Oprah (29 page)
Authors: Kitty Kelley
Oprah’s mother, Vernita Lee, fifty-three, as she appeared on Oprah Winfrey Day in Kosciusko, Mississippi, where she and Oprah were born in Vernita’s parents’ home outside the county line. Vernita, who moved to Milwaukee in 1958 during the Great Black Migration, had three children but never married.
(
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Katharine Carr Esters.
)
Following a bet made with Joan Rivers on
The Tonight Show
on January 29, 1985, to lose fifteen pounds in six weeks, Oprah has her “last food fling” with her lover at the time, Randolph Cook.
(
Photo Credit: Copyright Chicago Tribune © [February 6, 1985]. Reprinted with Permission. All rights reserved.
)
Oprah standing at the top of Mt. Cuchama in 1980 at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. She began visiting spas at crucial points in her life to get her weight under control. She was at the Heartland Health and Fitness retreat in Gilman, Illinois, in 1985 when she got the call that she had been chosen for the role of Sophia in
The Color Purple.
“If you lose a pound, you’ll lose the role,” said the casting director. Oprah left immediately.
(
Photo Credit: © Sandy Gibson Photographer.
)
Roger King (left), chairman of the board of King World, and Joseph Ahern (right), former general manager of WLS-TV, join Oprah at a news conference in Chicago on July 24, 1985, to announce the nationwide syndication of
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Oprah received a $1 million signing bonus and immediately called her father to announce, “Daddy, I’m a millionaire.”
(
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Bennet.
)
THE GREAT LOVES OF OPRAH’S LIFE
Radio disc jockey Tim Watts and Oprah in Baltimore in 2007, thirty years after their tumultuous love affair. “He was her first real love,” said Oprah’s sister, Patricia, in 1990.
(
Photo Credit: WJZ Channel 13, Baltimore, Maryland.
)
Photocopy of Stedman S. Graham, Jr., from the Fort Worth, Texas, police department. He started as a police academy trainee on January 6, 1975, and graduated three months later as a police officer. He later worked in the Bureau of Prisons.
(
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fort Worth Police Department.
)
Stedman S. Graham with President George H. W. Bush at a GOP fundraiser in Chicago, on September 26, 1990. Bush is holding a football he signed for the charitable organization Graham founded, Athletes Against Drugs: “A.A.D. Thanks and Best Wishes.”
(
Photo Credit: Presidential Library of George H.W. Bush.
)
Oprah with her best friend, Gayle King. The two met in Baltimore at WJZ-TV during the 1970s. Oprah is godmother to both of King’s children.
(
Photo Credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.
)
leven
O
PRAH’S REIGN
as America’s number one talk show host for more than two decades divides into the early years of 1984 – 1994 and the years that followed. For viewers, the first ten years marked Oprah sleaze, the second ten years, Oprah spirituality, or what Ann Landers told Oprah was her “touchy-feely crap.” Within the television industry the demarcation is defined by the rise and fall of Oprah’s former executive producer Debra DiMaio.
“She is the mother of us all,” Oprah said in 1986 when she introduced the hard-charging executive producer to her national audience. “I owe everything to her.”
DiMaio smiled and nodded in agreement. “Everything,” she said, knowing that DiMaio’s audition tape had landed Oprah the job in Chicago that led to her national syndication. “I feel very destined to have met her,” DiMaio said later. “I have pretty much unconditional love for her.”
DiMaio was the one to whom Oprah confided her fears of being assassinated. It was also DiMaio who received her late-night calls to go to Wendy’s for sour cream potatoes, and even if she got the call at midnight, DiMaio would throw on a coat, hail a cab waving a twenty-dollar bill, and rush to get to her boss for a late-night binge. The two young
women developed a symbiotic relationship that enabled each to complement the other. DiMaio, tough and controlled, was unafraid of confrontation. Oprah, more emotionally needy, wanted to please everyone and be liked. Together they made a perfect pair. In later years the staff would accuse Oprah of playing good cop to Debra’s bad cop, a characterization Oprah did not like. But she could not deny that she allowed DiMaio to do all her dirty work (hiring, firing, correcting, criticizing) so she could reign as the beloved monarch. From the recollections of former employees, most of whom were terrified of DiMaio, Debra flew like an F22 fighter jet and treated everyone else as if they were Sopwith Camels. The daughter of a Marine colonel, DiMaio took charge and tolerated little nonsense from anyone, including, on occasion, Oprah. If the talk show host acted less than engaged on the air, Debra would break for a commercial and kick her into shape. During one show she told Oprah to stop showing her boredom. “You’re an Oscar-nominated actress,” she said. “Go out there and act like a talk show host.” They never really clashed because they were both driven by ratings and the desire to dethrone Phil Donahue.
In the early days Oprah referred to her small staff—six women and one man—as “my girls.” She sounded like the actress Maggie Smith in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
who described her starry-eyed pupils as “my gels.” Oprah said of her staff: “These are my closest personal friends.”
“We’re each other’s family,” said associate producer Bill Rizzo, who frequently urged reporters to be kind to Oprah in their stories.
“We’ll be out to dinner and will vow that by this time next month we’ll be back with men,” said Christine Tardio. “Then the next month rolls around and we’re still together.”
“We all band together like a family since we don’t have anyone else,” said Ellen Rakieten. “I talk to Oprah every night on the phone. She says I’m her soul mate.”
All single and in their twenties, the “girls” worked fourteen-hour days, ate all their meals together, shopped together, and spent weekends together. They all worshipped Oprah. “I’d take a bullet for her,” said Mary Kay Clinton.