My first rootin’-tootin’, honest-to-God New York Times bestseller was actually a nonfiction book called The Day America Told the Truth. On some level, that seemed like a joke. Little, Brown had passed on it, so Richard Pine, my intrepid agent at that time, took it around to other publishers and sold it to McGraw Hill. In 1991, the book hit the Times bestseller list. That drove Little, Brown more than a little crazy, especially my fiction editor and friend Fredi Friedman—who was very smart, and also very competitive.
My partner on that nonfiction book was Peter Kim, the head of research at J. Walter Thompson. Peter and I were best buddies. When the book came out, we appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was a very big deal in the publishing world.
Peter Kim was a brilliant guy whose family had escaped from North Korea in the sixties. They wound up living in Iowa, of all places, which Peter actually loved. He went on to graduate from NYU—at nineteen.
The very sad thing about my friend Peter was that he was dying of a heart ailment. Peter knew it. There was nothing he could do. He’d already seen half the specialists in New York. But Peter, being Peter, wanted to keep working. And he continued to be a special friend.
Peter could talk about anything, anything. But minutes before the Oprah taping, he started mumbling, “Oh my God, Jim, I can’t do this. What are we doing here? In Chicago? I think I’m going to throw up. These are Oprah’s people.”
Early in the show Oprah tried her best to ask Peter questions. She threw him softball after softball. He came back with “Yes” or “No.” That’s a disaster on television. Oprah couldn’t believe it and neither could I. The whole thing was captured on national television. I covered as well as I could for my tongue-tied partner.
One day a week, Oprah did two shows. She filmed them at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, which is a playhouse in the round. Peter and I were surrounded by a large audience. In our book, we had interviewed people all around America. We’d asked somewhat probing, mostly ridiculous questions, like “For two million dollars, could you give up your faith?”
Oprah threw out the question to her live audience. A woman rose up and said, “I couldn’t do it. My faith is too important to me. Not even for two million dollars.” Oprah signaled for the audience to applaud and she praised the woman for the strength of her beliefs.
A little later in the show, one of Oprah’s questions was “Could you kill a stranger for two million dollars?”
That same woman stood up. She said, “For two million dollars, yes, I could. From a great distance. With a rifle.”
Oprah snuck a look at Peter and me. She rolled her eyes and tried her damnedest to hold back a smile. We could all see why this woman needed her church.
Later that same week, Peter and I did Larry King’s radio show. Peter had no trouble talking to King. But when the commercials came on, Larry laid his head down on his desk. And he fell asleep.
Peter and I started whispering. “Holy shit, this guy is out cold. What do we do after the commercials? Should I ask you questions, or should you ask me?”
The commercials stopped, and it was probably the first time in my life I didn’t want the ads to end.
Then Larry King popped up like a little jack-in-the-box.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m here live with James Patterson and Peter Kim. Tell me about the woman in your new book who swore she could kill a stranger for two million dollars.”