Unauthorized autobiography of oprah

A new unauthorized biography of Oprah Winfrey by author Kitty Kelley claims the talk-show queen greatly exaggerated the poverty of her childhood, has engaged in several “lesbian affairs,” and staged a sham relationship with longtime love Stedman Graham to enhance her image. The book says Winfrey cooked up a dirt-poor childhood in Mississippi because the truth—that she was “a spoiled child’’ of modest means—was “boring.’’ Other allegations: Winfrey was wildly promiscuous as a young woman; has a cold, distant relationship with her mother; and doesn’t know the identity of her biological father. The book also claims that Winfrey had an affair with New Age musician and former Entertainment Tonight host John Tesh, in the 1970s.

The revelations—even the one about Winfrey’s real dad—are duds.

CELEBS Let me start with an admission: I’m still slogging my way through Oprah: A Biography, Kitty Kelley’s latest O-pus (524 pages in length), which hit bookstores yesterday. So I don’t profess to know all that she spills therein. However, I do know the Kitty Kelley methodology, which I studied extensively in the spring and summer of 2008 for a piece of high-concept nonsense I wrote for the December issue of Chicago magazine.

For the article, I tracked Kitty as she tracked Oprah. In the beginning, I had hoped that Kitty would participate. After all, as I pitched her in numerous e-mails, nothing would humanize her better than an account of her conquering the near-impossible task before her (with Random House’s multimillion-dollar blessing): Bagging the largest prize in the celebrity-biography stratosphere, complicated by the fact that her Royal O-ness has rendered her subjects mute via elaborate confidentiality agreements and informal omerta. (Violation of the Harpo code of silence probably falls just short of whacking—although careers surely won’t be spared.) And Oprah controls the airwaves like a North Korean propaganda minister, seemingly able to program whatever she wants, on whatever channel she chooses. (See, for example, her sycophantic 2010 Oscar special.) She also, you might have heard, knows how to effectively hawk the printed word—her self-named book club and magazine are major success stories in the downward spiralling print industry.

And, yet, here came the irrepressible Kitty Kelley, vowing to assemble the definitive, if unauthorized, Oprah biography. Iconic dirt and grime is her infamous craft. In fact, she has sullied the legacies of no less than four American icons—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy Reagan. So, to my way of thinking at least, her quest to com

Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: “This book is an unauthorized biography.” The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a burglar alarm. Suddenly I heard the rumble of thousands of Oprah book buyers charging out of Barnes & Noble—empty-handed.

Days before this exchange, I had felt the chill of media disdain when my publisher began booking my promotion tour. Larry King barred the door to his CNN talk show because, he said, he didn’t want to offend Oprah. Barbara Walters did the same thing, proclaiming on The View that the only reason people wrote unauthorized biographies was to dig “dirt.” There was no room for me at Charlie Rose’s roundtable and no comfy seat next to David Letterman. The late-night comic had recently reconciled with Oprah after a 16-year rift and did not want to risk another. On my 10-city tour I made few, if any, appearances on ABC-owned-and-operated stations because most of the stations that broadcast The Oprah Winfrey Show are owned by ABC or its affiliates. No one wanted to displease the diva of daytime television. Although they had not read the book prior to publication, they assumed, given the author and the subject, that my unauthorized biography would be a blistering takedown of a beloved icon.

The reviews ranged from rocks (The New York Times) to raves (The Los Angeles Times). My publisher, Crown Books, aimed for sales from the fan base fondly known as “Opraholics” and “Winfreaks,” but once Herself publicly denounced the book as “a so-called biography,” the fan base dwindled, and to date the book has yet to sell 300,000 copies (a disappointing figure for an author paid to sell millions). It’s true that traditional publishing is getting slammed by the Internet and can no longer guarantee