Cracking the ice queen

"There's a warm side to Oprah," writes Kitty Kelley in the forward of her supposedly tell-all book, Oprah, A Biography, "and a side that can only be called cold as ice".

I've finished the book and I'm still waiting for the icicles to melt, even a bit. Where's the warmth, Kitty?

Not that this is necessarily Kelley's fault.

Winfrey's cold side, or possibly her warm side, refused to talk to Kelley, and shut down anyone who is a genuine friend, which is really not surprising given the well-known barbed pen of Kelley, the gossipy bleached-blond American queen of the unauthorised celebrity biography.

None of Winfrey's many staff are allowed to talk about her either, on pain of sacking and suing, so the book has a lot of bits of old interviews with Winfrey, a lot of disgruntled former staff and people who have run into or across Winfrey over the years. The family members who did talk sometimes sounded bitter - as you might expect when you drag your comb through the gutter of such a rags to stupendous riches story as Winfrey's.

There's a lot of salacious stuff, to be sure, and plenty of raking over old ground: sex, drugs and child abuse, for example, which if you hadn't already heard about, would shock you - but this stuff has been out there for years.

As for warmth? You've got to be joking. I detected more sadness than warmth and, funnily enough, though Kelley is renowned for her incredible range of sources and immaculate filing cabinets full of interviews (allegedly 800-odd interviews for this one), I didn't feel she'd got to the bottom of Winfrey.

Scratched away the surface perhaps, but with her own Kelley take. Winfrey is revealed, with considerable repetition, as incredibly driven right from childhood. She is both money-obsessed and big-gesture generous and, always, utterly, self-obsessed. Oh and it almost goes without saying, a monster of a control freak.

The new shock horror stuff seems to be: Winfrey's dad Vernon Winfrey is not her real dad and no one will tell her who is, which upsets her greatly; that she gets staff to call her Mary and won't allow cellphones because she doesn't want to be secretly recorded or photographed; that some of her family deny she was sexually abused as a child; and Kelley takes crack at the ice queen that she is prone to wild exaggerations (plain lies, according to Aunt Katharine) telling different versions of her life to suit whatever media she's talking to - did she really have cockroaches called Melinda and Sandy as pets because she was so poor?

We may never know for sure. Kelley doesn't nail this stuff down as truth or lie, she just puts it all out there (though I'm leaning away from the cockroaches as truth).

I guess, in this way, the book does shock. Who knew the cuddly telly-face in the living room told so many porkies?

The real shocking stuff, though, comes not from the endless titillating speculation over things like whether Winfrey and long-time partner (the very dull) Stedman Graham have sex or are in fact gay, but in the detail of some of those stories about Winfrey's early life, like sexual abuse (which Kelley does believe and does treat sympathetically).

Winfrey was outed by her now dead drug-addict half-sister for having a baby in her teens, (which, according to Winfrey, could have been fathered by her uncle).

She ran off the rails into teenage promiscuity and was allegedly at one stage going to reveal her teenage prostitution in an autobiography which she pulled when friends warned her against this.

So there's plenty of this sort of stuff. But, ultimately, at more than 500 pages, this book gets really tedious. It's way too padded and over-stuffed with contradictory tales.

The book does get off to a good old rollicking start, however. I even had a slight primal shiver of excitement that this was going to be a fascinating rip-busting insight into the one-woman empire who has had such phenomenal success and who pops up on TV screens here and around the world every day.

It sort of delivers. Kelly describes in chapter one how Winfrey blew into Chicago one freezing day (setting the cold-as-ice theme?) to host a daytime talk show and "introduced all 233 pounds of herself to the city by marching in her very own parade, arranged by WLS-TV.

"She wore one of her five fur coats, a Jheri curl [hairstyle] and what she called her 'big mama' earrings. Waving to people along State Street, she yelled, 'Hi, I'm Oprah Winfrey. I'm the new host of AM Chicago ... Miss Negro on the air'.

"She was a big, one-woman carnival full of yeow, whoopee and hallelujah," writes Kelley.

She soon trounced reigning daytime talk show king Phil Donahue in the ratings and he moved out to New York.

