Well, it’s about time that Oprah entered the fray
James Frey and the publishing world can relax a little: Oprah isn’t angry. Frey has come under intense criticism over allegations that his best-selling memoir of addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” is far from the candid self-portrait that he had claimed it to be.
But in a surprise call Wednesday night to CNN’s “Larry King Live,” where Frey was being interviewed, Oprah Winfrey – who selected the book for her book club, turning it into a best seller – came to his defense.
Calling the flap “much ado about nothing,” Winfrey said: “What is relevant is that he was a drug addict … and stepped out of that history to be the man he is today and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves.”
The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, posted a story Sunday claiming Frey had substantially fabricated his criminal record and other aspects of his past, including his involvement in a car crash that killed two high school classmates.
He has since acknowledged that he embellished parts of the book, but insists: “The emotional truth is there.”
Get your Phil online
Oprah protégé Dr. Phil McGraw is taking his relationship advice to the Internet.
The author and syndicated talk show host started offering his psychological pearls of wisdom Thursday morning in a deal with online dating service Match.com.
Subscribers who pay $12.99 a month for Match.com’s new “MindFindBind” premium service will get access to short video clips of McGraw talking about such topics as making good first impressions and having meaningful conversations on a first date.
Just chewing over old times
Kenny Chesney and ex-wife Renee Zellweger were seen together in a sandwich shop near Nashville, but his publicist says they have no plans to get back together.
“They’re friends,” the spokesperson said. “The media made so much more out of everything that the public has no clarity about any of it. And that’s the tragedy. They’re two nice people who don’t choose to live in public.”
Zellweger, 36, and Chesney, 37, wed in a small ceremony on the Caribbean island of St. John last May, but split up four months later.
And she thanks the witch doctor
Melissa Joan Hart, former star of the TV’s “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” has given birth to a baby boy.
Mason Walter Wilkerson, born Wednesday afternoon, weighed in at 9 pounds. It is the first child for Hart, 29, and her rock musician husband, Mark Wilkerson.
“He was a little stubborn, but all is well,” Hart says. “Everyone is well, and we are all relieved.”
An unfinished chapter
Author J.K. Rowling says that her mother’s death while she was writing the Harry Potter books led her to make her hero suffer the death of his own parents.
Rowling said part of the pain of losing her mother Anne, who died in 1990 at the age of 45 after fighting multiple sclerosis for a decade, was that she never knew her daughter was writing the books about the boy wizard.
“I had never told her about Harry Potter,” Rowling says. “Barely a day goes by when I do not think of her. There would be so much to tell her, impossibly much.”
The birthday bunch
Actor Charles Nelson Reilly is 75. Comedian Rip Taylor is 72. Actor Billy Gray (“Father Knows Best”) is 68. Actor Richard Moll (“Night Court”) is 63. Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (“Seinfeld”) is 45.Country singer Trace Adkins is 44. Actress Penelope Ann Miller is 42. Actor Patrick Dempsey is 40. Actress Traci Bingham (“Baywatch”) is 38. Actress Nicole Eggert (“Baywatch,” “Charles in Charge”) is 34. Actor Orlando Bloom is 29.