Chekhov’s Mistess

Sorry Mom. Can I Have My Check Now?

I’m torn. It’s so easy to be cynical when you know that Frey’s walking this scandal right over to the same bank that he and a million other liars frequent, but Oprah really meant business today, surprisingly turning her glare on editor Nan Talese and apologizing to her audience for her heretofore support of the man she helped make rich.

Last time I saw that show, hundreds of ladies (and a handful of men) were screaming and crying because Oprah had doled out new iPods to them all. With that background, I have to say I was shocked at the seriousness and candor of today’s show. Most tellingly was Oprah’s face after a clip of Maureen Dowd who said that she (Oprah) should kick Frey’s skinny little (something to that affect)… With that, Oprah’s look seemed to say, no, this is serious and I-want-answers. When one guest said she was sad, she said, “no, I’m embarrassed and disappointed,” then repeating herself, trancelike as though she were saying it privately, mulling over the idea in her head.

She didn’t exactly get answers, but she certainly did do some flogging, pressing Frey for details on his lies and shaming Talese for not taking action on those fabulisms that now seem so obvious, like his tale of getting two root canals with no Novocain, or the easy to check stuff, like his spending hours instead of months in jail. Keeping in mind that he had discussed these events with her on a previous show, he rather unabashedly treated his tales as though they were the acts of “characters” in a novel, with the purpose, he said, of “rendering them unidentifiable.” Oprah picked up on his use of the word “characters,” making his defense seem all the more feeble, but he did maintain that he still thought of the book as a memoir, not a novel. He said that his problem was that he wanted to make himself seem bigger than he was, but generally fell back on a shaky memory and admitted that he had made mistakes.

The memory play was Talese’s defense, as she said that everything in the book seemed plausible to her and her colleagues when they published the book. There was no mention of the earlier claims that (as I heard) Frey submitted the book as a novel and she convinced him it would sell better as a memoir. Besides holding back a new print-run for a disclaimer, I didn’t get the feeling that this incident had or would have any negative impact on Talese, her company or the industry, and despite their public apology after the show, I doubt fact checkers will suddenly appear in the halls of Doubleday or any other publishing house.

With a cast of supporting journalists – who were all on the finger pointing side of truth and Oprah – the show felt more like Meet the Press than its normal feel-goodness, but in the end Oprah couldn’t sustain that eyebrow thing Tim Russert does and she let Frey off with nothing more than an almost motherly scolding. I don’t recall any mention of her removing the Oprah Book Club seal that goes on the book, which I think would be about the worst she could do. In the end, Frey said he was (now) a better person, having come on the show, and that was that. Cha-ching.

As some have pointed out, Frey is not the most consequential liar we have in this country and he’s not the only one to make a lot of money in the prevarication trade, but you have to ask yourself just why he went on Oprah and Larry King – which had the perverse effect of sending his book’s sales ever higher? Because, that’s just what we do; admission, contrition and enrichment is de rigueur in our scandal hungry country. To go on t.v. with your sad face on and “tell the truth” is the way smart liars get rich. If he had started out just telling the truth, chances are, his would have been just another manuscript on the slushpile. Ultimately, despite what seemed to be earnest aims on Oprah’s part, today’s show was little more than free publicity for A Million Little Pieces.

comments

When you lie on Oprah, you’re just asking for it.  Either that or you just want to get really rich and don’t really give a sh*t.

    – Buffy (01/27  at  01:40 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: January 26, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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