Oprah (33 page)

Oprah was accused of triggering another death when she hosted a show called “Bad Influence Friends,” featuring a marriage therapist, an engaged couple having difficulties with their relationship, and a twenty-eight-year-old electronics technician branded by the engaged man’s fiancée as the cause of the couple’s problems. The engaged
woman said that “Mike,” her fiancé’s best friend, was an ex–drug user and a big drinker who flirted with other women even though he was married. The camera zoomed in on Mike with the words
Bad Influence
under his face. Oprah told the audience, “Mike is married, but it doesn’t stop him from being Tom’s bad influence and keeping him out late—drinking and dancing and a little flirting, which Mike believes is all harmless fun.” Mike said he enjoyed going out with his friends without his wife. Oprah looked at her predominantly female audience, who hissed and booed. One angry woman called him a “major nightmare,” and the audience applauded. A shouting match erupted when Oprah asked Mike why he’d gotten married.

“Because I like the security. I like to come home. I like to have someone there.”

Thoroughly incensed, one woman shouted, “You can’t have both worlds, Mike.”

“Yes, I can,” he shot back.

“No, you can’t.”

Less than two weeks later, Mike’s father found him hanging from a ceiling fan in his Northlake, Illinois, home. “I know in my heart that Oprah’s show killed my son,” said Michael LaCalamita, Sr. “I believe he killed himself because he couldn’t take the humiliation [of how he came across] and the pressure [of the comments from friends and strangers after the show]….Oprah didn’t give him a chance to defend himself. She kept egging him on and on. When the crowd stopped getting at him, she would start another round of attack. It wasn’t fair. Oprah’s a TV star and he’s just a young kid. He didn’t know what he was getting into.”

The marriage therapist on the show, Dr. Donna Rankin, an associate professor at Loyola University in Chicago, told a writer she was surprised that Oprah had even aired the show. “From the things Mike was saying it was clear that he had severe emotional problems,” she said. “Obviously, he needed help.”

The only public statement Oprah made about the suicide came through her publicist, Colleen Raleigh: “Only Mike LaCalamita or perhaps a psychiatrist would know why he took his own life. Our deepest sympathies are extended to his family and friends.”

Despite growing criticism over her tabloid programming, Oprah
said her shows “just give people a voyeuristic look at other people’s lives. It’s not to shock.” Still, she continued to demand what she called “bang, bang, shoot-’em-up shows,” especially during sweeps, but when she did a highly controversial show on devil worship, she almost shot herself in the foot.

Broadcast on May 1, 1989, the show was titled “Mexican Satanic Cult Murders,” and during one segment Oprah presented a woman under the pseudonym of “Rachel” who was undergoing long-term psychiatric treatment for multiple personality disorder.

“As a child my next guest was also used in worshipping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals and cannibalism,” Oprah told her audience. “She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she’s blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood. Meet ‘Rachel,’ who is also in disguise to protect her identity.”

“Rachel” said she had witnessed the ritual sacrifice of children and had been a victim of ritualistic abuse. “I was born into a family that believes in this.”

“And this is a—does everyone else think it’s a nice Jewish family?” asked Oprah, introducing “Rachel’s” religion. “From the outside you appear to be a nice Jewish girl….And you are all worshipping the devil inside the home?”

“Right,” said the disturbed “Rachel.” “There’s other Jewish families across the country. It’s not just my own family.”

“Really? And so who knows about it? Lots of people now.”

“I talked to a police detective in the Chicago area….”

“So when you were brought up in this kind of evilness did you just think it was normal?”

“Rachel” said she had blocked out a lot of the memories, but she remembered enough to say “there would be rituals in which babies would be sacrificed.” She later added, “Not all Jewish people sacrifice babies….It’s not a typical thing.”

“I think we all know that,” said Oprah.

“I just want to point that out.”

“This is the first time I heard of any Jewish people sacrificing babies, but anyway—so you witnessed the sacrifice?” said Oprah.

