Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [217]
Marian Fontana, whose husband, Dave, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, was hounded by Oprah’s producers, who had booked her for an upcoming show. “It was right after Dave’s funeral … and they were calling every ten minutes wanting something else. They wanted wedding videotapes and they wanted family photos and they wanted close-up shots.” When they heard she was holding a service for her husband on the beach where he had been a lifeguard for sixteen years, they insisted on coming. “They were very pushy,” she said, and when she declined, they canceled the booking.
In the spring of 2008, Oprah’s producers began booking for May sweeps and called James Frey to come on the show to talk about the paperback publication of his novel Bright Shiny Morning. They knew a rematch between Oprah and the author of A Million Little Pieces was a guaranteed ratings geyser, but the writer was not so eager to return to the scene of his reaming. Since getting bludgeoned on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, Frey and his wife had lost their newborn son, Leo, who died eleven days after birth from spinal muscular atrophy, and the writer was not going to put himself through another one of Her Majesty’s muggings, even to promote his novel, unless there were certain stipulations in place. Oprah’s producers explained the situation to her, and in the end, Frey was not booked, but Oprah did call him to apologize for how she had treated him two years before. She did not use her show to publicly say she was sorry, but Frey told reporters he appreciated her private apology. Oprah’s remorse may have been triggered by reading about a character in Frey’s novel who is embroiled in a scandal and, feeling people turn on him, begins to tape-record his conversations with the producers and host of a television talk show, including confessions the host made when she called him at home.
In their scramble to give Oprah ratings her producers can be rambunctious. “I found them to be … exceedingly difficult,” said Daniel J. Bagdade, the attorney who represented the first child in the United States to be sentenced as an adult for murder. His client, Nathaniel (Nate) Abraham, shot and killed Ronald Greene in Pontiac, Michigan. At the age of eleven Nate was sent to a maximum-security juvenile detention facility until he was twenty-one. Upon his release, Oprah’s producers were waiting to sign him to do a show, featuring his on-air apology to the family of his victim. His lawyer was not sanguine about putting him in the intense media spotlight of The Oprah Winfrey Show, but Nate was enthralled with the celebrity allure of Oprah. “She’s the person he admires most,” said the attorney. “So I agreed.… But once we got to Chicago, well …”
Seeing that what the producers had in mind for the show would put his client in legal jeopardy, Bagdade revoked Nate’s signed release. “Then it was two days and nights with Oprah and her attorney, a tough older gentleman [William Becker heads Harpo’s legal staff of twenty-five], and her hard-charging producers, who were aggressive and really backed us into a corner. They threatened to sue us for breaking the contract.… ‘We are not going to leave it here,’ they said. Oprah and I were back and forth on cell phones at midnight as she tried to get the show on the air. When I explained the legal complications to her, she called a lawyer in Michigan to make sure I was telling her the truth. She was reasonable and professional throughout, but I can’t say the same about her staff.”
In the end the show never aired. Instead, Oprah mediated Nate’s apology to his victim’s family privately, and Bagdade accompanied him and his mother and Ronald Greene’s relatives into Oprah’s office, which, he said, “was the size of a large house. Directly off her office is a wardrobe room, which is the size of another large house.… The shoe area alone seems to cover half a block.” Bagdade did not see Oprah’s huge office bathroom with its pond-sized tub of rose-colored marble.