Oprah (43 page)

As she started her new season in September 1997, Oprah’s producers suggested she interview Paula Barbieri, the
Playboy
model who had written a book about her relationship with O. J. Simpson. “When I heard that I said: ‘Let me tell you this: OJ is over. I’m not going to go into another season discussing what should have already been over two years ago,’ ” Oprah reiterated to the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“ ‘Paula Barbieri is not going to run my life. You hear me? It ain’t gonna be Paula Barbieri.’ I said, ‘I didn’t come twelve years of doing this show to start off a new season doing Paula Barbieri.’ ”

Someone suggested that Oprah’s indignation might have been tinged by losing exclusivity to Larry King, Diane Sawyer, and Matt Lauer, all of whom had lined up to interview Barbieri. Richard Roeper, who had interviewed her two days before, accused Oprah of utter hypocrisy.

“Barbieri has accepted Jesus Christ as her savior and has abandoned Hollywood for a life of church work,” he wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“Shouldn’t Oprah be hugging her on camera and whispering, ‘You go, girl!’ as the tears flow?”

Weeks after the Barbieri brouhaha, Oprah decided to do a show titled “What’s Black Enough?” During the two-and-a-half-hour taping on September 30, 1997, members of her audience criticized her for coddling white viewers and for having Mark Fuhrman on during Black History Month. She had scheduled the air date for October 8, 1997, but she canceled the show, possibly because she did not want to be publicly vilified and seen as the focus of so much racial dissension.

Reverberations from the O. J. Simpson trial continued for years. Following his acquittal in the criminal trial, he was later found liable in a civil trial for the wrongful deaths, and the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were awarded $33.5 million in damages, which the Goldmans sought to collect at every turn. A decade later, Simpson signed a $3.5 million contract with ReganBooks to write
If I Did It,
purportedly a novel about how he might have committed the murders. The victims’ families protested, and the public outrage prompted Rupert Murdoch to cancel the contract and pulp the book (four hundred thousand copies). Fred Goldman, who had initially opposed publication, gained the rights to the book under the civil court judgment against Simpson and arranged to republish with a cover that reduced the
If
to the size of an insect so that the title appeared to read,
I Did It: Confessions of the Killer,
by O. J. Simpson. Goldman commissioned a new introduction and added an afterword by Dominick Dunne. The book was published in 2007, and once again Oprah waded into the muck.

During her opening show of 2007 she announced yet another show on O. J. Simpson, saying she had invited the Goldmans and Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, to discuss the confessional novel with the former prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden. But Denise Brown was so angry at the Goldmans for proceeding with the book that she refused to appear with them and canceled her appearance. She finally agreed to tape a separate segment in which she could urge people to boycott the book.

Oprah opened that show (September 13, 2007) with Fred Goldman and his daughter, Kim, sitting onstage. “This is a moral and ethical dilemma for me,” she said. “We sell books on this show. We promote books, but I think this book is despicable….I’m all for it being published, because I don’t believe in censorship, but I personally wouldn’t want to be in a position to encourage people to buy this book.”

Immediately thrown on the defensive, Kim Goldman responded,
“It’s either him or us.” Oprah bored into the Goldmans on how much money they would make from the publication.

“Seventeen cents per book? That’s all? What kind of a publishing deal is that? Seventeen cents?” Oprah said. “Does that ease your pain?” She returned to the money again and again.

“Do you consider the proceeds from the book blood money?”

The victim’s sixty-six-year-old father said there wasn’t that much money involved.

“If you’re only going to get seventeen cents, who gets the rest of it?” said a skeptical Oprah.

“We have a judgment,” said Fred Goldman, “the only form of justice that we were able to attain through the civil court. And that piece of paper is meaningless unless we pursue that judgment. We took away the opportunity from him [Simpson] to earn additional money, and that money is the only form of justice.”

Oprah looked disgusted and disapproving. “We as a country have been able to move on,” she said. “I would hope you would [be able to move on and] get peace.”

Riled, Kim Goldman snapped, “It’s insulting to assume we would ever get peace.”

