Review: Oprah: A Biography, by Kitty Kelley

If you are reading this review, you probably want me to hurry up and get to the dish. So here it is:

Oprah once called room service and ordered two pecan pies, which she ate all by herself.
She once sent a diamond toe ring to Diane Sawyer.
She did some cocaine in her 20s.
She sometimes embellishes her past.
She looks much better on TV than she does without her makeup on.
She controls her image very tightly.
She's not so warm and huggy when she's off camera.
She has terrible taste in decorating.
She has a really big sense of entitlement.
She won't give her mom her phone number.

So much for explosive revelations. That's not to say this book isn't worth your time. Notorious celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley (Jacquie Kennedy Onassis, Liz Taylor, Sinatra) is a plodding writer who repeats every bit of bitchy gossip served up by former landscapers and other disaffected folks. But she is also a faithful chronicler of Oprah's early life. And that is a fascinating tale.

How did Oprah - born in 1954 to an unwed teenage mother in racist, small-town Mississippi - become the richest and most influential woman of her generation? One clue is that she was aspirational from the very start. At 10, she saw Diana Ross on the Ed Sullivan show and immediately decided that she too was going to be a rich and famous black woman.

Kelley accuses Oprah of exaggerating the poverty and deprivation of her early childhood. Perhaps she did. But her journey is no less astonishing. For the first few years of her life, she was raised largely by her grandparents. Later, she bounced back and forth between her mother in Milwaukee (who by then had two more children) and her father, who owned a barbershop in Nashville. (Her father was not, in fact, her father, as she later discovered.)

Her adolescence was chaotic and deeply troubled. She was sexually abused. She was promiscuous. She even slept with men for money. Just before her 15th birthday, she gave birth to a premature baby, a son, who died a few weeks later. She remembered it as "the shaming, most embarrassing, horrible thing" of her young life.

Most girls with a CV like that are headed straight for the underclass. But Oprah was not most girls. A week after giving birth she went back to school, where no one knew she'd been pregnant. She threw herself into becoming a someone. She told her drama teacher she was going to be a movie star.

Oprah was a born performer, with enormous belief in herself and a ferocious drive for self-improvement. She had a poster on her mirror with a quote from Jesse Jackson. "Excellence is the best deterrent to racism," it said. "Therefore, be excellent." She refused to speak black English. She spoke in local churches, won major speaking competitions and got herself elected vice-president of her mostly white high school. (Her campaign slogan was "Put a Little Color in Your Life. Vote for the Grand Ole Oprah.") She landed a job at a black radio station, then became the first black woman on local television. She was 21. She told people she was going to be the black Barbara Walters.

Part of Oprah's genius is her phenomenal ability to project warmth and authenticity. Her fans adore her because she's able to seem like Everywoman. Her troubles with men, food and (as she eventually admitted) drugs make her seem flawed and vulnerable, just like them. Unlike them, she never let her troubles hold her back. Even as she lay prostrate on the floor, weeping over Mr. Wrong, she was planning her breakthrough into major markets.

Professional setbacks simply redoubled her determination. At 22, she was recruited to co-anchor the leading news show in Baltimore, where she was a miserable, humiliating flop. (She was so unready for prime time that she mispronounced Canada as Ca-NAY-da). She picked herself up and was eventually offered an experimental morning talk show. By 33, she was TV's highest-paid talk-show host. She surrounded herself with smart people who were extremely loyal to her and worked like dogs. By 50, just as she had predicted, she was a billionaire.

You can argue whether Oprah's influence has been better or worse for the culture. I'd argue both. (The Queen of confessional TV has constantly campaigned for liberal social values and believes in reading books.) Kelley isn't interested in this question. Her job is to dig up scandal, which she has done by tracking down everybody who ever had a grievance.

Yet people looking for titillation will be disappointed to learn there's no evidence that Oprah ever had a lesbian affair with Diane Sawyer or anybody else. It's true she's not fond of her mother, but it's also easy to see why. Most of her relatives are a dodgy lot. Her half-sister, a drug addict, peddled the story about her secret pregnancy to the National Enquirer for $19,000. She has been remarkably generous to them anyway. Many of the people she met on the way up are aggrieved that they don't hear from her any more. But so what?

Oprah has been plagued for years by people who want to make money off their relationship to her - ex-boyfriends, miffed employees and the like. Today, everyone who works for her must sign an elaborate confidentiality agreement pledging not to talk about her - ever. Kelley makes a big deal of this. She argues that although Oprah pretends to live her life in public, in fact she has a lifelong obsession with secrecy. "The book," she says, "tries to show how these secrets, these awful secrets, controlled Oprah for most of her life." It doesn't seem to occur to her that Oprah might have a perfectly legitimate business reason for trying to protect her multibillion-dollar brand.

You can probably tell by now that I don't like Kitty Kelley much. She is remarkably thick-headed. She has no answers for the really interesting questions about Oprah, who has probably had more impact on popular culture than any other single figure of our time. Until that book comes along, though, she's done us a service.

Margaret Wente is a Globe and Mail columnist.