Don't fuck with the Big O

Like the rest of the country, Chicago is all abuzz about yesterday's live telecast of the Oprah show and her public tongue lashing of James Frey, author of the best selling, controversial-exposed-as-a-lie memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

Unless you live in a cave, Frey's sensational fake memoir of his years as a criminal drug addict on the mutha of all benders was recently exposed by TheSmokingGun.com as fabrication. Last September, Oprah anointed Frey and his book as an "Oprah Book Club" selection, which automatically means instant celebrity for some poor writer whose been struggling to pay his or her rent and cell phone bill while laboring over the Great American Novel. It also means a guaranteed readership of millions who'll do anything that Oprah tells them, even jumping off the roof of the John Hancock Building.

Why Frey submitted himself to Oprah's flagellation before millions of television viewers is beyond me. Personally, I would have told her to go get fucked and then move to France next door to Roman Polanski. Then again, you don't fuck with the Big O, for there was Frey, with his greasy receding hairline, nervously downing glasses of water until I sat waiting for his bladder to burst all over Oprah's couch.

I don't regularly watch Oprah. I don't particularly like her, and have grown hardened to her happy talk, thanks to real life. I mean, it's easy to lecture some single welfare mother about gratitude and finding happiness when you have over a billion cool ones in the bank. I much prefer finding my own reading material than to jump on the Oprah Book Club bandwagon reading whatever sentimental swill that she recommends.

The only time I have seen Oprah in person was on the Jumbotron at the United Center, sitting front row and center at Tina Turner's farewell concert with Stedman, her best friend Gayle, and the rest of her sycophants. When the Jumbotron wasn't focused on Oprah, she was yawning and checking her watch, but as soon as the camera zoomed in on her, Oprah suddenly came alive; jumping out of her seat and pumping her fist in the air to beat the old Harry. I came to the conclusion that Oprah was extremely sleep-deprived when she snuck out of the concert before it was over.

Oprah as a coporation, is also not necessarily a good citizen of Chicago's philanthropic community. She doesn't support any of the philanthropic foundations which are much better equipped to address societal ills, such as the outstanding Chicago Foundation for Women which supports a majority of Chicago's women's non-profit services community. Instead, she hawks her Angel Foundation and other Oprah-branded charities that suck millions of dollars away from organizations serving women and girls, or populations most at risk of contracting HIV and AIDS (e.g., heterosexual African-American women), or support Chicago's deplorable public schools, perpetuating our broken philanthropic system. Unless something is in it for Oprah - some guest she can exploit on her show or publicity - forget it.

But last night, my friend and I paused "The Aristocrats" DVD to watch the 11 p.m. repeat of Oprah's attempts to rehabilitate her Oprah-brand and image as goddess of the soccer moms, after the earlier live telecast was pre-empted by Chimpy's presidential press conference. We spent the first several minutes commenting on Oprah's choice of wardrobe during her opening mea culpa apologizing for her half-cocked phone call to Larry King last week proclaming the brohouha over Frey's book as "much ado about nothing." The winged collar on Oprah's blouse made her appear as if she didn't have a neck. I remarked to my friend that if not an intentional choice, it was certainly subliminal, providing Oprah protection if things got dicey and she could retreat down into her blouse.

In addition to Frey, who if he were a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanomo Bay she surely would have tortured him, Oprah spanked Nan Talese, Frey's publisher and Doubleday vice president, who essentially blamed her editors for not catching the book's many discrepancies. (That's right, Nan, blame it on the workers just like every other major corporation that lays off 30,000 workers because of bad executive decision-making.) Washington Post Richard Cohen also was a guest (or plant), who praised Oprah for her courage in admitting that "you made a mistake."

It doesn't surprise me that journalists are lining up this morning to kiss Oprah's ass. I have seen Oprah's wrath against reporters - especially reporters making crap money - who dare cross her "Hineyness" up close and personal. In 1989, a Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist reported a wild rumor that was sweeping the floor of Chicago's Board of Exchange that Oprah had stabbed her boyfriend, Steadman Graham, after coming home and discovering him in bed with her male hairdresser as being essentially true. Oprah had the columnist summarily fired when she threatened to file a mega slander suit against the Sun-Times, even though it was a blind item. (This columnist now writes for a community newspaper group, but the queens sill love her and insist that Oprah did come home and catch Steddy with his cock shoved up her hairdresser's behind.)

