Oprah (23 page)

“I retired her, bought her a house, bought her a car and pay her double the salary that she made all of her life,” Oprah told the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“So now she has no bills to pay and nothing to do all day.
And you know what she said to me? ‘Well, I’ll try to make it.’ Can you believe that? I said, ‘You’re going to
try
to make it? See if you can, Mom.’ Then just the other day, she called me up to say, ‘I need a new coat.’ So I said, ‘Go to Marshall Field’s and get you one.’ She says, ‘I don’t need a Marshall Field’s coat. I need a fur coat.’ So I said, ‘Nobody
needs
a fur coat, Mother. Nobody
needs
one.’ Well, I did buy her a mink coat. So now she has a fur coat, a new car, a new house, no bills and double her salary. And she’s gonna
try
to make it.”

But that, apparently, was not enough for Vernita. “Oprah told me that her mother stole her personal checkbook, wrote twenty thousand dollars in checks to herself, and thought nothing of it,” said the designer Nancy Stoddart, who became close to Oprah in the 1980s. “I met Oprah and Stedman when I was with [the musician, composer, and producer] Nile Rodgers at La Samanna in St. Martin. Oprah and I immediately bonded when I held forth over dinner one night about the Theory of Relativity, which had nothing to do with Einstein and everything to do with greedy relatives who jump out of the woodwork to grab your money when you become rich. That’s when Oprah began telling me about her mother and how greedy and grasping she was….She really didn’t like her mother at all.

“She said Vernita felt totally entitled….She was just a greedy greenback….But she got the big-time bucks because Oprah probably knew she would make her life a living hell if she didn’t [by selling stories to the tabloids].”

As generous as Oprah was to her mother—one Mother’s Day she arrived with a gift-wrapped box containing $100,000 in cash—she was still bitter toward Vernita for “giving me away,” and she ricocheted from resentment to gratitude over those motherless years. She understood that the lack of her mother’s unconditional love drove her to develop skills to get praise from others, but she also saw that she tried to fill her motherless hole with food as a substitute for love and comfort and security. It would be many years before she reckoned with the depth of her psychological damage.

“If [my mother] hadn’t given me up, I would be in deep trouble now,” she said. “I would have been barefoot and pregnant, had at least
three kids by the time I was 20. No doubt about it. I would have been part of that whole ghetto mentality that’s waiting for somebody to do something for them.”

She was quite clear about what she thought of Vernita. “I don’t feel I owe anybody anything but my mother feels I do….She says, ‘There are dues to pay.’ I barely knew her [when I was little]….That’s why it’s so hard now. My mother wants this whole wonderful relationship. She has another daughter and a son. And everyone now wants this close family relationship….They want to pretend as though our past did not happen.”

Oprah occasionally derided her mother on the air, once telling her audience that Vernita had borrowed her BMW two years before and hadn’t returned it. She told
Life
magazine her mother cursed her as a child for being a bookworm, saying, “You think you’re better than the other kids.” She told Tina Turner her mother did not want her. “[I]t affected my self-esteem for years,” said Oprah. “It’s unnatural to not be wanted by your mother. That takes some overcoming.” She told BET’s Ed Gordon that she was hesitant to have children because of the poor mothering she’d received. “I would be afraid that I would make a lot of the mistakes that were made with me.”

The strained relationship between Oprah and her mother became obvious to everyone who watched them on Oprah’s 1987 Mother’s Day show. “I could not hug her,” Oprah said later. “Oprah Winfrey who hugs everyone could not hug her own mother. But we have never hugged, we have never said, ‘I love you.’ ” By then Oprah had emotionally erased Vernita as her mother, relegating her to the horde of grabby relatives she said always had their hands out. “I think that Maya Angelou was my mother in another life,” Oprah said. “I love her deeply. Something is there between us. So fallopian tubes and ovaries do not a mother make.”

