Oprah (28 page)

During one of her visits to Kosciusko, Oprah had a late-night talk with her “aunt” Katharine and broke down in sobs, begging to know the name of her real father.

“She put her head on my shoulder and cried and cried,” recalled Mrs. Esters. “ ‘I know it’s not Vernon,’ she said to me. ‘There is nothing of Vernon in me. I know that and you know that….You know the whole story; you were there. So, please, Aunt Katharine, tell me who my real father is.’ ”

“I just couldn’t do it,” said Mrs. Esters many years later. “I told her it was her mother’s place to tell her, not mine.

“ ‘My mother says it’s Vernon,’ Oprah said.”

Katharine Carr Esters raised her eyes as she related the story, torn between wanting Oprah to know the truth and disapproving of Oprah’s mother for not telling her. “I guess Bunny—that’s what the family calls Vernita—doesn’t want to get into it all at this stage, but I feel her daughter has a right to know if she wants to know. I just don’t have the right to tell her.”
*

Mrs. Esters understood why Vernita Lee was not inclined to rock her well-heeled boat late in life and admit that someone other than Vernon Winfrey was Oprah’s real father, especially since Oprah had never demanded a DNA test. Vernon had admitted he had not sired
Oprah, but he took great pride in knowing that he had given her something better than blood.

“Oprah has taken very good care of her mother, who now buys five-hundred-dollar hats and has drivers who have drivers and helpers and cooks and all, but the story of Oprah and Vernita is sad and complicated,” said Mrs. Esters. “Oprah does not love her mother at all….She gives her a great deal financially but she does not give her the respect and affection a daughter should, and that bothers me. Vernita did the best she could with Oprah, who was a willful, runaway child….Her mother has had to bury two of her three children over the years, and I can tell you that when a parent loses a child it can bring you to your knees. I know. I had to bury my son.” She gestured to the painting of a young man hanging over her bed. “So Oprah should be more forgiving of her mother….Even when she has had Bunny on her show she won’t let her talk, because Bunny speaks colored dialect….She’s not as educated as Oprah would like.”

Oprah had moved so far beyond the life of her grandmother’s farm that there was nothing left for her in Kosciusko. After one of her visits she told a luncheon audience, “I was recently back in my hometown…and some of the people that I grew up with are still sitting on the same porch, doing the same thing. It’s like time stopped and continues to stand still in parts of Mississippi. There’s not a day that I’m not on my knees thanking God that I was one of the blessed ones to be able to leave that place and do something with my life.”

Yet there was something she needed from the past, which she said she finally found in a $1 million mansion on a sprawling 160-acre estate in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. Having invented a family she could love, she now decided to invent her ideal home, with rolling hills, meadows of purple flowers, stables, a heated dog kennel, twelve bedrooms, a heliport, nine palomino horses, ten golden retrievers, three herds of black-faced sheep, one eight-room guesthouse, a log cabin, a pool, tennis courts, and pretty blue hydrangeas.

“I’ve never loved a place the way I love my farm,” she said. “I grew up in the country, which is probably why I’m so attached to the land. I love it. I love the lay of the land. I love walking the land. And I love knowing that it’s my land….When I’m pulling into the gate and my
dog comes running out to meet me because he knows the sound of the truck, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I walk in the woods. I do Tai Chi Ch’uan by the pond. I grow my own collards.”

“The landscaping alone for that farm was a four-year project and cost nine million dollars,” said the landscape architect James van Sweden of Oehme, van Sweden and Associates. “I met with Oprah every three weeks for four years to discuss the design. We had a wonderful time bricking the parking area, erecting limestone walls, laying flagstone walkways, grassing the pond, moving the tennis court and the swimming pool. I built her an eighty-five-foot-long pool, but the poor thing could not use it because she was at her heaviest then—she was hugely heavy—and the paparazzi were always buzzing the farm in helicopters and hiding across the lane with cameras that could catch a perfect picture from three thousand feet away. There was no way she could go into her pool without having her three-hundred-pound self splattered all over the tabloids. We also built a twelve-hundred-square-foot pool house so she could hold meetings. She was totally involved in the project from start to finish, and spent three to four hours with me at every meeting. Then I would spend weeks at the farm….

