Oprah (11 page)

“During our stay [in the city] a girl was reported raped on the second floor. I told a lie on Oprah. If Oprah had known about the rape,
she’d have shouted, ‘Yoo-hoo. I’m up here!’ Oprah didn’t take too kindly to that joke. She was quite provoked.”

Dr. Cox regretted making fun of Oprah’s aggressiveness when he learned of her history of sexual molestation. “I was astonished,” he said. “Her father and stepmother were the strength behind her. [Vernon’s] attitude was strict, and he was the best thing that ever happened to her.”

In her sophomore year Oprah joined the Tennessee State Players Guild to play the role of Coretta Scott King in a drama titled
The Tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Headlining the review in
The Meter,
the TSU newspaper was brutal: “Martin Luther King Murdered Twice.” The drama critic was unsparing:

Years later Oprah attributed her unpopularity in college to envy. “My classmates were so jealous of me because I had a paying job. I remember taking my little $115 paycheck, and at the time I was trying to appease them. Anytime anybody needed any money I was always offering, ‘Oh, you need ten dollars?’ or taking them out for pizza, ordering pizza for the class, things like that. That whole ‘disease to please.’ That’s where it was the worst for me, I think, because I had wanted to be accepted by them and could not be.”

Her classmates did not recognize her behavior as insecurity. “She acted as if she knew she was going to be someone and stick it to all of us later on,” said Sheryl Atkinson. “She walked down the hallway with her head up in the air and swishing from side to side as if to say, ‘I’m the best thing walkin’.’ When people saw her coming, they avoided her. She had the kind of confidence that said, ‘I don’t care that you don’t like me—I’m going to be someone big and you’ll be sorry.’ She did become someone very big, but I’m not sorry. I applaud her, and I commend her on the good works she’s done. I just wish she weren’t so bitter about our school. But that springs from stuff deep inside Oprah, from secrets that are too dark and deep to look at….People struggle
with that kind of stuff their entire lives….Maybe her dark stuff was connected to her father’s strictness. I know she disliked him intensely when we were in school.”

Later in life Oprah publicly thanked Vernon for saving her. “Without his direction, I’d have wound up pregnant and another statistic.” But that gratitude was a long time coming. When she turned eighteen, she broke away from his strict control and moved out of his house.

“I had to help her, because Vernon was so pissed off he wouldn’t lift a finger,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler. “We moved her into an apartment on Cane Ridge Road in Hickory Hollow.” In later years, Oprah maintained that she continued living under her father’s roof and the whip of his midnight curfews until she left Nashville at the age of twenty-two. “I don’t know why she’d say something like that—maybe to put forward the image of a good little girl….Whatever the reason, it’s probably connected to those damn secrets of hers….That’s why she makes everyone who works for her sign those confidentiality agreements that forbid them from ever breathing a word about their personal or professional experiences with her. I guess it’s her way of keeping control over what people find out about her….It’s kind of sad.”

Soon after Oprah moved into her own apartment she called upon Gordon El Greco Brown, a local promoter who had purchased the franchise for Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee in 1972. “Her stepmother, Miss Zelma, had first brought her to meet me for Miss Fire Prevention….When she started at TSU she enrolled in my modeling school near campus. She waltzed in one day and announced, ‘Hi. I’m going to be a big star someday. Where do I sign up, baby?’ She was only 17 and not beautiful. But I could tell she had something. She was very poised and had a great speaking voice.”

The deep timbre of Oprah’s voice never failed to impress. In high school her rich vocal range was compared to that of the American contralto Marian Anderson. For a teenager, Oprah’s commanding voice was always a revelation.

“Miss Black Nashville was the first time there had ever been a beauty pageant for black girls. In the past it was white girls only,” said El Greco Brown. “Oprah [saw] that contest as a stepping stone for the
big career she so desperately wanted….I had to practically beg everyone else to participate because there was no cash incentive. No scholarship. No record deal. No Hollywood contract. Just a title, a sash and a bouquet.”

Oprah filled out the pageant application, stating her height: 5′6½″; weight: 135 lbs.; measurements: 36–25–37; shoe size: 8–8½. She listed her hobbies: swimming and people; her talent: dramatic interpretation; and her parents: Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Winfrey, with no mention of her mother, Vernita Lee, in Milwaukee. For “Why are you entering the Miss Black America beauty pageant?” she wrote, “I would like to try to instill a sense of individual (black) pride within our people. Self-dignity.” She stated that she had “never been married, annulled, divorced or separated,” and had “never conceived a child.”

