Given that she is one of the world’s most celebrated women, with a multibillion-US dollar media empire centered around her own personality, there have been strikingly few books about Oprah Winfrey. Among the many volumes dedicated to the O factor, most are published by Winfrey herself, some are children’s books and the rest are hagiographies (The Gospel According to Oprah, for example) or collections of her own quotations.
Winfrey plays a central role in the US media, with her own TV studios, magazine, and the hugely influential Oprah’s Book Club, which perhaps goes some way to explaining the reluctance of the publishing industry to tell the intriguing story of her rise to power. But what is it about Winfrey? How has she managed to discourage journalists and publishers from taking her on as a legitimate subject of investigation, and how did she successfully floor Kitty Kelley, reputedly the world’s most tenacious biographer?
Robert Feder, a media blogger who until two years ago was the TV columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, cites the cases of two Chicago journalists who put forward solid, well-researched proposals for Winfrey books, yet could not find a publisher willing to touch them. “They were not proposing rip jobs of Oprah, they were relatively favorable to her. And yet the publishing houses were so fearful of her they would not take the risk,” he said.
On Tuesday that publishing silence was broken with the arrival on the bookshelves of Oprah: a Biography. It is the latest from Kelley, the poison-pen writer whose previous subjects have included Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Nancy Reagan and the British royals. In the past, she has uncovered details of former US presidents John F Kennedy’s sexual trysts and George W Bush’s cocaine consumption. Her aim in this new Winfrey book, she says, is to debunk the mystique of this global public figure, to separate “fact from myth.”
Only this time, it seems, she has failed. By general critical consensus, she hasn’t been able to find Winfrey’s Achilles’ heel. The book contains few revelations. Kelley says she was told by a Winfrey cousin the identity of the star’s biological father, though declines to name him; she exposes a penchant for sour-cream potatoes, Ding Dong cakes, and fried chicken. So far, so underwhelming.
Kelley also revealed on ABC television this week that her own publisher, Crown, had shown signs of anxiety about the biography. She also alleged that several TV hosts, from Barbara Walters to Larry King and David Letterman, had shunned her from their shows because of their personal ties with her subject.
By her own admission, Kelley bumped up against a daunting wall of silence that protects Winfrey from the prying eyes of journalists. Though she claims to have conducted more than 800 interviews, almost a third of the people Kelley approached refused to speak to her. In a foreword to the book, Kelley says she encountered a “kind of fear” instilled in Winfrey’s friends and employees that deterred them from co-operating freely.
Observers who followed the rise of Winfrey as a television sensation in Chicago saw a tendency towards privacy develop into an entire business philosophy. Feder recalls that at the start Winfrey was accessible and open to the media. Before the start of each TV season, he would meet her to chat about her plans for the year and gossip about the competition. She’d send him Christmas cards and they would speak often on the phone.
In 1994 Feder wrote a piece for his paper disclosing that Winfrey was being sued by her former publicist over her employment practices. Overnight, their relationship changed. “Almost immediately I felt myself being shut out. My access stopped,” he says. “She wanted tighter control over her image and message, and she began shutting everything down. Our access began to disappear.” He never got another Christmas card.
When The Oprah Winfrey Show went nationwide in 1986, the incentive to contain and manage her self-image grew. It was not just that Winfrey was amassing a media empire — one valued at US$2.4 billion — it was that she was turning herself into a brand. Oprah Winfrey was the business, and the business was her. In a revealing comment to Fortune magazine in 2002, she said: “If I lost control of the business I’d lose myself — or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.”
Own herself is precisely what she did. In 1988 she set up her own TV studio, Harpo — Oprah backwards — where she recorded her show, followed by a film studio in which she made TV movies. Ten years later she set up Oprah.com, and two years after that she launched O, The Oprah Magazine. She secured so many outlets through which she could stream her own perfectly honed story that she no longer needed to deal with mediators such as journalists and authors who might see her in a different light.
“She has been exceptionally successful at controlling her own image,” says Janice Peck, media professor and author of The Age of Oprah. “She has repeated her own story over and over, and nobody can gain enough access to check the truth of what she says.”
At the center of Winfrey’s castle of secrecy is a legal requirement that she imposes on anyone who works for her: a confidentiality agreement never to reveal anything about her. Every member of the 500 or so Harpo staff has to sign one, as well as those on the fringes — according to Kelley, that includes caterers, florists, upholsterers, plumbers, and the vets who treat her dogs. The legal restraint lasts for life.
Lawyers say such agreements are as commonly used by celebrities in the US to clamp down on media intrusion, though Winfrey has made it into an art form. “The question you have to ask is whether this deprives people of their freedom of speech. Some would say that such blanket use of confidentiality agreements should not be allowed,” said Andrew Celli, a New York-based first amendment lawyer.
Elizabeth Coady, a former Harpo producer, tried in 1998 to write a book about her time in the company and was stopped by the courts, which ruled that her hands were tied by the agreement she signed. That sent a chill over the publishing world that is still felt today.
Winfrey says she is merely protecting herself from incessant snooping. But observers such as Feder suspect she has sacrificed something in the process.
“I feel very sad about it,” he says. “She has lost a good deal of the common touch that ironically helped bring her to the position she holds today.”
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50