Authors: Kitty Kelley
Oprah (36 page)
While changing some of the male characters in the book, she left intact the lesbian relationship, honoring the novelist’s intent to represent the diversity of black women, from their skin color to their religious, political, and sexual preferences.
Oprah worked eighteen-hour days for six weeks to complete the film. As executive producer, she was the first one on the set every morning. “I made sure I knew everybody’s name, so there was no one thinking I was Miss Mightier-Than-Thou.”
The Women of Brewster Place
was scheduled to air on Sunday and Monday evenings, March 19 and 20, 1989, and Oprah agreed to do national promotion for ABC beforehand, including a press conference for television critics. Jeff Jacobs stressed to reporters the importance of Oprah doing good work, whether or not it was commercially viable. “
The Women of Brewster Place
hasn’t aired yet,” he said. “When it does, we’ll find out if people respond to it and give it a good number. But whether they do or they don’t, it was an important book, an important film. It needed to get made. If we make money, great. And if we don’t, well, there are other reasons to do projects besides making money.”
Oprah turned to the reporters. “You want to know where I’ll be Sunday night? You’ll find me on my knees in front of the TV—praying
for the Nielsens.” While Jacobs indicated a commitment to the worth of the project, Oprah’s commitment was to the ratings, and she was not disappointed.
The Women of Brewster Place
was the most watched two-part movie since NBC’s
Fatal Vision
in 1984. Oprah’s triumph averaged a 24.0 rating and a 37 share, according to A. C. Nielsen Co. figures, with one ratings point representing 904,000 households. On Sunday her miniseries beat both
The Wizard of Oz
on CBS and NBC’s airing of
Return of the Jedi.
The reviews were mixed, but none surprised Oprah more than the one in the
Chicago Sun-Times
by Daniel Ruth, who had criticized her in the past but now praised her as “a woman of considerable talent—especially as a dramatic actress. Throughout…she exerts an energy that carries this production from beginning to end. It’s a first-rate characterization.”
Oprah wrote him a note, saying that she never thought she’d get a positive review out of him. He replied that he never thought she’d do anything to deserve one. “So,” he said many years later, “we were even.”
Now with her star power greatly enhanced, Oprah persuaded ABC to give her a weekly series in prime time based on the film. Her only caveat was that the show could not air on Thursday nights. “I will not be put in a situation where I’m up against Cosby,” she said, referring to
The Cosby Show,
one of the most popular shows on television then. To appease critics who felt
The Women of Brewster Place
bashed black men, Oprah agreed to add some sympathetic male characters and simply call the series
Brewster Place.
The network threw its full support behind her and her new show. “We are delighted to have Oprah Winfrey join our prime-time schedule in this series,” said Robert Iger, the new president of ABC entertainment. “The success of the mini-series last season and the ongoing popularity of her daily program are testament to Oprah’s universal appeal.”
Brewster Place
began airing in May 1990, but drew such poor ratings that ABC canceled it after eleven episodes. The failed venture cost Oprah $10 million and left Harpo’s facilities largely unused and unprofitable. Having once again lost a shot at prime-time television, she retreated to her farm in Indiana. She later told
Essence
magazine that
she had failed because the noise of her ambition had drowned out “the voice of God.”
“I thought I could make [the series] all right because I wanted it to be all right….But I wasn’t ready for it. My mistake was that I didn’t listen to the voice. Me! The one who always preaches ‘Listen to the voice,’ ‘Be guided by the voice,’ ‘Take direction from the voice,’ by which I mean the voice of God within me….The voice was speaking loud and clear and I didn’t take heed.”
Oprah could not comprehend that the failure of
Brewster Place
might have been in its conception, or the script, or maybe even the acting. She had said over and over again, “God is with me. That’s why I always succeed….I am God-centered.”
She did not believe that bad things could happen to good people. Nor did she accept the anarchy of fate or wicked chaos, even bad luck. She totally dismissed good luck as having any part in her success. “Luck is a matter of preparation,” she said. “I am highly attuned to my divine self.” She believed that everything was dictated by holy design, including the 157 miracles she told viewers she had experienced. She told Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel that his surviving the Holocaust was a miracle, but he disagreed. “If a miracle of God to spare me, why? There were people much better than me….No, it was an accident,” he said. Oprah looked at him incredulously.