“Right. When I was very young I was forced to participate in that, and…I had to sacrifice an infant.”

The phones at Harpo started jangling with hundreds of irate callers objecting to Oprah’s blithe acceptance of “Rachel’s” claims about Jews practicing devil worship. Television stations across the country—New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Cleveland, Washington, D.C.—were inundated with furious calls. Within hours, Jewish groups rose up in condemnation, and Oprah’s show became a national news story. “We have grave concern about both the lack of judgment and the insensitive manipulation of this woman, who is clearly mentally ill, in a manner which can only inflame the basest prejudices of ignorant people,” Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reformed Judaism told
The New York Times.

Arthur J. Kropp, president of People for the American Way, a leading civil liberties organization, met with his board of directors in Washington, D.C. “There’s been a lot of concern about so-called trash television,” he said after reviewing the transcript of Oprah’s show. “She was the one who introduced the religion. I don’t think she introduced it to convey any correlation between the woman’s Jewishness and what she saw, but nevertheless Oprah did do it and that was careless.”

This wasn’t the first bad publicity Oprah had ever received, but it was brutal because she was being criticized for offending sensibilities of race and religion, which she had always appeared to champion. It was an especially sorry position for a woman who had put herself forward as a “poor little ole nappy-headed colored chile” from the lynching state of Mississippi as a not-so-subtle reminder of the viciousness of bigotry. She now felt misunderstood by her accusers, but she also recognized that her career was in jeopardy.

“We are aware that the show has struck a nerve,” said Jeff Jacobs, then COO of Harpo Productions. He pointed out to the press that Oprah had said on the air that “Rachel” was one particular person talking about her particular situation. “And she was identified at the top of the show as being mentally disturbed,” he added, not commenting on why such a person would be allowed on the show in the first place. Recognizing the danger of a national boycott of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
and the potential loss of sponsors, which could spell financial
ruin for everyone, Jacobs quickly offered to meet with Jewish leaders in Chicago to try to salvage the situation, but neither he nor Oprah offered a public apology. When reporters called, Jacobs said Oprah was “traveling” and “unavailable for comment.”

The night after hosting her devil-worship show, she appeared on
The David Letterman Show
in Chicago and was unnerved by the comedian’s quirky manner. The interview was awkward throughout, especially when someone in the crowd yelled, “Rip her, Dave.” Letterman grinned his gleeful gap-toothed grin and said nothing. Years later he said, “I think she resented the fact that I didn’t rise to the occasion and, you know, beat up on the guy. Which I probably should have, but I was completely out of control and didn’t know what I was doing.” A couple of nights later, Letterman, doing his show from the Chicago Theater, told his audience that he felt ill because he had eaten four clams at Oprah’s restaurant, The Eccentric. That ripped it. Oprah closed the door on David Letterman and did not speak to him again for sixteen years.

Feeling battered by the bruising she was taking in the nation’s press over her devil-worship show, Oprah remained close to her condominium at Water Tower Place when she wasn’t working. Serendipitously, she happened to meet Harriet Brady (née Bookey), another resident, in the lobby. Mrs. Brady, then seventy-two, was well known in Chicago’s Jewish community as a philanthropist. She approached Oprah to introduce herself, and then said kindly, “I think I can help you.”

Within hours she was on the phone to her good friend Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, a federal judge whose contacts extended into every segment of society. He agreed to help, and for the next week Judge Marovitz and Mrs. Brady worked on Oprah’s behalf to assemble a group of representatives from the region’s Jewish community to meet at Harriet Brady’s condominium to try to quell the raging controversy.

Oprah arrived at the meeting on May 9, 1989, with Debra DiMaio and two Jewish members of her senior staff, Jeffrey Jacobs and Ellen Rakieten. They sat down with Michael Kotzin, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Chicago; Jonathan Levine, midwest director of the American Jewish Committee; Barry Morrison, director of the Greater Chicago/Wisconsin Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith; Rabbi Herman
Schaalman, president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis; Maynard Wishner, president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago; Judge Marovitz; and Mrs. Brady.

