Oprah (21 page)

At that point, the thirty-one-year-old talk show host was riding a comet of local fame across Chicago: “I could practically do no wrong,” she said. She knew that a major role in a Steven Spielberg film could throw her star into the stratosphere. “I wanted that role more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life,” she said. When she found out she was in the running, she begged her lawyer not to negotiate too hard. “He was pushing, pushing, pushing. I said, ‘Jeff, I’d do it for nothing—please, please don’t ask for any
money
money.’ He said, ‘You’re not doing it for free.’ ” Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg had already accepted scale ($84,000 apiece), and so had the rest of the cast ($35,000 apiece). “It was a labor of love for everyone,” said Oprah.

She auditioned on April Fool’s Day of 1985, with Willard Pugh, who was to play her husband, Harpo, in the film. “After we were through, Steven said he’d like to see us upstairs in his office,” she said. “He then told us he wanted us for the roles. I went nuts. I jumped on Steven’s sofa, knocking over his NASA space shuttle model in the process, and that was nothin’—Willard passed out.”

The director had occasion to recall that moment twenty years later, when his friend Tom Cruise, promoting Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds,
jumped on Oprah’s couch to demonstrate his love for Katie Holmes, soon to be his wife. There had been rumors in the tabloids about Cruise possibly being homosexual, and Oprah seemed to fan that speculation by telling reporters she was not convinced of the star’s heterosexual enthusiasm. “I just didn’t buy it,” she said. “Didn’t buy it.” Following Cruise’s appearance on her show, the phrase “jump the couch,” meaning “strange or frenetic behavior,” jumped into
A Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
Spielberg was upset by the criticism his friend received and publicly defended him. “Working with Tom is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given by this business,” he said. He did not mention
the time Oprah had exhibited similar exuberance by jumping on his couch in 1985, but by 2005, their twenty-year friendship had frayed. Months after the Cruise couch-jumping, Spielberg stayed away from the Broadway premiere of Oprah’s production of
The Color Purple—The Musical,
and she ignored the presentation of his lifetime achievement award at the Chicago Film Festival.

In the beginning, Oprah had been in awe of Steven Spielberg. “He’s the most wonderful human being I’ve ever met,” she told reporters in 1985, adding that everyone in the cast and crew was “awed out of our brains” to be working for him. “Oh, dear Gawd,” she drawled, “I cans believe we is workin’ for Mr. Steven.” When she saw Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment empire, she elevated him to godlike status. He was the movie mogul she aspired to be. “That’s when I wanted my own production company,” she said. Until then, Harpo, Inc., was simply the corporate entity she needed for tax purposes—to answer her fan mail—but after seeing Spielberg’s operation, she and Jeff Jacobs set about making Oprah the first black woman to own her own studio.

She claimed that as the only non-actor in the cast she was terrified during filming, but her costars laughed at the suggestion that she was intimidated by anybody or anything. Akosua Busia and Margaret Avery jokingly imitated her husky voice to mock her so-called fears: “ ‘I’m so terrified. Look out, everybody, here I come, and I’m scared out of my wits.’ ”

Oprah later criticized the casting of people of different skin tones as family. “[That] was one of the things that bothered me about
The Color Purple.
” On the set she did not hesitate to tell the director he was making some of her scenes look too slapsticky. He barred her from watching the dailies. In one memorable scene, where her character wallops the white mayor of the town, Oprah admitted she was not acting. Her response was real and visceral. “Steven had told the white actors to call me ‘nigger,’ but he didn’t tell me what he was going to do. ‘You big fat nigger bitch,’ they said….Nobody had ever called me that, or anything close to it, and I didn’t need to be a method actor to react….I was so shaken and angry that I…really decked the mayor.” Her character pays with years in jail for assaulting a white man. She
emerges broken, empty, and blind in one eye to become a maid for the mayor’s wife. “I’m not a subservient person,” said Oprah, “so playing that part of Sofia was hard for me.”