In this first chapter, Kelley firmly establishes Winfrey's ego. She jumps to her subject's debut as an actress in The Colour Purple, for which she would get Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for best supporting actress.

Quincy Jones (who would become part of Winfrey's replacement family - she didn't much like her own) apparently told director Steven Spielberg he'd found the perfect person to play Winfrey's role of Sofia, "she is so fine ... fat and feisty. Very feisty."

Apparently, Winfrey went around telling people she was destined for great things.

"I'm Diana Ross, and Tina Turner, and Maya Angelou."

Apparently, she also told Spielberg he should put her name on theatre marquees and her face on the posters, then told him he was making a big mistake when he refused.

"You wait. You'll see. I'm going national. I'm going to be huge," she apparently said.

But he didn't change his mind, and Winfrey did not forget, writes Kelley.

"When she became as 'huge' as she had predicted, he became a weed in her garden of grudges."

Kelley jumps around in this book a lot, which gets really annoying, and explains that a week before the movie's premier, Winfrey decided to do a show on rape, incest and sexual molestation. Volunteers talked to her on the telly about their sexual abuse. This became Winfrey's signature programme - a victim who triumphs over adversity, and the start of the Oprah Winfrey phenomenon.

"During that programme, she introduced a new kind of television, that plunged her viewers into two decades of muddy lows and starry highs. In the process, she became the world's first black female billionaire and a cultural icon of near-saintly status.

"'I am the messenger of God', she said at various times along the way. 'I am his messenger ... My show is my ministry'."

On the show itself, in December 1985, Winfrey asks a young white woman called Laurie when the fondling by her father led to something else and if she remembers the first time her father had sexual intercourse with her, etc. Kelley talks quite a bit about that show and how Winfrey, bursting into tears, reveals for the first time that she, too, had been abused. And that's all by page five.

It's pretty gripping so far.

For the next few seconds Winfrey appeared to be discovering, for the first time, that what she had experienced as a 9-year-old child was indeed rape, a defilement so unspeakable that she had never been able to put it into words until that very moment, says Kelley.

"Her audience felt as if they were watching the fissures of a soul split open as she admitted her shameful secret. Oprah revealed that she had been raped by her 19-year-old cousin when she was forced to share a bed with him in her mother's apartment."

She also claimed she was sexually molested by her cousin's boyfriend and then her favourite uncle, from the age of 9 until she was 14 - which her family denies.

Chapter One covers the controversy on the shows Winfrey does - on pornography, in which she gets female porn stars to talk about male organs, endurance and ejaculation; Ku Klux Klan members in white sheets; nude nudists; women with sexual disorders; whether size matters.

Reporters love her, the audience is intoxicated. She asks Dudley Moore how such a short man can sleep with women so tall ("luckily, most of the extra length seems to be in their legs," he says.)

And on it goes, but also about how she has become a heroine to women and a champion for children through her rape and incest shows, details about her work to set up legislation and later website to catch child abuse offenders.

Winfrey, according to Kelley, used her shows as therapy, and Kelley reflects Winfrey's loneliness as an abused child and later insecurities.

The next chapter, called Two, could be called Truth or Lies. It covers recollections of her early years as dirt-poor and fatherless, neglected by her teenage welfare mother, "the only toy I had was a corn cob doll with toothpicks," she apparently told reporters, and we are informed of the existence of the pet cockroaches.

Kelley says: "Oprah morphed into Oprah-rella as she spun her tales about the switch-wielding grandmother and cane-thumping grandfather who raised her until she was 6 years old ...

"Oprah played with race like a kitten batting a ball of yarn ...

"'I was jes' a po' little ole' nappy-headed coloured chile," she said of her birth on January 29, 1954 in Mississippi, the most racist state in the nation."

Her sister Patricia, however, has dismissed the "myth" of grinding poverty, saying Oprah he had always had a dog, plus a parakeet called Bo-Peep, and never kept cockroaches for pets.

This is the sister who says Winfrey invited men over during the day while their mother was working and would give the younger siblings (she had a half-brother too, all had different fathers, who would die from Aids) a popsicle and send them outside to play.

When she was older the sister claims Winfrey showed her how she did "The Horse - which is what she called the sex act.

"It took Patricia many years to realise that Oprah was selling The Horse - trading sexual favours for money."