“I did not mean to be insulting,” said Oprah. “Thank you for honoring your commitment to be here.” She quickly moved to a commercial and then introduced Denise Brown.

“I will not be reading this book,” Oprah told her. “My producers have read it and tell me that Nicole is depicted as a drug addict and slut and deserves the description.” Denise Brown said the book was “evil” and publication was “morally wrong.” At the end of the hour, Oprah looked like she had clean hands: she had said she wouldn’t read the book, and she wouldn’t recommend the book. Still, she allowed the principals to come on her show and give her huge ratings, while pushing O. J. Simpson’s confessional novel to number two on
The New York Times
bestseller list.

When Oprah started her book club in 1996 she gave all of her authors “the love treatment,” and her enthusiastic endorsements sent their books charging up
The New York Times
bestseller list, a button-busting
experience for any writer. Oprah’s Book Club became a national sensation that enshrined her as a cultural icon while energizing publishers, enriching authors, and enlightening viewers. Yet when Alice McGee had first suggested in a memo that Oprah do a book club on the air, she did not think it would work. She worried about the ratings. “We’ll get horrible numbers,” she said. “We’ll bomb….Over the years we’ve tried to do fiction and always died in the ratings.” But after Oprah received a gold medal from the National Book Foundation and an Honor from the Association of American Publishers, was named Person of the Year by the Literary Market Place, dubbed by
Newsweek
as the most important person in the world of books and media, and lauded as a “Library Lion” of the New York Public Library, she framed McGee’s memo and hung it on her office wall.

At the time, book clubs were springing up all over the country and many booksellers ran author readings and study groups out of their stores. Oprah responded to the existing popularity of these groups and seized the zeitgeist. “She gets no credit for invention,” joked
TV Guide
critic Jeff Jarvis, “but she certainly knows how to steal wisely.”

She began her book club, as she did so many of her shows, with herself. Having gone from XXXL sweats to slinky spandex after losing almost eighty-five pounds in 1993, she felt she had turned her life around. She finally had accepted daily exercise as her metabolic savior, and she now wanted to convert her sedentary viewers. So she decided her May sweeps period would be an entire month of “Get Movin’ with Oprah: Spring Training 1995.” This set the stage for the fitness book she wanted to write with her trainer, which preceded her book club.

“We had this big discussion about what [that month of spring training] would do in the numbers and what about people who really didn’t want to lose weight,” she said. “And then we decided O. J. was on anyway so we could do what we wanted.” By that time Oprah could do almost anything she wanted and stay at number one. She would soon win a Daytime Emmy for the fifth consecutive year as Best Talk Show Host, and would make her first appearance on the
Forbes
annual list of the four hundred richest Americans, with a net worth then of $340 million.
Life
magazine dubbed her “America’s most powerful woman,” and
Time
named her one of “The Most Influential People of the Century.”
As the dramatist Jean Anouilh once said, “Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”

Taking note of her monthlong workout,
The Onion,
a parody newspaper, ran a front-page headline announcing, “Oprah Secedes from U.S., Forms Independent Nation of Cheesecake-Eating Housewives.” The tongue-in-cheek story reported that the newly formed republic of “Ugogirl” would be recognized by the UN as a sovereign nation with attitude and sass.

From the time she started losing weight with Bob Greene in 1993, Oprah talked about writing a book with him, and he began jotting down notes. When she determined the time was right, they found a writer and signed with Hyperion to coauthor
Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body—and a Better Life.
Oprah wrote the introduction and the front piece for every chapter, sharing photos of herself at her fattest and fittest, as well as poignant entries from her journals about how her weight had consumed her life.

