No, really: Am I expected to believe that in 21 years of broadcasting, The Oprah Winfrey Show has never once bumped a guest, and that keeping Fred and Kim Goldman on after Denise Brown refused to appear on the same stage with them should be elevated to the level of a “moral, ethical dilemma,” especially given that Oprah didn’t seem to have any moral or ethical qualms sticking an entire audience with $7,000 tax tabs for the Pontiacs she gave them?
There was a moment about halfway through yesterday’s Oprah show about If I Did It where Oprah Winfrey turns to the Goldmans and says that in the 13 years since the double homicide of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, “we’ve been able to move on with our lives,” and I thought to myself, wow, Steve Almond was right, she really is a “zillionaire narcissist.” And the irony of a woman who just last year spent an hour publicly humiliating a memoirist because she felt personally betrayed by the extent of his artistic license suggesting that a family who had lost a son and brother in a brutal killing by a man who had escaped punishment thanks to the bungling of the two prosecutors plopped on stage across from them ought to be ready to find some peace along with everybody else? I was impressed that Kim Goldman handled Winfrey’s ludicrous comments as well as she did when she spoke about how insulting she finds it when people assume that she and her family will be able to find peace.
“I thought Kim handled that beautifully,” Sharlene Martin, the Goldmans’ literary agent, agreed when we spoke on the telephone shortly after I’d had a chance to watch the show. “I admire her and Fred for owning their feelings and not acquiescing to pressure to ‘move on.'” But that wasn’t the main reason I’d called Martin; what I really wanted to know was how she felt about Winfrey’s repeated assertions that the Goldmans were only receiving 17 cents on every copy of If I Did It sold, a figure which anybody with any understanding of the publishing industry would immediately recognize as absurd.
“Let’s call it what it is,” Martin told me. “I was livid. I have absolutely no idea where that 17 cents came from. The first time I heard it was today.” She went on to describe the deal she negotiated with Beaufort Books on the Goldmans’ behalf as the best of the 75 deals she’s negotiated in the last four years, including the highest backend royalty participation—”a very, very substantial deal,” in her words, “almost a partnership.” The only possible explanation she could think of for where that number came from was the “extraordinary” number of outside parties who have claims against OJ Simpson‘s assets, from the attorneys working for the Goldmans on contingency to the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson, not to mention the percentage of the proceeds from the sales of the book earmarked for the Ron Goldman Foundation. But, she insisted, “I’m very proud of the deal I made for them.”
Earlier that afternoon, I was standing next to Beaufort president Eric Kampmann, who had described that 17 cent figure to me as “not even in the same universe as the real numbers,” as we waited in a midtown conference room for the Goldmans to come back from their search for a television that carried the Court TV channel, where Star Jones was interviewing Dominick Dunne. Kampmann had invited other Beaufort staffers, plus some folks from Midpoint Trade Books, to watch the show together, along with his wife, Anne, because yesterday was their 38th wedding anniversary. As he handed me a copy of the finished If I Did It hardcover to examine before he gave it to one of his guests, Kampmann talked about their good fortune in taking a book from signed contract to bookshelves in a little over a month without any major foul-ups. “I knew we could step up and do it,” he had said when he called me a few hours beforehand. “I knew we had the facilities to handle it.” The Goldmans arrived and said hello to the small crowd gathered to meet them, then decided (understandably enough) that they would rather watch the show alone. As they quietly headed back to their room, the rest of the group began to take their seats in front of the TV, where Winfrey would soon make her smug declarations about how wonderful it is to leave in a country where you have the freedom of choice and can tell everybody in the world about the books you won’t read because they disgust you…not that she had any problem regurgitating the secondhand evaluation of the contents fed to her by her producers.