Eventually Oprah created a new family for herself, one that she felt she deserved and could claim with pride. In place of her welfare mother with three illegitimate children, she selected the celebrated poet and author, an autodidact with no formal education beyond high school, who claimed the title of Dr. Angelou because of her many honorary degrees. Oprah carried Maya’s monthly itinerary in her purse at all times
so she could reach her morning, noon, and night. Quincy Jones stepped into the role of beloved uncle. “I truly learned how to love as a result of this man,” Oprah said. “It’s the first time I came to terms with, ‘Yes, I love this man, and it has nothing to do with wanting to go to bed with him or be romantically involved. I unconditionally love him and…I would slap the living shit out of somebody who said anything bad about Quincy.” Gayle King was the adoring sister Oprah had substituted for the drug-addicted Patricia Lee, and John Travolta seemed to replace her brother, Jeffrey Lee, who died of AIDS. Even Vernon Winfrey was supplanted. Once Oprah met Sidney Poitier, she bound him to her like a kind and loving father. “I call Sidney every Sunday and…we talk about life, we talk about reincarnation, we talk about the cosmos, we talk about the stars, we talk about the planets, we talk about energy. We talk about everything.”

Oprah continued to see her natural family on occasion, gave them money when they asked (“Gobs of it,” she said), and then fumed on the air about being treated like an ATM. Her sister, Patricia, felt that Oprah preferred giving money to her family instead of giving them her time and attention. “At times Oprah acts like she’s embarrassed by her family,” said Patricia. “She acts ashamed of her own mother, probably because Mom doesn’t always pronounce things correctly and doesn’t have a good education.” Patricia said that Oprah gave their mother a $50,000 Mercedes but would not give Vernita her home phone number. “If Mom wants to get in touch with Oprah, she has to call the studio like any fan and leave a message for Oprah to call her. In a real emergency, Mom would have to call Oprah’s secretary.”

For Father’s Day one year, Oprah gave Vernon a new Mercedes. “The 600 Mercedes,” she told a reporter for publication. “The $130,000 600 Mercedes, black on black, fully loaded Mercedes. Had Roosevelt [her makeup artist] drive it down there. A couple days passed and I hadn’t heard from my dad. So I called and said, ‘Did the car get there?’ He goes, ‘Yes, it did and I sure do appreciate that.’ I said, ‘Do you think you could’ve called and said, “I received the brand new 600 Mercedes?” You think you could show a little excitement?’ ”

Her blood family knew they did not have Oprah’s heart like the
celebrity family she had reinvented for herself, and they resented their secondary position in her affections, but they knew their lack of acclaim could not enhance the image she wanted to present.

“We’re just country folk,” said her cousin Katharine Carr Esters, whom Oprah continued to embrace as “Aunt Katharine.” “She needs more for herself than what we have….Oprah doesn’t see her real family much. Harpo is her family. She told me so….I don’t like Gayle much, but Oprah does and that’s fine. I just think Gayle is too much into Gayle.”

Oprah made it clear to all her relatives that “Gayle is the most important person in the world to me,” and, as she told
TV Guide,
she gave them the steel-toed boot when they criticized Gayle. As she related to the writer: “It was my birthday party and all these family members were gathered in my house, and Gayle walked out of the room. And this distant relative says, ‘What’s sheee doing here? She’s not family.’ Well, I hit the ceiling. My hair stood up on my head. I had a screaming, raging, maniacal fit. I told them all—and I don’t care who they were—my family, my mother—that they could get out of my house now and never set foot in it again….My friends
are
my family.”

Oprah frequently mentioned on her show how disgusted she was with all the beggars in her life. “I’m hearing from so many people now who want me to give them money, or lend them money. I say, ‘I’ll give you the shirt off my back, as long as you don’t ask me for it.’ ”

On the heels of her multimillions came thirty-five-year-old Stedman Sardar Graham, the man she had been telling audiences was walking (“slowly, very slowly”) from Africa to be her Mr. Right. “He’s coming, I just know it,” she said, “and when he finally shows up, please God make him tall.”

Graham, a prison guard by day and a part-time model by night, was handsome and light-skinned. “He’s terrific,” said Oprah. “Six feet six of terrific.” A little too terrific for her protective staff, who wondered why such a gorgeous man would be attracted to their overweight boss.

“I remember they were very worried about why Stedman was dating her,” said Nancy Stoddart. “When we went skiing together, Oprah was so fat that she had to buy her ski clothes in the men’s department.”

Oprah acknowledged her employees’ concern. “They figured if he looked like that, he had to be either a jerk or want something,” she said. “He was so handsome—oooh, what a body—so I figured the same thing. If he’s calling me…there’s something wrong with him I should know about.” She turned him down the first few times he asked her out. “I thought he was kind of dorky because everyone said what a nice guy he was [and] I’m used to being mistreated. I’m not used to a nice guy who’s gonna treat me well.