Spielberg was so impressed by Oprah’s talent for improvisation that he enlarged her part during filming, and drew a magnificent performance out of her that, sadly, she never equaled in subsequent films. But in
The Color Purple
she was superb. “Unforgettable,” said the
Los Angeles Times.
“A brazen delight,” said
Newsweek.
“Outstanding,” agreed
The Washington Post.
Critics predicted her nomination for a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. The only lackluster review came from her father: “I think I’d put Whoopi Goldberg first, Margaret Avery second, and maybe Oprah was third,” said Vernon Winfrey.

In the middle of filming, Oprah flew to Chicago to sign contracts with King World to syndicate
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in the fall of 1986. At the press conference afterward she told reporters, “I’m thrilled at the prospect of beating Phil [Donahue] throughout the country.” With more than one hundred stations committed to carrying her show, she received a $1 million signing bonus. She called her father, then a councilman in Nashville. “Daddy, I’m a millionaire,” she shouted. “I’m a millionaire.” She returned to North Carolina and told Steven Spielberg that he should reconsider putting her name on the movie’s posters, which he did not.

“I think that hurt Oprah deeply,” said Alice Walker, “and may have been the reason why she took over the theater marquee for the musical of
The Color Purple
twenty years later.” The theater marquee did indeed read, “Oprah Winfrey Presents
The Color Purple.
”

Being a part of the film changed Oprah’s life forever. The confluence of her Oscar nomination with the syndication of her talk show produced a perfect storm for star-making, and Jeff Jacobs, in conjunction with King World, mounted what Quincy Jones described as “an unprecedented promotional blitz that started her on the path to where she is now.” Oprah began a round of radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews that lasted for months, making her name known from the cornfields of Kansas to the penthouses of Manhattan. She was profiled by
Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, Elle, Interview, Newsweek, Ebony,
The Wall Street Journal,
and
People.
She was interviewed on
The
Merv Griffin Show, Good Morning America,
a
Barbara Walters Special, 60 Minutes
with Mike Wallace, and
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. She also appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman,
and hosted
Saturday Night Live.
“Seldom before in the history of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has one Academy Award nominee received so much publicity,” wrote Lou Cedrone in the Baltimore
Evening Sun.
“Since the day she won the nomination, it has almost been impossible to pick up a newspaper, a magazine or a trade publication without coming face to face with the Winfrey image and attendant stories.”

Oprah’s movie debut had launched her beyond the realm of daytime television, and she could not help but enjoy her elevated status. TV critics who had characterized her as a big, brassy, tabloid talker now treated her with a newfound respect. She was no longer relegated to the entertainment sections of their newspapers; her picture now appeared on the front pages with glowing tributes. She became a full-fledged household name as she crisscrossed the country promoting herself, her movie, and her talk show. She readily acknowledged her new fame—“Ain’t I something, child?”—but she refused to act as though she had been blessed by good luck.

“I had sense enough to know that the movie was something very special,” she told Luther Young of
The Baltimore Sun,
“and I expected it to do everything it has done for me.”

“Yes, I’m coming into my own,” she told Ann Kolson of
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
“and it’s a great feeling to know [I’m] not even there yet.” Nonplussed, the reporter wrote, “The world has been good to this big, noisy, hip-shakin’ mama who began life poor on a Mississippi farm.”

When Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis
StarTribune
suggested she was an “overnight sensation,” Oprah let him have it. “I resent that,” she said. “I take objection to people saying that because no one gets anywhere overnight. I am where I am just as you are where you are: because of everything you have done up to this moment.”

Writing for
TV Guide,
R. C. Smith was struck by her immense self-confidence. “She claims to have believed, always, that for her anything was possible because she was just that good.” When asked if she was going to give up her talk show, Oprah said, “I intend to do and
have it all. I want to have a movie career, a television career, a talk show career. So I will do movies for television and movies for the big screen and I will have my talk show. I will have a wonderful life. I will continue to be fulfilled doing all of those things, because no one can tell me how to live my life. I believe in my own possibilities, so I can do whatever I feel I’m capable of doing, and I feel I can do it all.”