Having credited her “triumphal” life to God’s plan for her success, she now accepted her
Brewster Place
setback as another message from on high. “I truly understand that there is a lesson in everything that happens to us,” she said. “So I tried not to spend my time asking, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ but trying to figure out why I had chosen [to do the series]. That’s the answer you need. It’s always a question of accepting responsibility for your choices. Anytime you look outside yourself for answers, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
In analyzing Oprah’s beliefs for
The New York Times Magazine,
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison had written that her “knotty contradictions” and simplistic truths often collided with each other but were perfect for sound-bite television: “They make up in pith what they lack in profundity.” The writer later admitted she could not bear to watch Oprah’s
show. “You’ll forgive me, but it’s white trailer trash. It debases language, it debases emotion. It provides everyone with glib psychological formulas. [These people] go around talking like a fortune cookie. And I think she is in very large part responsible for that.” The writer Gretchen Reynolds agreed, if not quite so harshly. “[S]he is a true adherent…of the squishiest sort of self-help dogma. She believes you can ‘get to know yourself by facing your fears.’ ”
Yet Oprah’s little homilies touched her audiences and reflected their own spiritual quest. As she evolved from a child of Old Testament preachers into a New Age theorist who loosely defined God as a vague force of the universe, she gave her viewers what she called “a spiritual reawakening,” so that they could all, in her words, “live your best life.” That phrase became such an Oprah mantra that she had the four words trademarked by Harpo, Inc., as her own. She led Live Your Best Life seminars across the country, charging as much as $185 per person, and attracted thousands of women. She passed out Live Your Best Life journals and encouraged everyone to write their aspirations in order to realize them. She distributed Live Your Best Life gift bags filled with scented candles and tea bags. She preached like an old-fashioned Baptist minister, but her Live Your Best Life sermons did not contain fire and brimstone. Instead, she offered huggy, feel-good messages about “living in the present moment” and “following your dream” and “listening to the voice,” which, she promised, would lead you to “live your best life.” And to the hordes of paying participants who wrote down every word she said in their Live Your Best Life notebooks, there was no better proof of this than Oprah herself.
hirteen
D
URING THE
summer of 1988, Oprah heard a voice that led to the biggest change in her life and gave her the highest ratings of her career. It was the voice of Stedman Graham, whom Oprah said had been sent to her by God after she had formally prayed on her knees.
Over dinner one night she asked if her size ever bothered him. He paused—a little too long. Then he said: “It has been something of an adjustment.” Oprah looked at him in disbelief.
“At first I figured, ‘Oh, great. I get to be somebody’s personal growth experience.’ But then I started to realize that, my God, he’s been feeling that all this time [two years] and it took him this long to ever tell me about it.”
On July 7, 1988, shortly after that conversation, Oprah started a protein-sparing fast, drinking a medical concoction of powder and water five times a day, plus sixty-four ounces of noncaloric liquids, and taking vitamin pills, but eating absolutely no solid food. Six weeks into the strenuous diet, she and Stedman were on vacation in Hawaii and Oprah started eating. “I felt terrible because I’d been so controlled up to that point. So Stedman said, ‘Why don’t you just decide you’re going to eat on vacation and not make yourself crazy? When you go home, you can start the diet again.’
“ ‘How about if I had just one cheeseburger and got it out of my system?’
“ ‘Are you crazy?’ ”
Oprah became maniacal about that one cheeseburger. She waited for Stedman to go to his golf lesson and opened all the windows in the hotel room. Then she called room service and ordered the cheeseburger—with bacon and avocado. Minutes later she raced to the phone and called Gayle King to tell her what she had done. Gayle understood the binge because her husband, William Bumpus, had been on the same fasting diet and lost seventy-five pounds in twelve weeks. Oprah went back on her fast and jogged every day with Stedman. By the time she returned to Chicago in the fall she had dropped forty pounds.
