Oprah (31 page)

The publicist, too, fell out of favor, which he attributed to “my troubles with the law” (a felony conviction for defrauding an art dealer). After serving five months in prison and five months house arrest, Behrman went back into public relations but was no longer able to book clients on Oprah’s show. “I can’t even get through to a secretary of the secretary of the secretary,” he said with a laugh. “But it was a good run while it lasted.”

The closing of Oprah’s door wounded others who found themselves suddenly banned without explanation. Mark Mathabane, who wrote
Kaffir Boy in America,
appeared on her show in 1987 to discuss his memoir about growing up in South Africa under the barbaric system of apartheid. Oprah told reporters she had found the book in paperback. “It went from the sale table to Number 5 on
The New York Times
best-seller list, and I know it was because of being on my show that the book made the list,” she said. Moved by his story, she befriended the young man, flew his family from South Africa the following year for a reunion on her show, and even accompanied him to the airport to meet them with a film crew. As she said, her support made Mathabane’s book a bestseller in paperback for thirteen weeks, reaching as high as number three. She invited the author and his wife to parties, optioned the film rights to his book, and announced that
Kaffir Boy
would be one of Harpo’s first film productions. “She is the most compassionate human being I’ve ever met,” said Mathabane. Then the door suddenly closed without explanation or avenue for apology. Oprah did not renew her option for
Kaffir Boy,
and she never spoke to the writer again.

“I remember very strongly the sense of hurt and confusion his wife exuded,” said a New York editor after meeting Mark Mathabane and his wife, Gail Ernsberger. “She understood that they had done something to offend Oprah, but it was relatively minor. I can’t remember if it was asking for a book blurb or talking to a magazine. What Gail seemed so blindsided by was that someone who had been so helpful, so involved with her husband’s life, could suddenly cut him off without a word of explanation.”

Oprah does not slam her door in fury, but rather with chilling resolve. Even those who have tried to help her have been shut out. When Eppie Lederer, the renowned advice columnist known as Ann Landers, heard some distressing stories about Stedman’s sexual preferences that made Oprah look foolish, she called her in confidence. Eppie had befriended Oprah when she first arrived in Chicago and appeared on her show many times, occasionally at the last minute to fill in for no-show guests. Oprah lavished her with luxurious gifts, but once Eppie told her the stories about her boyfriend, Oprah closed the door. “That was the end of the cashmere bathrobes and Judith Leiber bags at Christmas,” said Lederer’s daughter Margo Howard. Decades later, when Lederer died, her daughter published a book of letters from her famous mother, but Oprah refused to have Margo on the show to promote it. “I couldn’t understand it, because Mother was a beloved figure, especially in Chicago, and her audience was Oprah’s audience, but Oprah just wasn’t going to do it because she, apparently, was still mad. A grudge unto the next generation.”

Orlando Patterson, the distinguished John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard, also ran afoul of Oprah after writing an op-ed in
The New York Times
criticizing her production of
There Are No Children Here
for ABC television as a “tendentious, dishonest dramatization of Alex Kotlowitz’s book.” Professor Patterson upbraided Oprah for distorting the real-life account of ghetto life in Chicago and perpetuating “the black establishment’s dogma of victimization.” Oprah stopped speaking to him.

The photographer Victor Skrebneski experienced a similar shutout and told friends he had no idea why. After seeing Oprah around town at various parties, he finally asked, “Why did our professional relationship end?” She shot him a look and hissed, “Black lipstick. You are the one who told me to wear black lipstick.”

The photographer had been brought to Oprah by Sugar Rautbord, part of Chicago’s social set, who was doing a Q&A with her for Andy Warhol’s
Interview
magazine. “Andy kept asking me, ‘Why is she so big? Why isn’t she beautiful?’ So I decided she had to be photographed like a star, and that’s what Victor did….Oprah posed for the picture but later told me she didn’t like it. ‘I am not a diva,’ she said.
‘I am everywoman. I should not look grander than other people.’ She always took umbrage with that photograph….