What looked arrogant in print sounded only slightly less so in person, as Oprah’s rich voice and commanding size transfixed listeners while she communicated the kind of self-assuredness only a fool would question. Yet when she leavened self-importance with self-deprecation, she was winning and wonderful.

In the days leading up to Oscar night, she joked with her audiences about having to lose weight and find a gown to camouflage “a behind as big as a boat.” At a public appearance in Baltimore she showed up in a $10,000 full-length fox coat dyed purple and a purple sequined gown showing massive cleavage. “I’m dieting now. Can’t you tell?” she joked. “Thinner thighs by Oscar night. Thinner thighs by Oscar night. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

Despite mixed reviews,
The Color Purple
received eleven Academy Award nominations, including one for Whoopi Goldberg as Best Actress, and two for Oprah and Margaret Avery as Best Supporting Actress, but nothing for Spielberg as Best Director. This caused considerable comment because no director of a movie with that many nominations had ever been ignored. On top of that insult was an angry backlash from the black community, which threatened to doom the film’s commercial success. The Coalition Against Black Exploitation boycotted
The Color Purple
because of its depiction of black men, and the uproar of rancorous debate prompted picket lines at the premieres in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Steven Spielberg was denounced for turning a complex novel into patty-cake and purple flowers. Quincy Jones was slammed for selecting a white director to tell a black story, and Alice Walker was blasted for portraying black men as beasts to white audiences.

Few movies up to that time had caused such rabid racial reactions. Columnists and radio talk shows focused on the controversy, historical black colleges sponsored forums and seminars, and black churches
across the country filled with passionate debate. The biggest outcry came from African American men who felt defiled by the film.

“It is very dangerous,” said Leroy Clark, a law professor at Catholic University. “The men [in the film] are raping, committing incest, speaking harshly, separating people from their families….It reinforces the notion of black men as beasts.”

The cast rushed to the film’s defense, including Oprah, whose excellent performance was untouched by the public vitriol. “This movie is not trying to represent the history of black people in this country any more than
The Godfather
was trying to represent the history of Italian Americans,” she said.

“
The Color Purple
in no way identifies itself as the story of all black men,” said Danny Glover, one of its male stars. “This is just this woman’s story.”

After receiving the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Whoopi Goldberg dismissed the protesters as “pissy.”

The respected film critic Roger Ebert declared
The Color Purple
the best film of 1985, but when he viewed it again twenty years later, even he admitted “that the movie is single-minded in its conviction that African-American women are strong, brave, true and will endure, but African-American men are weak, cruel or comic caricatures.” Still, he found humanity in the story of how Celie endures and finally finds hope.

Oscar night arrived, but without thinner thighs for Oprah. In fact, she said it took four people laying her on the floor to pull her dress on her, and at the end of the evening they had to scissor it off. “It was the worst night of my life….I sat in that gown all night and I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid the seams were gonna bust.” When Lionel Richie appeared on her talk show later, he said she had looked nervous at the Oscars. “I’m telling you, there aren’t many black faces at the Oscars,” she said. “So when you walk through the door, everybody looks around to see. ‘Is it Lionel Richie? No. It’s not Brenda Richie. Who is it? It’s some black girl in a tight dress,’ is what they say. And that’s why I was so uncomfortable. I thought, ‘Oh, God! Lionel Richie is gonna see me in this dress!’ It was the tightest dress known to womankind. It was a horrible night.”

Oprah lost Best Supporting Actress to Anjelica Huston (
Prizzi’s
Honor
) and in one of the most stunning shutouts in the Academy’s history
The Color Purple
did not win one of its eleven nominations, while
Out of Africa
won seven awards, including Best Picture. “I could not go through the night pretending that it was OK that
Color Purple
did not win an Oscar,” Oprah said. “I was pissed and I was stunned.”

Whoopi Goldberg blamed the Hollywood NAACP. “They killed the chances for me, Oprah, Margaret Avery, Quincy, everybody—I truly believe that. And blacks in Hollywood paid a price for years to come. Because after all the hell that was raised, the studios didn’t want to do any more black movies for fear of the picket lines and boycotts.”