The night of March 10, 1972, there was not an empty seat at the Black Elks lodge on Jefferson Street. “I had managed to get fifteen contestants, and they were judged on beauty in evening gown and swimsuit competitions, plus talent,” said El Greco Brown. “Oprah gave an average showing in the [beauty] competitions but when her talent turn came she did a dramatic reading and sang—and she knocked the audience off their feet. She was so good; it moved her into the top five.

“There was only one girl who out-excelled Oprah in talent. Her name was Maude Mobley and she later worked as a backup singer at the Grand Ole Opry. Not only was Maude talented, she had a beautiful figure and scored top marks in the swimsuit and evening gown competitions. Everyone picked her as the winner as soon as her foot hit the stage.”

The six judges tabulated their scores and the winners were announced from last to first: “I couldn’t believe it when [the MC] read out the name of the fourth runner-up: Maude Mobley. He continued to read the winners, pausing briefly before he called out: ‘The winner, and the first Miss Black Nashville, is Oprah Gail Winfrey.’ ”

Recalling a collective gasp of shock from the audience, the promoter said he was besieged by people who claimed the contest had been fixed. “I was confused myself. So I gathered up all the judges’ scorecards and tallied up the votes. I couldn’t believe what I discovered: the number four runner-up and the winner’s scores had been switched.
I’m convinced the scoring switch was an error. The judges were honest men and women.”

The promoter said he went to the Winfreys’ house the next day to explain the mix-up. “I asked Oprah if she would consider giving the crown to…the rightful winner. Oprah stood up and said angrily, ‘No, it’s mine! My name was called and I am Miss Black Nashville.’

“I tried to reason with her. ‘How would you feel if you had been in Maude’s shoes?’

“ ‘I don’t care,’ she said.”

The next week Oprah’s picture appeared in the Nashville newspapers as the winner. Her photograph, with a press release mentioning Patrice Patton as the first runner-up, was sent to black newspapers across the country. There was no mention of Maude Mobley.

“Everyone at TSU talked about the Miss Black Nashville contest,” said Sheryl Atkinson. “We discussed it among ourselves, because Oprah seemed least likely to win. She certainly wasn’t the prettiest, but I’m sure she was the most vocal.”

“I think she got it because she was well known from her radio show,” said Barbara Wright. “She couldn’t have gotten it any other way.”

The confusion over tabulating the scores did not become public until Oprah became famous. Then Gordon El Greco Brown wanted to publish a book of photographs. “I had hundreds of pictures of Oprah from those pageants and wrote her to say that I’d like to publish something. Her lawyer Jeff Jacobs wrote me back and said they’d like to see all the pictures. When I saw that he was a lawyer, I said I’d come to Chicago with my lawyer so we could make a deal. But Jacobs said no, I couldn’t bring a lawyer. I had to meet with him and Oprah alone. They flew me to Chicago, put me up in a hotel, and sent a limousine to bring me to the Harpo studios. Oprah met me, hugged me, and was my best friend. Then she handed me off to her lawyer, who really roughed me up.

“ ‘We just want to see what you’ve got,’ said Jacobs. So I showed him all my pictures. I said I had spent three years promoting Oprah [for free] and would now like to do a book.

“Jacobs said, ‘No book. No job. No nothing. We’ll put some money on the table and the pictures stay with us. Take it or leave it.’ I said
I wanted to keep my pictures. Jacobs said, ‘So leave, but we don’t want to see those pictures all over the place.’ When I left Harpo, they canceled the limo to the airport, and I had to flag a cab.”

Feeling spurned, the promoter sold his story and some of his photos to the
National Enquirer,
which ran the headline “Oprah Stole Beauty Contest Crown!” Her publicist denied the story: “Oprah was never told of any alleged problems with any pageants she was in at any time.”

Maude Mobley, described in the 1992 story as the “rightful pageant winner,” sounded fearful. “Oprah’s a rich and powerful woman. I would rather not talk about this. It might anger her.”