“I’ve done Oprah’s show eleven times,” said Sugar Rautbord. “I knew her before she became Oprah and moved up in the world….She has a great quality of moving on and moving up….Even back when she was local in Chicago I saw her great ambition and I was in awe….She figured out early that the only way to have a successful career and make money—big money—was to delete husbands and children and carpools from life’s agenda. None of those problems touch Oprah in the golden sphere in which she lives. Yet she still addresses our issues of husbands and children and carpools as if they were her issues, as if she really is Everywoman….It’s quite amazing.”

Oprah preferred presenting herself to her audience as one of them, and adopted Whitney Houston’s hit “I’m Every Woman” as the theme song for her show. She understood the importance of maintaining an appealing public image, which is why she insisted on controlling her own public relations, including all photographs of herself. “
Controlling
is the operative word with Oprah,” said Myrna Blyth, the former editor of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
“I think we were the first traditional women’s magazine to put her on the cover, and we had her on many times. One time she insisted on choosing her own photographer, which is not unusual. A lot of celebrities do that, but after the shoot, Oprah did not like the picture. So she asked for another shoot by another photographer, whom she also chose. That is unusual, but we agreed, even though it was very expensive with the second photographer, but we wanted to please her….She bought up all the first photographer’s negatives so he couldn’t publish them elsewhere. She does that with all her pictures, which is why you see so very few photos of Oprah that she doesn’t want you to see, except in the tabloids.”

Oprah told
Ladies’ Home Journal
that she insisted on having total control over every aspect of her professional life. “It’s tough to have a relationship with someone like me,” she said. “And the older I get, the tougher I am….Because I control so many things in my life, I have to work at not being controlling when I’m spending time with Stedman.” She said that whenever they drive somewhere, she always dictates the route, sure that she knows the best way. One time she was so insistent
that Stedman take a certain shortcut that he finally gave in, even though he knew the street was blocked. “When I realized that I had been a real jerk and that he had allowed me to be a jerk, I said, ‘Why didn’t you just tell me that you knew the street was blocked?’ He said, ‘It’s easier for me to just drive down the street and turn around than to try to explain that to you, because you would be convinced that it wasn’t blocked.’ That’s when I realized, God, I’m really bad.”

Oprah’s need for control also extended to her father, who frequently chafed under her yoke. “Oprah is all about control,” said freelance writer Roger Hitts. “I used to talk to her stepmom, Zelma, a lot, but Oprah shut that down. She told all her relatives, ‘You are not important. They only want to talk to you to get to me.’ I went to Zelma’s funeral [November 7, 1996] and Oprah gave the eulogy and took over everything….She did the same when Vernon remarried four years later [June 16, 2000]. At the wedding, which Oprah paid for, Vernon was talkative and approachable—until she arrived. Then she took charge, telling him what he could and couldn’t do. She wouldn’t let him talk to anyone. She completely controlled the situation. The wedding was run on her clock. She was late, but nothing could start until she got there. Then her minders took control of everything, including the relatives….

“I caught up with Vernon afterward. He was still talkative but dour, which had to do with Oprah. He is a pretty prideful guy, but he has had to do a lot of giving with her. She tells him what he can and cannot do all the time. She dictates his life. That’s the relationship, and it grates on him.”

Oprah had no control over what happened when she agreed to host the winners of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
celebrity look-alike contest. “It never occurred to us to specify the sex of the applicants,” said Myrna Blyth, “and we didn’t expect to get an Oprah look-alike, but we got one who looked exactly like her. Only after we announced the winner [Jecquin Stitt], who beat out four thousand other contestants, did we find out that the Oprah look-alike was a man….But we had to give him the award because of political correctness.”

At the time of the contest, Stitt, who later underwent sex reassignment surgery to become a woman, was known as a transvestite in Flint,
Michigan, where he worked as an account clerk for the Water Department. “I was a flaming queen [then],” Stitt said, “but the torch was turned way down at work.”

The prize for the look-alike winners (Oprah, Madonna, Barbara Bush, Whoopi Goldberg, Carol Burnett, Janet Jackson, Cher, Liza Minnelli, and Joan Collins) was a trip to New York City, a makeover by John Frieda, makeup by Alfonso Noe, a photo shoot for the magazine by celebrity photographer Francesco Scavullo, and an appearance on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.