But it wasn't until Oprah tried to get my late friend, Don Alexander, fired after he phoned in a complaint about one of her shows that I truly began to understand just how powerful Oprah was. Don was a reporter and editor in the Royko-mold, although without Royko's success. He was a brilliant writer, but unfortunately had a serious drinking problem that kept him from advancing beyond crappy $25K-a-year jobs working for neighborhood rags. Don fulfilled his own self-prophecy of not living to 50 when he died suddenly at age 48 a few years ago, alone in his apartment with the TV blasting and a warmed-over beer on the table next to his Lazy Boy recliner. The only consolation of Don dying so young was that in the final 18 months of his life, I had never seen Don happier after he moved from Chicago, where he was miserable, to Atlanta where he blossomed under the love and support of an old army buddy and his wife.

Don had spent much of his adult life in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of master sergeant. He managed to earn a degree in journalism and left the army shortly before the first Gulf War where he was stationed in Alaska. He could speak knowledgably about any subject - politics, science, religion, literature, history - and there were many late nights of slurred phone conversations about events yet to transpire that at the time, I passed off as more of Don's drunken rants, but shockingly proved to be true.

He was the greatest colleague I ever worked with. Listeing to Don's end of his personal phone calls working at the desk adjacent to his, he should have been the one to write "A Million Little Pieces," as he discussed waking up in the morning to find cops in his bedroom shoving guns in his face looking for some fugitive that had shown up at one of his many parties, or screaming at his mother, "Suck my dick," when she blew her share of the rent money playing video poker. As I pretended to be busy at work and not eavesdropping on his personal phone calls, Don would invaribly share his side of the story after he hung up and we were outside having a smoke.

While I was getting in touch with the intuitive spirits, Don would be writing seamless, one-draft, perfect columns, accurately predicting events like 9/11 years before it occurred when the country was preoccupied with President Clinton getting blow jobs by a pudgy intern. In fact, it was just a few weeks after 9/11 when Don called me at work (I had left the paper) and asked if I had heard any news stories about someone phoning in a terrorist threat against Oprah on WGN. When I asked him why, he told me he had just been released by the Chicago bureau of the FBI for leaving an angry message on the general manager of WLS, the local station that carries the Oprah show, voice mail.

Apparently, Don had been drinking heavily the night before and was watching a repeat of the day's earlier telecast. I didn't see the particular show, but Don had taken offense to something Oprah said about "what did America expect" in reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition to calling Oprah a "$500 million cunt," he left his name and work number, and his immediate supervisor's name and work number. The next morning, the Lincolnwood police showed up at the office and escorted Don to the police station, where he was interrogated for the next five hours by the FBI. Eventually, the feds released Don with a stern warning. If it hadn't been two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the station probably would have ignored Don's voice mail as just another crank call.

To the executive editor's credit, a brave young man whose name I won't mention here because I don't want him to lose his job, he refused to buckle under Oprah's demands that he terminate Don. Instead, he told Don that he didn't care if he exercised his right to free speech, but to please leave out his place of employment in any future angry calls to celebrities. For those of us who listened to Don's story, our first response was, "Well, Oprah is a cunt."

It wasn't until Don passed away a few years later that I ran into a former colleague at his memorial, actually a loud, raucous party hosted by his famly that had propped up Don's cremains on the buffet table next to the Jell-O mold. We were standing in the kitchen when I mentioned Don's terrorist threat against Oprah. To my surprise, she told me she had a copy of the police tape of the actual voice mail. We quickly made arrangements to meet for drinks the next week and she would give me the tape to make copies (I made seven).

Like "The Aristocrats," the three-minute-long, voice-mail message is one of the most vile, vitriolic verbal attacks I've ever listened too. In the message, Don threatens to take Oprah out, refers to ABC as the "other Disney channel," and uses the work "fuck" thirty times in one sentence. From what I understand, Oprah hit the roof when the cops played it for her.

At any rate, Oprah accomplished what she set out to do on her show yesterday morning. She rehabilitated her brand, but not until after she read all the angry e-mail from her fans telling her that she was wrong when she said the truth doesn't matter. She won the praise of her most vocal critics, proving that she is a sly, master manipulator by disguising her spin with tears and astonishment. This will all die down eventually, but wherever my friend Don is, I hope he's feeling vindicated and laughing his ass off. He's the only guy I know who got away with fucking with the Big O.