Oprah (22 page)

The movie’s loss did not dampen Oprah’s intention to become a great star. “When you mention great actresses, you’ll have to say my name: ‘Meryl…Oprah,’ ‘Hepburn…Oprah.’ That’s what I want. What I am is an actress. I don’t get paid for acting. But I was born to act.” She continued her publicity blitz long after the movie’s run, and piled up reams of reverential press in time for the September 1986 launch of her talk show. Her laudatory media coverage hit its first speed bump when Tina Brown, then editor of
Vanity Fair,
assigned Chicago writer Bill Zehme to profile Oprah. He accompanied her on her rounds of the good and the great, and described how, “with unabashed lustfulness,” she pawed through the possessions of rich Chicagoans and poked in their closets, counting their shoes.

“She was like a little kid running around my apartment just oohing and aahing,” said Rockefeller heiress Abra Prentice Anderson Wilkin. Chicago socialite Sugar Rautbord, who had profiled Oprah for
Interview,
Andy Warhol’s monthly magazine, said, “There’s a wonderful hunger about her. Some people yearn to be free. Oprah yearns to be rich.”

Oprah did not hide her acquisitiveness from Zehme, who wrote that within the first hour of their meeting she had told him she was a millionaire. “ ‘I knew I’d be a millionaire by the time I turned 32,’ she said…again and again….By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, ‘I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.’ ” Zehme captured Oprah’s obsession with money but lacked the sensitivity to note that for a descendant of slaves, money would mean freedom from servitude forever.

She told him about her many fur coats (“I say minks were born to
die!”) and her immense income (“Money just falls off me, I mean it falls off!”). She opened the doors to her new $800,000 lakefront condominium, a marbled palace with a dripping crystal chandelier in the dressing room and ornate gold swans on the bathtub spigots, and led him into her bedroom, with its panoramic view of the city.

“She is sprawled lumpily across her bed at this point and I sit on its lower edge,” he wrote as Oprah continued her me-me-me monologue: “ ‘I transcend race, really. I believe that I have a higher calling. What I do goes beyond the realm of everyday parameters. I am profoundly effective. The response I get on the street—I mean Joan Lunden [former host of
Good Morning America
] doesn’t get that and I know it. I know people really really love me, love me, love me. A bonding of the human spirit takes place. Being able to lift a whole consciousness—that’s what I do.’ ”

Describing her as “an economy size glamour puss” and a “ hyperkinetic amalgam of Mae West, Reverend Ike, Richard Simmons and Hulk Hogan,” Zehme mentions her trademark “big mama earrings” and the way “she will name-drop unashamedly—the most frequent is ‘Steven,’ her director in
The Color Purple.
”

What the writer found most curious about Oprah was her conquest of the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport through her friendship with Maria Shriver, whom she had met in Baltimore. Oprah was asked to recite the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem “How Do I Love Thee?” at Shriver’s 1986 wedding to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she told Zehme the only other speakers at the April ceremony were the bride’s parents and her uncle Senator Ted Kennedy. Afterward, Oprah said she played charades at Ethel Kennedy’s house and had several intimate chats with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“We talked life and perms and spirituality,” Oprah said. “I was moved by her.” She also mentioned that she had sent $650 replicas of a leather sailing jacket she had worn that weekend to Eunice Shriver and Ethel Kennedy because both had admired it. “I love that family,” she said.

Years later few wedding guests recalled Oprah’s poetry recitation as vividly as they remembered Arnold Schwarzenegger’s endorsement of Kurt Waldheim, the president of Austria, who had been exposed for
participating in Nazi war crimes during World War II. During the wedding reception Schwarzenegger strolled the broad expanse of lawn at Hyannisport carrying a large papier-mâché statue of himself in lederhosen and his bride in a dirndl. “I want you all to see the wedding present we have just received from my good friend Kurt Waldheim,” Schwarzenegger told the crowd of judges, priests, and politicians. “My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff…but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt.” Waldheim could not attend the wedding because he had been officially declared persona non grata by the United States.

