Oprah (10 page)

When Oprah introduced the former student body president as a computer science teacher, she said, “I thought you’d be president of a company or something.” When he related his story about getting “the wooden paddle” his senior year for having left the grounds during school hours, she was astounded. “How could you be paddled? You were the student body president.”

“Rules are rules, Oprah,” he said. “For everyone.”

Before taping the show he had seen her in the hall surrounded by her coterie of hairstylists, makeup men, and producers. “I gave her a big hug and said, ‘Hon, why are you doing all of this?’ She said, ‘Because I want to bring the truth to the world.’ ” He handed her his 1971 yearbook, which she had first signed when they were seniors. Next to that entry, which said, in part, “I want you to know that in a very special way—I love you,” she now wrote: “Gary—22 years later God is still King! Thank you for what you’ve done and continue to do to live well! Oprah.” He didn’t know what she meant. “Possibly, it’s just a safe statement that she or her staff has coined for the general public.”

During one segment of that show, Oprah introduced a man who had written a book about the difficulty of fulfilling high-school achievements. He said, “To be a high-school hero is the biggest thing in life. It’s hard to equal that kind of esteem later on.”

Aside from a cardiac surgeon, Andre Churchwell, who graduated from East in 1971, Oprah seemed to be the only one sitting onstage who had exceeded the promise of high-school potential. At the end of the show, she asked her classmates how they looked back on their high-school years. Each responded with warmth and sentiment, saying those years were a valuable proving ground, and a time when they felt they had been a family.

Oprah looked amused. Standing in her own spotlight, finally thin and glamorous at the age of forty, she was anything but nostalgic. “Boy, I didn’t feel it was a family,” she said. “I felt like it was just a phase. I moved on.”

I
 LOVED THE
girl that Oprah was back then,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler. “She was Ope or Opie, and I was Luv or Veenie….We met in high school and were close until she left town. We used to crack each other up doing Geraldine.” Luvenia laughed as she recalled the comedian Flip Wilson’s cross-dressing impersonation of a sassy female he called Geraldine. Each week on his variety show he sashayed across the stage in a tight Pucci dress, high heels, and a long black wig as a babe brassy enough to scare a bear. From 1970 to 1974, Geraldine was adored by television audiences, black and white.

“Oprah and I imitated Geraldine all the time,” Luvenia said as she paged through her 1971 high-school yearbook thirty-seven years after graduation. She smiled at what Oprah had written:

Over lunch in 2008, Luvenia shook her head with amusement.
“Remember her? Lord in Heaven, who can forget her? She’s announcing herself to the world every time you turn around.”

The effects of the Sears Roebuck Charm School that Oprah attended in Milwaukee show in her yearbook pictures. Sitting with the honor society, she is the only girl who crossed her arms in an
X
on her lap, the perfect way to deflect camera focus from the stomach. Standing with the student body president, she tilted her head up, another charm-school trick to elongate a double chin. With the National Forensic League, she stood in the classic model pose, one foot in front of the other.

“Look at her head shot,” said Luvenia, pointing to the picture of Oprah in dangly earrings with peace symbols. “See how dark she is there? Big wide nose and all. Now [over three decades later] she’s different. She looks like she has bleached her skin and maybe had some kind of surgery….The real Oprah is Sofia in
The Color Purple.
That’s the real Oprah. Not the Photoshopped glamazon on the covers of her magazine who looks so light-skinned.”

As an African American, Luvenia understands the tyranny of color among blacks. “Because Oprah is so dark she felt discrimination within our own community….That’s why she’s always been attracted to high yella men. She needs to have a successful light-skinned man by her side to feel secure. In Nashville, it was Bill ‘Bubba’ Taylor, the mortician. When she left here she set her cap for Ed Bradley, the light-skinned correspondent for
60 Minutes.
She got sidetracked in Baltimore by some light-skinned disc jockey. Then Stedman. Obama. Even Gayle. They’re all high yella.”