Oprah's Aunt Katharine tells Kelley how she loves Winfrey but does not understand the lies she tells - "she's been doing it for years now".

The book goes on through Winfrey's fallings-out with family, her tendencies to not ever speak again to people who offend her, her rise through the trashy talk show years and weight struggles, through broken relationships and cocaine use, to her more recent emergence on a spiritual path where she interviews New Age gurus and has upped her philanthropy with huge amounts of money to various causes and charities, though always with the camera on her, as Kelley points out more than once.

If you are a true student of Winfrey, this may be the book for you.

I didn't really feel her, though perhaps this is Kelley's cold-as-ice point, but to me the book somehow lacked the "O factor".

The contradiction between the warm, bubbly Winfrey on the telly who is unafraid to bring up the big questions - such as what your stools should look like - and the cold ice diva might be hard for her adoring fans to reconcile with the woman they think they know.

But somehow I doubt it will matter.

MISTRESS OF THE UH-OH BIOGRAPHY

Looking impeccable in elegant designer clothing bought with the proceeds of almost three decades' worth of seven-figure book advances, Kitty Kelley has spent the past week energetically promoting her highly-unauthorised take on the life, times, and habits of the most successful woman in TV, Oprah Gail Winfrey.

The book soared to the top of the best-seller lists, as Kelley's books tend to do. Publishers Crown ordered an initial run of 500,000 copies, around 18 for every single bookstore in the US.

Kelley's reputation precedes her. On purely commercial terms, she's almost certainly the most economically-valuable biographer in the literary world. On a journalistic level, she's a force of nature. People call her an "uh-oh" writer, because that's what you say when you hear she's researching your life. Her prurient, deliciously sordid books destroy blue chip reputations.

Her 1986 biography of Frank Sinatra, His Way, largely ignored the singer's extraordinary career, focusing on his colourful love life and links to organised crime. Critics called it gutter journalism, but hailed the book as one of the greatest show business biographies.

In 1991, she gleefully recast America's favourite granny, Nancy Reagan, as a high-maintenance astrology nut who'd lied about her age, hit her children, and cheated on Ronnie. She learned this week exactly what sort of power Winfrey wields, when her rummage through Oprah's dirty laundry got only a handful of takers. "We were told by Barbara Walters' producer 'no, you cannot be on The View. I cannot disrupt my relationship with Oprah'," she revealed last week.

Kelley likes to emphasise her exhaustive research: the years of phone calls, letter-writing, and flying around the world to meet unwitting sources. That is what gives her the edge, she says. For her Sinatra biography, she spoke to 857 people. For the Bush family, it was 988. When she chronicled Nancy Reagan's life, she did an astonishing 1022 interviews.

Critics, of course, will search for factual inaccuracies and accuse Kelley also of cherry-picking negative anecdotes Time magazine once carped that she: "fails to bring perspective or analysis to the fruits of her reporting and at times lards her work with dollops of questionable inferences and innuendos".

A decade ago, Kelley received a dose of her own medicine when a tabloid reporter called George Carpozi jnr released an unauthorised biography of her, Poison Pen.

The book portrayed a troubled girl brought up by an alcoholic mother, who fell into her trade after going to Washington in the mid-1960s to work for Senator Eugene McCarthy. In 1969, Kelley landed a job as a researcher on the Washington Post. She left, in murky circumstances, two years later, to go freelance and wrote her first book, an expose of the health-farm industry called The Glamour Spas in 1975. Her first celebrity biography, of Jackie Onassis, came four years later. Its energetically researched revelations about her extravagant sex life earned it the title Jackie Oh!, along with best-seller status.

Since then, through five more books Kelley's technique has remained broadly the same: she spends years accumulating information about her subject. Then she slaps it into a manuscript. When it's launched, she gives endless interviews, dissecting her unfortunate victim.

While it's tempting to pour scorn at the concoction of rumour and innuendo that is cobbled into Kelley's books, it's also misguided. People buy her books by the million for the same reason they read gossip website TMZ: to be entertained and titillated.

When you're dissecting someone's character, the devil is in the detail. And attention to detail is Kelley's trademark.

- additional reporting by INDEPENDENT