daughter to appear, they offered to publish her book in paperback. So I said she should do the show, sell some books, and get her message out.” Robinson, the curt British host of the weekly game show The Weakest Link, had a certain visibility in the United States at the time, but according to her agent, her experience with Oprah was “hellacious.”
“Anne yelled at me after the show,” said Victor. “She hated Oprah and felt she had not been treated right by the Oprah people.” Robinson refused to discuss the matter, but Ed Victor recalled it as