Dad’s book is no Oprah pick
It could be a chilly Father’s Day for Oprah Winfrey ’s dad.
The talk queen tells us she’s “shocked” and “disappointed” that she had to hear it from the Daily News that her 74-year-old pop, Vernon, is writing a book about her.
Winfrey said she laughed recently when “one of my assistants said, ‘The Daily News is calling. They say they heard your father is writing a book about you.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. I can assure them it’s not true.’
“But then my sister said, ‘I think you should call your father.’ I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, ‘I meant to tell you I’ve been working on it.’ ”
Winfrey, 53, confided, “I was upset. I won’t say ‘devastated,’ but I was stunned.”
“The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey,” she added. “The last person.”
Oprah was 14 and pregnant when she left her mother’s home in Milwaukee to live with her father in Nashville. Her baby died weeks after he was born. She has said before that she’s grateful to her father for helping her go on, for teaching her discipline and the importance of education.
Nevertheless, Vernon, who plans to call his book, “Things Unspoken,” was quoted as saying he should have been tougher on her, because Oprah was “out of hand and an unruly child.”
“I have a good relationship with him,” Oprah told us Sunday, when she received the Elie Wiesel Foundation Humanitarian Award at the Waldorf. Though she hasn’t seen Vernon since he accompanied her on a trip to Africa a few months ago,
she said, “We talk, we talk, we talk.”
That’s why “I would have preferred to have known my father was working on this. It would have been a nice gesture, a courtesy,” she said.
OK, Vern: you’re the dad. No matter how famous she gets, it’s your job to protect your daughter.
Technorati Tags: Oprah, Father’s Day
Tags: Books I Won't Be Reading, Front Page, Heroes and Villains, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
No Comments »