When Bill Zehme submitted his profile to
Vanity Fair
about the “capaciously built, black and extremely noisy Oprah Winfrey” with “her great lippy smile,” Tina Brown killed the piece, “not wishing to stir racial teacup tempests,” said someone directly involved in the editorial decision. She paid Zehme in full and encouraged him to publish elsewhere. The piece appeared in the December 1986 issue of
Spy
magazine.

If the profile wasn’t sexist, or even racist, in tone, it was certainly elitist. Zehme seemed to filet Oprah for being fat, famous, and full of herself, something he may have accepted from a fat, famous, full-of-himself white man. Undone by her own messianic pronouncements, she rallied with good humor and fired off a note, saying, “Dear Bill, I forgive you. Oprah.” Zehme sent her flowers to make amends, but she never responded. He should not have been surprised, having written about “disapproving hostesses who carp that Oprah never RSVPs and surmise that she has no notion of thank-you note etiquette.” In later years, when Oprah became omnipotent, Zehme tried to distance himself from the profile and even omitted it from a collection of his published writings. But it did him little good as far as Oprah was concerned. She never spoke to him again.

Years later, when Tina Brown left
Vanity Fair
to become editor of
The New Yorker,
she decided again to assign an in-depth profile on Oprah. She called the writer Erica Jong. “Tina knew that I knew Oprah—we had met in the sauna bath at Rancho La Puerta years and years before, and talked about how difficult men were. She invited me to come on her show in Baltimore, which I did….She was so warm and sweet then.”

Now Oprah was wary. She felt slammed by a cover story in
The New York Times Magazine,
titled “The Importance of Being Oprah,” by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. While Zehme’s arrow had grazed the good ship
Oprah,
Harrison’s was a torpedo to the hull. Not only did the writer declare Oprah’s candor to be more apparent than real, but she also branded Oprah’s New Age pronouncements nonsensical and her self-interest extreme. Further, she asserted that Oprah’s message—“you can be born poor and black and female and make it to the top”—was a fraudulent sop to her white audience:

Most damning was the writer’s assessment of Oprah’s dangerous influence on the millions of her viewers “who lonely and uninstructed draw sustenance from her, from the flickering presence in their living rooms they call a friend.” Obviously Barbara Grizzuti Harrison did not believe that false comfort is better than no comfort at all.

As a media darling accustomed to ribbons of praise, Oprah was irate. It wasn’t just the writer’s bite or her disdain for what she called Oprah’s “superficial quality,” it was also the prestigious placement of the profile. Getting shredded in a satirical magazine like
Spy
was one thing, but to be dissected on the cover of the country’s most important Sunday magazine was intolerable.

“Oprah was furious about that article,” said Erica Jong, “and she told me she did not want anyone writing about her, especially a white woman for a white publication. ‘I don’t need a honky magazine to canonize me,’ she said. I assured her I would not be writing about her negatively, but she did not trust Tina Brown.

“ ‘What if she tells you to put in barbs? Will you be able to resist?’ She said she’d pray on it and call me back, which she did, but in the end I was not able to give her the editorial control that she demanded.”

Later, when Tina Brown left
The New Yorker
and started
Talk
magazine, she again wanted to profile Oprah. Sitting with several art directors to discuss possible covers, Tina said, “Oprah has really gotten full of herself….Who the hell does she think she is? Let’s do Oprah Pope-rah.” The artists whipped up a mock cover of Oprah’s black face half-covered with the white ceremonial miter of the Pontiff. “We couldn’t put her whole face on the cover because we had to leave room for a big fat halo,” said one of the artists. But the profile never got written because by then Oprah had stopped giving interviews.

After
Talk
folded, Brown wrote a book about Diana, the Princess of Wales, but could not get booked on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
When she started her news site,
The Daily Beast,
she again took a poke at Oprah, for getting hoodwinked in 2008 by a Holocaust memoir that Oprah had recommended on her show but that had turned out not to be a true story. “You have to wonder why the big fat budget of that show doesn’t at least extend to a fact checker,” Brown wrote. In 2009 she dismissed Oprah as a “juggernaut business franchise” whose “authenticity can’t help transmuting into something manufactured.” She wrote that Oprah had become a brand, no longer a person. “[She] might as well have a little R in a circle next to [her] name.”

