Oprah Loved the Story, Part II
Here's more of the back-story about the magic memoir that never happened, Angel at the Fence ...
In that case Ms. Winfrey was in part trusting the credibility of Mr. Frey’s publisher, an imprint of Random House, when she anointed “A Million Little Pieces” as a selection of her book club and propelled it to best seller status. But in the case of Mr. Rosenblat it was Ms. Winfrey who gave his story a mass hearing long before he ever secured a book deal.
According to the prologue in a galley copy of “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat entered a contest in The New York Post for the “best love story sent in by a reader.”
“On a whim, I wrote a couple of paragraphs and mailed them in,” he wrote. He won the 1995 contest, he said, and he and his wife received a candlelit dinner overlooking Central Park and a trip to Broadway and were featured in the newspaper. As a result of that media exposure, Mr. Rosenblat wrote, Ms. Winfrey invited him on the show.
Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1996, telling their story of meeting as children while Mr. Rosenblat was a prisoner at a subcamp of the infamous Buchenwald. Eleven years later the couple returned to Ms. Winfrey’s show, and Mr. Rosenblat got down on his knees to give his wife a new ring. Ms. Winfrey called it “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.”