The transformation of her five-six frame was startling. Her audiences could not believe their eyes. She promised she would reveal her secret as soon as she lost more weight. Viewers tuned in every day just to see what she looked like. By October she had dropped another fifteen pounds. Still, she would not say how she was shrinking every week. Finally she announced that she would share her secret during November sweeps, on a show titled “Diet Dreams Come True.”
The buildup to this show seemed to galvanize the country. Everyone wanted to know how Oprah, who once said she didn’t keep a handgun because she would shoot off her thighs, had finally managed to lose weight without joining the NRA. The Associated Press dispatched a photographer to Chicago, and newspaper editors around the country sent reporters to cover the “Diet Dreams” show. While acknowledging that Oprah’s amazing weight loss had grabbed the nation’s attention, the Knight Ridder correspondent groused that it was only “the most important social development since Michael Jackson’s last nose job.” Embarrassed to be covering Oprah’s diet revelation, he added, “Did she find the cure for cancer? Did she eliminate the specter of AIDS? Did she reduce the national deficit?”
The day of the much-ballyhooed show, November 15, 1988, Oprah sashayed onto her soundstage in a big bright red coat. “This is a very, very personal show,” she said. Then, like an exuberant stripper, she ripped off the red coat to reveal half of her former self. “As of this morning I have lost sixty-seven pounds,” she said, justifiably proud of
her new figure, which was tucked into a pair of size-ten Calvin Klein jeans that had been hanging in her closet since 1981. She twirled around the stage to show off her new body in a cinched belt with a silver buckle, a tight black turtleneck, and spike-heeled boots. The audience cheered her wildly, waving the little yellow pom-poms they had been given for just that purpose.
Oprah held up a package of Optifast powder, which she said she mixed with water in an Optifast cup and drank five times a day. This gave her four hundred calories of nutrition without solid food on a fast that supposedly spared the body’s loss of protein. Before she had ended her first segment, Optifast operators were bombarded. A company spokesman reported one million attempts to get through to the toll-free number after Oprah mentioned the brand name seven times. “I’m sure a lot of people think I own stock in Optifast,” she said. “I don’t.”
After a commercial break, she returned pulling a little red wagon loaded with sixty-seven pounds of greasy white animal fat. Bending down, she tried to lift the bag of blubber. “Is this gross or what? It’s amazing to me I can’t lift it, but I used to carry it around every day.”
Then she became very serious. “This has been the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life….It is my greatest accomplishment.” She then made her personal diary public, reading entries she had made after talking with an Optifast counselor about why she wanted to lose weight. “What is the bigger issue here? Self-esteem. For me, it is getting control of my life. I realize this fat is just a blocker. It is like having mud on my wings. It keeps me from flying. It is a barrier to better things. It has been a way of staying comfortable with other people. My fat puts them at ease. Makes them feel less threatened. Makes me insecure. So I dream of walking into a room one day where this fat is not the issue. And that will happen this year because the bigger issue for me is making myself the best that I can be.”
The next segment of the show featured a congratulatory call from Stedman in High Point, North Carolina, to say how proud he was of her. At that time he was working for his mentor, Bob Brown, and seeing Oprah only on weekends. “I hate it,” she told reporters then. “It’s going to last another year. Then he says he’s going to move back to Chicago.” Her regular viewers knew who Stedman was, although they
had yet to see him. She was saving that introduction for a February sweeps show titled “How Fame Affects a Relationship.” Stedman’s phone call of congratulations was followed by a video clip from Shirley MacLaine, whom the audience knew to be Oprah’s movie-star guide to all things paranormal.
The “fat wagon” show became the most watched show of Oprah’s career, with her highest overnight rating ever in sixteen of Nielsen’s major markets, meaning that 44 percent of the daytime television audience watched. “These are unbelievable numbers,” said Stephen W. Palley, COO of King World. “Those people who didn’t see the show certainly heard about it.” Oprah’s eye-popping weight loss riveted the nation’s media for days after the show, as nutritionists and doctors and commentators debated the merits of protein-sparing fasts, with everyone wagering on how long Oprah would keep the weight off.