Later in 2009, Brown’s
Daily Beast
devoted a web page to “Oprah’s Bad Press,” with links to stories about a poet’s $1.2 trillion lawsuit against Oprah for plagiarism; the lawsuit of a flight attendant on Oprah’s plane who claimed she was wrongfully fired by Oprah; two deaths at a spiritual retreat led “by [an] Oprah-approved author”; the sex scandal at Oprah’s school in South Africa; and Oprah’s “ill advice,” saying “she’s not a doctor but plays one on TV.”

Like Inspector Javert chasing Jean Valjean in
Les Misérables,
Tina Brown seemed more than a little preoccupied with Oprah, but when asked to discuss the matter, Brown avoided further controversy by responding through her assistant, who said, “Tina has never been a big student of Oprah and has no time to spend answering questions about her.”

By then Oprah Winfrey was in total control of her public image. She had become exactly what she wanted—a gigantic mogul. She had her own media empire: her own television network, her own radio show, her own website, her own daily talk show, and her own magazine, whose every cover featured…her.

A
FTER THE
seedling years of 1984–1986, Oprah burst into full bloom. She flowered as a national success at the age of thirty-two, and money rained down on her in torrents.
Variety
reported she would earn more than $31 million in 1987, making her television’s highest-paid talk show host, topping even Johnny Carson, who made $20 million on
The Tonight Show.
As Miss Fire Prevention, Oprah had vowed to become “a spending fool” if she ever saw $1 million, and now she sprang with all fours. “I have allotted myself personally only to spend one million dollars this year,” she said. “That’s how much I’m giving myself to play with.”

She began by buying herself a Mercedes and a Jaguar, and then she lavished mink coats on everyone—her mentor Maya Angelou; her cousins Jo Baldwin and Alice Cooper; and her female staff, who were accustomed to her extravagance. The year they had been denied Christmas bonuses by WLS station bosses, she had stepped in, giving each $10,000 in cash stuffed inside rolls of toilet paper. She also gave her producer, Debbie DiMaio, a fox jacket as a “thank you for getting me the talk show.” Now she gave DiMaio a six-carat diamond bracelet. (“Brilliance deserves brilliance,” Oprah wrote on the card.) She gave the only male on her staff, Billy Rizzo, the keys to a Volkswagen Rabbit
convertible. She sent two producers to Switzerland on vacation, paid for the wedding of another, and took them all on a shopping spree in New York, where she turned them loose in three stores—an hour at a time—with orders to buy anything they wanted. “I get the biggest kick out of buying great presents,” she said, listing her largesse for reporters. “That’s why I’m a great friend to have. Once I gave my best friend [Gayle King] and her husband [William Bumpus] an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for two weeks in all first-class hotels—and money to spend. But my best present to date was when I gave her a nanny to care for her two babies.” Gayle recalled the day Oprah visited her and her husband in Connecticut, arriving in a stretch limo. “She was wearing one of her five fur coats, probably a $25,000 number, and white tennis shoes with rhinestones on them and a red sweat shirt that said, ‘Husbands Can Be Temporary but Best Friends Last Forever.’ ” The story that she gave Gayle a check for $1,250,000 for Christmas so they could both be millionaires is also part of the Oprah legend. Years later she bought Gayle a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, for $3.6 million.

She made sure the media knew that Phil Donahue offered congratulations when she won Daytime Emmy Awards in 1987 for Best Talk Show and for Best Talk Show Host. “He kissed me,” said Oprah. “Yep. That’s right, Phil kissed me.” She was so grateful for his public acknowledgment that she sent him twenty bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne to mark the twentieth anniversary of his talk show, pointing out to reporters that Cristal sold for eighty dollars a bottle.

She bought her father a new set of tires and a large television set for his barbershop, so he could watch her show, because he’d said that was all he wanted. She later bought him and his wife, Zelma, a new twelve-room house in Brentwood, Tennessee. “I called him and said, ‘Dad, I’m a millionaire! I want to send you and your friends to any place in the world you want to go.’ He said, ‘All I want is some new tires for my truck.’ I was so upset.” Her mother, Vernita Lee, was another matter.