Oprah was sufficiently contrite and vowed never again to broadcast a show on devil worship. She agreed to reach out to B’nai B’rith, which fights anti-Semitism and racism, whenever her show focused on those subjects, and she promised to exercise better judgment in selecting guests. The two sides came together over the next three days to work out two statements to be delivered to the press, which had been covering the story nearly every day. Oprah and her executive producer said, “We recognize that
The Oprah Winfrey Show
on May 1 could have contributed to the perpetuation and historical misconceptions and canards about Jews, and we regret that any harm may have been done. We are aware of community and group sensibilities and will make every effort to ensure that our program will reflect that concern.”

Speaking on behalf of the Jewish community leaders, ADL representative Barry Morrison said, “We were all satisfied that Oprah Winfrey and her staff did not intend to offend anyone and that Oprah was genuinely sorry for any offense or misunderstanding. During the meeting, constructive recommendations were made and there was an extensive exchange of information which led to a greater understanding of Jewish perspective on the part of Oprah and her staff.”

Not everyone was pleased with the outcome. “It’s an inadequate response to the harm that may have been done on that broadcast,” said Phil Baum, associate executive director of the American Jewish Congress. “It’s not our sensitivities she ought to be concerned about. It’s a question of the integrity of her show. This apology cannot possibly reach anything like the people [7,680,000 homes, according to the A.C. Nielsen Company] who were exposed to these statements.”

Oprah refused to make an apology on her show or publicly comment on the program or the statements, but privately she embraced her two major defenders and kept Mrs. Brady and Judge Marovitz close to her for the rest of their lives. Both were invited to all her parties, and because of them she became more involved in Jewish causes.

When Judge Marovitz died in 2001 at the age of ninety-five, the elite of Chicago assembled in his courtroom on the twenty-fifth floor of the
Dirksen Federal Building to remember him as, in Mayor Richard Daley’s words, “a true friend and wonderful human being.” Covering the memorial for the
Chicago Sun-Times,
Neil Steinberg was surprised to see Oprah in the crowd. “Every man would like a woman of mystery at his memorial,” he wrote, “and it was fitting that Winfrey filled that role at Marovitz’s service.”

“I love him,” Oprah said. “He was beyond wonderful. He was one of my inspirations. He was a dear friend to me when I most needed him.”

“And what exactly did Marovitz do for you?” Steinberg asked.

Winfrey smiled, sphinxlike: “I’m not saying.”

Two years later, when Harriet Brady, then eighty-six, was dying in the hospital, Oprah visited her often, and later attended her funeral. They, too, had become close over the years, and it was a relationship Oprah valued because Harriet Brady, wealthy in her own right and socially established, wanted nothing from her. “Oprah feels so ripped off by everyone that she appreciates people who, as she says, ‘don’t bleed me,’ ” said Bill Zwecker, the newspaper columnist and television commentator who had been covering the talk show host since she moved to Chicago.

Shortly after making her peace with Jewish America, Oprah was hit with a nasty blind item by Ann Gerber in the
Chicago Sun-Times
(May 14, 1989):

Although Oprah did not live on Lake Shore Drive, she knew she was the target of the gossip columnist, and she was irate. “She was angrier than I’ve ever seen her,” recalled Patricia Lee Lloyd.

Three days later, on May 17, 1989, Ann Gerber responded to the calls she had received from Oprah’s staff with another item, this time naming names:

The media flew into a frenzy, calling Chicago police and area hospitals to try to confirm the story, with no success. Oprah issued an emotional denial on her show (May 19, 1989):

She didn’t say what the vulgar rumor was, so most of her audience was confused and did not understand why she was so upset. This triggered even more curiosity, proving, as Shakespeare wrote, that “Rumor is a pipe / that the blunt monster with uncounted heads / can play upon.”