It's hardly the first time Irish American biographer Kitty Kelley has involved herself in controversy, but her new book about talk show titan Oprah Winfrey is generating headlines.

Unlike some of her subjects, Winfrey has actually met Kitty Kelley: the two came face-to-face back in 1981.

Kelley was a guest on the Baltimore talk show co-hosted by Winfrey to promote her biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

"She was very standoffish and I didn't understand why," Kelley said this week while signing books at the Regency Club. "Her co-host is the one who interviewed me. We had a very lively exchange and then he bounced over to Oprah and said, 'Wasn't that great?' She folded her arms and said, 'I don't approve of those books. She wrote a book about my relatives.'

"Oprah is very close to Maria Shriver, and she thinks she's a member of the Kennedy family," Kelley suggested. The only biography she had written before Elizabeth Taylor's was on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Kelley says that she has 2,763 files on Oprah. "I submit my manuscripts to four sets of lawyers," she said. "So whatever anyone says about Kitty Kelley and these books she writes, they should know I've never ever been sued."

But she hasn't many any friends either. It's hard to imagine that Oprah Winfrey really thinks she's a Kennedy. It's just the sort of trumped up claim that sells books, though, isn't it?