Oprah’s fixation with light skin is borne out by a famous psychological experiment cited in
Brown v. Board of Education
in which black children offered dolls of differing skin tones overwhelmingly chose to play with the white dolls. When asked to identify the “nice” doll, they chose the white one; when asked to select the “bad” doll, they pointed to the black one. “We interpreted it to mean that the Negro child accepts as early as six, seven, or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group,” testified Kenneth Clark, one of the psychologists conducting the experiment.

Oprah admitted that color discrimination dominated her life for
many years, even dictating the college she selected. She said she enrolled at Tennessee State University, a historically black college in Nashville, rather than the private, more prestigious Fisk University because she didn’t want to compete with light-skinned girls. In those days Fisk was known for “the paper bag test.” Supposedly, applicants were required to attach photographs to their admission forms, and anyone darker than a brown paper bag was rejected.

“Oprah did not really want to go to college,” said her high-school speech teacher, Andrea Haynes. “She had a paying job at the black radio station and was setting her sights on television, but Vernon insisted she get a college education. So she kept her radio job and enrolled at TSU, which, in my opinion, was really the lesser educational institution in Nashville.” But TSU, which charged $318 a year for tuition compared to $1,750 a year at Fisk, was all Vernon Winfrey could afford. People have since written that Oprah won a scholarship to study speech and drama at TSU, but the school offered no records of such a scholarship, and Vernon dismissed the suggestion when he stood in his barbershop, proudly declaring, “This place put Oprah through college.”

In 1971, Fisk was considered the black Harvard, the university for elites of color. Tennessee State University was for the sons and daughters of the black working class. This distinction was not lost on Oprah, who told
Interview
magazine, “I went to [TSU but] there was another black college in town where all the vanilla creams went. I thought it was a better school but I wouldn’t go just because I didn’t want to have to compete with the vanilla creams because they always got all the guys.”

Oprah later told
People
magazine that she “hated, hated, hated” her college. “Now I bristle when somebody comes up and says they went to Tennessee State with me. Everybody was angry for four years. It was an all-black college, and it was in to be angry. Whenever there was any conversation on race, I was on the other side, maybe because I never felt the kind of repression other black people are exposed to. I think I was called ‘nigger’ once, when I was in fifth grade.” She said her aversion to TSU stemmed from black activism on campus, and as she told Mike Wallace on
60 Minutes,
she was “not a dashiki-wearing kind of woman.”

When she realized that the ruling class in America hailed from the
Ivy League she was even more embarrassed about TSU. During her 2008 webcast with Eckhart Tolle she said she did not like to be identified by where she went to college. “[It]…annoys me [when] people will say, ‘What school did you go to?’ That’s immediately to say whether or not you’re in the[ir] category.” She probably found the question irritating because she felt diminished by her college credentials.

Understandably, Oprah engendered bitterness among some TSU classmates, who dismissed her comments about the school as complete fabrications by someone trying to ingratiate herself with a white audience. “TSU was not like what Oprah said it was—maybe it was in the early sixties, but not when we were there,” said Barbara Wright, who, like Oprah, was from the class of ’75. “I came from the North because I wanted to go to a historically black college. We all wore Afro puffs in those days, like Angela Davis, but we were not marching in the streets.” Known for her raised fist and struggle for black liberation, Davis, a former UCLA philosophy professor, made international news in 1970 when her gun was linked to the murder of a white judge in a courtroom battle that killed four people. She fled the jurisdiction but was arrested, detained, and harassed. After awaiting trial for twenty-two months, she was finally exonerated by an all-white jury in one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.

“We were real traditional kids who wanted the college experience of being away from home, living on campus, and joining a sorority,” said Barbara Wright. “Oprah was not a part of our college life at all, probably because she was grown beyond her years, as we all found out later. How are you going to be friends with those who haven’t experienced such? Also, Oprah was a townie who did not live on campus and did not get asked to join a sorority. Whenever she was around, she was hanging out at Fisk.”

