Unlikeable by Edward Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

so, they joked ‘the fat lady hasn’t sung yet,’” explained one of Oprah’s closest friends who was intimately acquainted with her thinking. “It’s not that she isn’t aware that people make fun of her weight and define her as being a heavy person. She certainly is aware of it and, for the most part, ignores it.
    â€œBut it is a different thing to have a slur about her weight written as the subject line of a memo that is circulated in the White House,” the friend continued. “It doesn’t matter that Hillary and Bill’s fingerprints weren’t on the memo. In Oprah’s opinion, members of the Clinton administration wouldn’t have used phrases like that if they thought the president and first lady would find it offensive.
    â€œThat wasn’t the only reason Oprah never warmed to Hillary. But it was one of the many slights that distanced her fromHillary. She thought Hillary was a user and not a particularly trustworthy person. Oprah always kept her at arm’s length. I’m sure Hillary will make an approach to get Oprah’s support in the 2016 election, but I’m just as sure she won’t get it.”

    The second blow to fall on Hillary in 2008 came from another sort of royalty— Hollywood royalty in the form of the Dream-Works SKG trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen.
    Everyone in Hollywood was under the impression that the SKGs were FOBs—Friends of Bill. That is, until Geffen, who was worth $6 billion, threw a fund-raiser for Barack Obama in the sprawling ten-acre backyard of his Beverly Hills mansion.
    Geffen and his friends raised $1.3 million for Obama.
    But that wasn’t the worst of it as far as Hillary was concerned.
    Afterward, Geffen agreed to sit for a rare on-the-record interview with his homegirl New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The interview took place at his home, the fabulous old Jack Warner estate on Angelo Drive.On display in the 13,600-square-foot mansion were paintings by famous American artists, which were valued at $1.1 billion, making it the most valuable private art collection in the world. The home also featured a curiosity that was tailor-made for a Hollywood mogul—the floor on which Napoleon was standing when he proposed to Josephine.
    Normally, Geffen played his cards close to the vest, but he couldn’t restrain himself when he started venting about the Clintons.
    â€œIt’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the [Iraq] war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Geffen said. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”
    Most people outside Geffen’s inner circle didn’t know that he had parted company with Bill and Hillary several years before the Dowd interview.
    In the final hours of the Clinton administration, Bill granted 177 presidential pardons. One of them went to bank swindlers Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory. It was later learned that Tony Rodham, Hillary’s younger brother, had received a “consultant’s fee” to arrange the Gregory pardon.
    Another pardon went to the fugitive Marc Rich, an international commodities trader who had fled to Switzerland to avoid being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion. The pardon was viewed in many circles as a flagrant payoff to Rich’s former wife, Denise, who had contributed more than $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign and $450,000 to the Clinton Library.
    At the same time that Bill was letting the Gregorys and Rich go scot-free, Geffen—who was also a major Democratic Party donor—was lobbying the president to grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier. A Native American activist, Peltier was serving two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first-degree murder in theshooting of two FBI agents. Many in