When she finally did accept a date, Stedman arrived with roses and paid for dinner. After several more dates people assumed he was after her money. “They say, ‘She’s this fat girl and he’s this hot-looking guy, what else could there be?’ [But] that invalidates me as a person,” said Oprah. “Even though I understand, because when he first asked me out, that’s exactly what I thought. But Stedman’s spirit is so totally the opposite of somebody who’s out to get something material from the relationship.”

She told
Ladies’ Home Journal,
“The rumors are classic jealousy. One of the reasons they persist is that Stedman’s so good-looking, and I’m not the kind of woman you’d expect him to have. I’m over-weight, I’m not fair skinned and I’m not white. So you would think a guy who looks like that would be with Diahann Carroll or Jayne Kennedy or some willowy blonde.”

Still Stedman became a national punch line and the butt of cruel jokes. During a break in taping the NAACP Image Awards, the comic Sinbad was entertaining the audience when he spotted Oprah and Stedman returning to their seats. “Look at Stedman, following Oprah’s purse around,” he jabbed. “I’m surprised he’s not carrying it for her!” Stedman wasn’t even safe among his friends. The former ABC-TV anchor Max Robinson teased, “She’ll eat you out of house and home, brother. It’s a good thing she owns them.”

In later years some saw Stedman as more drone than predator. Debra Pickett, who wrote a “Lunch With” column for the
Chicago Sun-Times,
pronounced him the “biggest disappointment of the year.” She wrote, “Graham, who is impossibly good-looking but incredibly dull, broke my heart by demonstrating that his life partner, Oprah, must be at least as shallow as the rest of us, since she clearly didn’t fall for his
conversational skills.” New York
Daily News
columnists George Rush and Joanna Molloy were equally disappointed to find no humor behind the handsome façade. They reported that when Stedman accompanied Oprah to the Essence Awards at Radio City Music Hall, he was the only one not laughing at Bill Cosby’s teasing from the stage.

“Stedman—is that a real name?” Cosby said, looking at the couple sitting in the front row. “I thought it’s something he’d tell you at a party. ‘I’m a steady man.’ ”

Oprah and the rest of the audience roared with laughter, but Stedman leveled a blank stare at Cosby. Afterward the comedian took Oprah aside backstage.

“What’s the matter with him? Usually when people make fun of you, you laugh and go ha, ha, ha,” Cosby told Oprah. “But he just stared into space.”

The next night Joanna Molloy asked Stedman why he’d gotten so upset. “He was very grouchy. He said, ‘It’s my name, don’t wear it out.’ I instantly thought, ‘Oh, no. You are not bright enough to be Ms. Oprah Winfrey’s partner.’ ”

The actress E. Faye Butler knew Stedman from his modeling days. “We’d call him to model Johnson Products because he was handsome, but he was an awful model, so we’d make him stand still and have others move around him….He was nice enough but boring as hell….So boring…I remember he liked little petite light-skinned girls with straight hair, so I was surprised when he went with Oprah.”

“He’s a very somber person,” said Nancy Stoddart, “almost like he has a childhood wound. I remember him telling me once, ‘I used to be a really, really good basketball player, but my dad never came to a single one of my games.’ It’s the story of a child still hurting over a neglectful parent who never paid him any attention.”

Whether or not Stedman was drawn to Oprah’s money, he was definitely attracted to her brimming self-confidence and the easy way she moved to take her place in the world. “She absolutely transcends race,” he said. In contrast, his view of the world had been strapped by racism, as he had grown up in the all-black township of Whitesboro, New Jersey (population six hundred), and attended an all-black grade school. “If you are an African American in this country, you are a
victim of perception,” he said. “You don’t have as much value as someone else, and when you walk into corporate America, your image is lessened. I never imagined that I could be equal to white folks.” Oprah never imagined she could be anything less.

“For 30 plus years I believed I was limited because of the color of my skin,” Stedman said. “I [eventually] learned it’s not about race but what it’s really about is the powerful against the powerless. What matters is power, control, and economics.” On this he and Oprah were in full agreement. “They both share the same pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy,” said Fran Johns, a close Chicago friend of Stedman’s.