Oprah was drawn to Fisk like a hummingbird to sugar water. “She would go there every chance she got,” said Sheryl Harris Atkinson, another TSU classmate. “We took a speech and communication class together as freshmen. Speech was her major; mine was education, but the class was a required course for both of us. There were fifteen in the class, and Oprah sat right next to me. ‘You seem really sweet and so I’m going to help you become a better communicator,’ she said. She
mentored me in that class. We were peers, but she decided that I was her student, probably because I was the opposite of her. I’m not verbally aggressive or assertive. She would follow me around. ‘I’m behind you,’ she’d yell in the hall or on the stairs. ‘I’m following you.’ She was determined to be my friend. I was considered a pretty girl back then, and that’s why she wanted to befriend me. She knew I had been recruited by American Airlines, which was a big deal at that time. They were going to use me in their advertising commercials. So Oprah figured, ‘I’m going to get close to her.’ It was a ‘pretty girl’ thing. Nothing to do with any accomplishment or my personality. Just how I looked.”

For all her rampaging self-confidence, Oprah later admitted that her self-image was frayed around the edges. “I remember that every single month, on the day
Seventeen
magazine came out, I’d wait by the newsstand for the delivery truck. They’d throw a stack of magazines off, and I’d be there to buy the first copy and read all the beauty tips. I mean, my god, the idea of being a pretty girl! I thought if I could just be pretty, my life would be fine. So I’d look at the models and at every makeup trick there was and I’d try them all. I even ironed my hair. Here I was, a negro girl who had no business ironing anything but her shirt, and I was ironing my hair.”

Years later Oprah admitted to the actress Charlize Theron that she grew up “idolizing beautiful girls.” She said, “I’d think, ‘What would it be like to look like that?’ ” When she met Diane Sawyer she seemed besotted by the beautiful blond cohost of
Good Morning America,
who, like Oprah, was a Southern beauty queen, crowned America’s Junior Miss in 1963.

Some employees at ABC-TV noticed the affectionate relationship between the two women, and winked as if to say, “Guess who’s got a crush on Diane?” They recalled the giggly late-night phone calls, their excited plans for future joint programs, the hugs, and Oprah’s lavish gifts—the gigantic sprays of orchids that arrived after every one of Diane’s big exclusives, the expensive Kieselstein-Cord handbag, the one-carat diamond toe ring.

“There was a whisper in the workplace,” said Bonnie Goldstein, a former producer for
ABC News.

“I don’t even know how [our friendship] happened,” Oprah told
InStyle
magazine in 1998. “We used to sit around the table and say, ‘You know who is the coolest person? That Diane Sawyer.’ Then out of the clear darn blue sky Diane called and invited me to Martha’s Vineyard. We had so much fun. Fun, fun, fun.”

Another beautiful woman Oprah befriended after she became famous was Julia Roberts, the star of
Pretty Woman,
who appeared on her talk show ten times and described Oprah in 2004 as her “best friend.” Intrigued by the actress’s luscious good looks, Oprah asked, “Does the pretty thing ever get to ya?…I’m wondering. I was having this discussion with my girlfriend the other day. I said, ‘It’s a really great thing we were never, like, pretty women, because now we don’t have to worry about losing that.’ ” The actress said: “You can’t really complain about being in a movie called
Pretty Woman
when you’re the woman.” Oprah nodded in agreement and smiled adoringly.

In college she seemed to collect pretty people. “She had her eye on my boyfriend at Fisk and was always asking me questions about him,” said Sheryl Atkinson. “He looked a lot like Stedman—what we call a pretty boy, high yella—light-skinned with European features and a caramel complexion….Oprah was quite aggressive in her pursuit of him. I remember lying on my bed in the dorm one Sunday night listening to her on WVOL. I heard her dedicate a song to him. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t mad, because I knew he wasn’t interested in her, but I was amazed at how forward she was. But she was like that in class, too. The professors didn’t like her because she would debate with them and tell them they were wrong. They might say something and Oprah would come back and rebuke them. She would take over the class. Very bossy.”

Not all TSU professors felt that way. Dr. W. D. Cox remembered Oprah as an outstanding student. “I knew her from age sixteen to about twenty-one. I taught her in stage lighting, scenery, and the history of the theater. She was a very likeable student, carried a full load, and took responsibility seriously.” He recalled taking his class to Chicago in 1972 for a speech project and “enjoy[ing] a little foolishness” at Oprah’s expense.