Maude’s mother was not so cautious. “I knew something wasn’t right when they called out Oprah as the winner,” she said twenty years after the pageant. “After I talked to Maude, I was so angry that I wrote to everybody I could think of to get the situation righted. But no one was interested. It’s true that Oprah stole that crown.”

Another version of the switched-votes story surfaced when Patrice Patton, the first runner-up for Miss Black Nashville, noticed Gordon El Greco Brown’s tabloid story when she was grocery shopping. “I already knew that the scores had been switched, and that Oprah had not won,” she said in 2008, “but I don’t believe what Gordon is quoted as saying in that story….I don’t believe for one minute that Oprah knew about the switch or that Gordon ever confronted her. I was told by the pageant coordinator that Gordon was the one who switched the votes on Miss Black Nashville. The pageant coordinator said she had confronted him at the time, and when he didn’t step forward to correct the situation, she quit. I ran into her a few years later and she told me the truth: that I had actually won Miss Black Nashville and Oprah had been the runner-up. I never said anything, because it was five years after the fact and I would’ve looked like a sore loser. Besides, I liked Oprah. She was good folks….

“She had a following in Nashville at the time, from all the publicity she got being the first black girl to be Miss Fire Prevention, plus she had her own radio show. It’s my opinion that if Oprah hadn’t been declared the winner of Miss Black Nashville, Gordon wouldn’t have been able to sell tickets to the Miss Black Tennessee pageant. So he made her the winner….

“After the pageant coordinator quit, Gordon gave me the job and we traveled all over Tennessee just trying to get girls to participate. Even then we only got a few. A few days before the pageant, Gordon moved out of his house in Nashville and we moved in so I could get everyone ready to make the rounds of radio stations and churches and department stores. Oprah drove some of us in her father’s pickup truck….I still remember how determined she was to get into shape for competition. She wanted to be a certain size, so she had started dieting….She was the first black person I ever saw to eat yogurt. We just didn’t eat yogurt in those days. But she did and she lost a bunch of weight.”

Oprah said she was as surprised as anyone to be crowned Miss Black Tennessee. “I didn’t expect to win, nor did anybody else expect me to, because there were all these vanillas and here I was a fudge child. And Lord, were they upset, and I was upset for them, really, I was. I said, ‘Beats me, girls. I’m as shocked as you are. I don’t know how I won, either.’ ”

As Miss Black Tennessee, Oprah flew to California in August 1972 to compete for the crown of Miss Black America. For the talent portion of the pageant, she sang “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a spiritual dating back to slavery. Her chaperone, Dr. Janet Burch, a Nashville psychologist, recalled for the writer Robert Waldron how focused Oprah was on becoming successful. “I have never seen anybody who wanted to do well as much as Oprah did. She used to talk about things, like how one day she was going to be very, very, very wealthy. The thought always precedes the happening. If you really think you’re going to be very wealthy, and very popular, and prominent, and you sincerely believe it, it’s going to happen. You see, some people say it, but they don’t really believe it. She believed it. People say, ‘I’d like to be wealthy.’ Oprah said, ‘I’m
going
to be wealthy.’ ”

Oprah did not win, place, or show in the race for Miss Black America. “As district pageant organizer I had access to those final tallies and ascertained that she came in number 34 out of 36 contestants— almost flat bottom,” recalled El Greco Brown. Oprah dismissed her loss by blaming the winner. “The girl from California won because she stripped,” she said. Yet the
New York Times
coverage makes no mention
of the beautiful California singer who won as having performed a striptease.

During the week, Oprah, who had been sponsored by her radio station, told Dr. Burch that she was going “to be a big TV personality.” After the pageant, she returned to Nashville ready to raise her game.

“Our general manager got a call from WVOL that they had a girl who wanted to get into broadcasting,” said Chris Clark, the former anchor, producer, and news director of WLAC, later WTVF-TV. “So I was told that I had to interview her.”

The station had already hired Bill Perkins, the first black face on Nashville television, now deceased, and Ruth Ann Leach, the first woman, who said, “I was the first female fanny to sit on the news desk next to the anchor during a newscast. This was back when NewsChannel 5 was trying desperately to meet its FCC obligation to diversify the on-air talent. So there was Bill Perkins and me. Everyone else on the air was white and male.”