She whipped up frenzied excitement about the book when Hyperion sponsored a breakfast with her and her trainer in Soldier Field stadium during the 1996 ABA convention in Chicago, which was followed by a mile-long power walk to McCormick Place, the convention center. “I can’t tell you what I ate that morning, who shared my table or what I wore that day,” wrote Renee A. James in the Allentown
Morning Call.
“But I do remember this very clearly: Oprah Winfrey was incredible. She looked great; she sounded approachable. As she spoke to the assembled masses, she came across as your very best girlfriend. Every woman in the crowd felt like Oprah was connecting specifically with her. We shared the same struggles, including the never-ending weight loss battle, despite the fact that Oprah was (back then) a millionaire with a hit television show and more money than the rest of us would see in several lifetimes. It didn’t faze us that she was an international celebrity. She was just like us. She sounded exactly like each one of us when we talked to our girlfriends. Oprah would fit right in if she wandered into one of our get-together lunches. The whole experience was powerful. The connection she made that day with a couple thousand women was about much more than losing weight.”

Sadly, James changed her mind about Oprah twelve years later.
“Could it have something to do with the difference between the superstar billionaire we see in 2008 and the girlfriend I saw walking around, talking to people on Soldier Field in 1996? Somehow, Oprah is starting to feel a bit too ‘empowered,’ just a little too ‘enlightened’ for the rest of us. To me, this feels like the friend who got a little too impressed with herself and became just a little too good for the rest of us. Makes you sort of mad; but you still miss her.”

Watching Oprah and her trainer in the summer of 1996 leading all those women huffing and puffing across parking lots, up highway overpasses, and along the lakefront convinced booksellers to place heavy orders for
Make the Connection,
which had a first printing of two million copies. On publication day Oprah dedicated her show to her book with Bob Greene, and she also posed for a cover story in
People:
“Oprah Buff: After Four Years with a New Fitness Philosophy Oprah Is Happy at Last.” Within a month,
Make the Connection
was at the top of every bestseller list in the country.

Oprah was so convinced she would never gain weight again that she spent the next several months making a motivational home video titled
Oprah: Make the Connection
in which she talked about having conquered her weight problem. “The sixty-minute tape is less an instructional guide on getting in shape than it is an Oprah-fest,” said the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“We see Oprah boxing on the beach with Greene. Oprah in a field of flowers with a puppy. Oprah in her dressing room. Oprah dancing. Oprah sitting around the dinner table with her buddies. Oprah finishing the marathon. We see fat Oprah. We see fit Oprah.”

We also see generous Oprah, who announced that all proceeds from the video would go to A Better Chance, a Boston-based program that provides inner-city students with good grades the opportunity to attend the nation’s best college preparatory schools.

Days after launching her own book, Oprah launched her book club to feature works of adult contemporary fiction. She made a few exceptions for her friends when she chose Maya Angelou’s nonfiction book
The Heart of a Woman
and Bill Cosby’s
Little Bill
children’s stories. When she started featuring nonfiction in 2005, she rejected her “aunt” Katharine’s memoir,
Jay Bird Creek,
because, according to Mrs. Esters, Oprah said her book was “too trite and mediocre. No drama or excitement.”

“I self-published the book, and Oprah said she could not consider it for her show unless it was published by a publisher like Random House, Inc….She also said her viewers would not like it.” Mrs. Esters had written about growing up in the Jim Crow South and her fight for civil rights. “My book was too little for Oprah to bother with.”

Inexplicably, Oprah ignored the two women whose contemporary fiction had given her an entrée into acting. Alice Walker, who wrote
The Color Purple,
and Gloria Naylor, who wrote
The Women of Brewster Place,
were never selected for Oprah’s Book Club for any of their subsequent works. Particularly puzzling was the distance Oprah put between herself and Alice Walker, because
The Color Purple
had been such a significant part of Oprah’s success, expanding and, in many ways, making her career. Her homage to the movie could be seen in the “Color Purple” meadow she created at her Indiana farm. Yet she never invited Alice Walker to see the landscaped hymn of praise to her novel.

“I love Oprah and I admire her and I think she’s a gift to the planet,” Walker said in 2008, “but she’s put a huge remove between us that I don’t understand….Maybe my views are just too out there for her.”

Equally inexplicable was what looked like Oprah’s total usurping of the novel when it became a musical and opened on Broadway in 2005. The marquee blared: “Oprah Winfrey Presents
The Color Purple.
” Only in the smallest print in the programs and in the full-page ads that ran in newspapers were the words “Based upon the novel written by Alice Walker.”