“I remember when I first walked into her Indiana living room and saw those overstuffed couches and plump tufted chairs and what looked like one million pillows strewn everywhere. That’s her decorator Anthony Browne’s idea of ‘Country English,’ which poor Oprah bought into totally. She liked puffy things. Big puffy things….Browne put fringe and ruche and piping and ruffles and cording on everything.” The internationally acclaimed van Sweden is known for sleek, uncluttered design. “All of Oprah’s servants are white, but her walls are black. She’s got paintings of black shepherds and black farmers and black angels—all very tacky, but that, too, might’ve been Anthony Browne’s fault for steering her to junky art. The color, though, Oprah insisted on. She said, ‘I’m not going to have counts and countesses on my walls. Just black folks.’

“After our first lunch at the farm we walked outside and she told me I had to transform her meadows into
The Color Purple.
She insisted that she be able to see purple flowers from every angle of her bedroom. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t plant that meadow (forty acres)
as fast as Steven Spielberg did for the movie. ‘It only took him three weeks,’ she said. I tried to explain that was Hollywood and he’d done it with mirrors and lenses. I spent days in her bedroom designing plans from every window, so that by the time I was finished I knew every inch of that room, inside the closets and out, which is why I can tell you that there were no men’s clothes in any of Oprah’s closets and no trace of Stedman anywhere. Maybe she put him in the log cabin she built, which she called ‘The Love Nest,’ but I can tell you that Oprah sleeps alone in her bedroom and keeps a Bible next to her bed with loads of books.

“I designed a circle in the parking lot for her wedding, because I’d heard her talk on her show about eventually wanting to get married. I didn’t tell her this at the time, but I had it in mind for her. Then I met Stedman and knew there wouldn’t ever be a wedding. He’s simply a fixture in her life. Window dressing. A way for a single, childless woman to appear normal to her married audience of women with husbands and children. Stedman is a nice man. I remember his beautiful, elegant, long fingers. He was handsome, too, but he’s nothing more than an attractive escort. I never saw any warmth or affection between them—any at all during the four years I worked with Oprah. I never saw touching or hugging or kissing between them ever. They didn’t even hold hands. But Oprah wants to come across as normal to her audience, so she needs to have Stedman around so she can refer to him….She talked about Gayle far more than she ever did Stedman, but I don’t think that she and Gayle are a lesbian couple. They’re just very good friends….Oprah keeps Stedman around because she wants her audience to accept her as a normal woman with a man in her life, but from what I saw during those four years I can tell you there’s nothing there with Stedman. Nothing at all.”

Months after van Sweden had planted the last purple flower on Oprah’s Rolling Prairie farm, she and Stedman and Gayle were spending a fall weekend together. Gayle had arrived from Connecticut and was in the kitchen when Oprah went outside to greet Stedman, who was arriving from Chicago. She later related their brief conversation.

“I want you to marry me,” he said.

“Is this the proposal?” asked Oprah.

“I think it’s time.”

“Oh, that’s really great.”

She walked into the kitchen a bit breathless. “You are not going to believe this,” she whispered to Gayle. “Stedman just proposed.” They planned to be married on September 8 of the following year, because that was the date of Vernon’s wedding to Zelma. Oprah called Oscar de la Renta to design her wedding dress. She and Stedman announced their engagement in an interview with Gayle on television—or rather, Oprah made the announcement, which she said upset Stedman. Days later, on November 23, 1992, during the ratings sweeps, they were on the cover of
People,
next to a blaring headline: “OPRAH’S ENGAGED!”

Months before, in what was hyped as their first joint interview, Oprah and Stedman appeared on
Inside Edition
and complained to Nancy Glass that too much publicity threatened their relationship. “We’ve been through a lot of stress,” Stedman said. “Not having any privacy when you go out.” Apparently, neither saw the irony in going on national television to bemoan the public attention they attracted.

After six years, Stedman had officially progressed from boyfriend to fiancé. A decade later he would be politely described as Oprah’s life partner, which is how he has remained for years and years—a perpetual escort, a roommate, and an occasional traveling companion.