“I have to say Oprah handled it very well, because she didn’t make a big deal of it,” said Blyth. “When he came out to meet her on the show, she said, ‘If I had a wig, I’d take it off to you.’ If she had reacted differently, it could have blown up into a big story, but she handled it so that it just went away quietly after the show. She and her people are very savvy, very smart. They protect her and do a great job.”

The transvestite Oprah felt that, in protecting the real Oprah, her staff had trampled on him. He said he was denied the promised makeover and his photo in
Ladies’ Home Journal.
While the other look-alikes were attended to in the Harpo prep room, he was ignored, although he had been promised that Oprah’s hairdresser, Andre Walker, would make sure he looked like Oprah. He had also been promised that he would be on for half the show, and while the other look-alikes each got three minutes on air, he was not brought on until the very end, when Oprah was doing the sign-off. When the program aired during sweeps, the credits ran over his appearance. He sued
Ladies’ Home Journal
for breach of contract, and the magazine paid him a settlement. He later said his treatment by Harpo was “ugly,” but he got revenge a few days later when Joan Rivers decided to do a mock bridal shower for Oprah on her new talk show and invited the transvestite to appear in a Vera Wang wedding gown flanked by look-alikes for Madonna and Cher. After that show, Oprah closed the door on Joan Rivers and never spoke to the comedienne again, even after appearing with her three times on
The Tonight Show
early in her career.

Oprah and her producers turned themselves inside out for shows during sweeps, because the ratings then determined how much the show could charge for license fees and advertising rates. Higher ratings
meant more money, so sweeps shows tended to be highly controversial, to increase viewership, and Oprah awarded $10,100 bonuses to her producers if their sweeps programs achieved at least a 10.1 rating, as measured by Nielsen. For the February 1987 sweeps, she presented a show that shot her ratings through the roof. She took her cameras into the town of Cumming, in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, which had received negative publicity when members of the Ku Klux Klan threw bricks at civil rights workers celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. A week after the brick-throwing incident, the Rev. Hosea Williams organized a march of twenty thousand people into Forsyth County in one of the biggest civil rights demonstrations since the 1960s. They, too, were attacked with rocks and stones and shouts of “Nigger, go home.”

With the attention of the world upon her, Oprah ventured into the all-white community and excluded any participation on the show by civil rights representatives. “We’re here simply to ask why this community has not allowed black people to live here since 1912,” she said, “and we felt that the people of Cumming are in the best position to answer that question.”

Rev. Hosea Williams protested the exclusion of civil rights representatives. He said he had been misled by Oprah’s producers into believing that blacks would have an opportunity to express their views. Consequently, he said he and his demonstrators would march with signs that read, “Like Forsyth,
The Oprah Winfrey Show
Turns All White.” The protesters were arrested at the restaurant where Oprah was broadcasting, charged with unlawful assembly, and thrown into jail. Oprah’s cameras showed the police handcuffing them. Afterward she said she was “very, very sorry” about the arrest. “I have nothing but respect for Rev. Hosea Williams.”

Her producers had selected one hundred of the county’s thirty-eight thousand citizens to be on-camera, representing a range of opinion: some felt blacks deserved equality; others did not.

“Tell me,” said Oprah, “where did the people come from who were shouting, ‘Nigger go home’?”

Frank Shirley, head of the Committee to Keep Forsyth White, said, “This was the largest white people’s protest against communism
and race mixing in the last thirty years….Many of [those marchers] are outright communists and homosexuals….”

“You’re not just anti-black,” Oprah said, “you’re also anti-gay, too.”

“I’m opposed to communism, race mixing, and low morals, and homosexuals are of low morals, in my opinion.”

Oprah asked another town resident, “What’s the difference between a ‘black person’ and a ‘nigger’ for you?” She was told, “Blacks stayed at home during the civil rights march. Niggers are the ones that marched….A nigger is one like Hosea Williams. He wants to come up here and cause trouble.”

Oprah listened to a liberal businesswoman talk about “us” and “them.”