Cracking the ice queen
By Catherine Masters
New Zealand Herald, Saturday Apr 17, 2010

Oprah Winfrey now rubs shoulders with the likes of President Barack Obama

"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.

Read the full piece at NZH.