Oprah (46 page)

Dear Nan,

Thanks for being on the show.

Sincerely,
Oprah     

P
HIL DONAHUE
hung up his microphone on May 2, 1996, and when television gathered to honor the talk show grandee at the Twenty-third Annual Daytime Emmy Awards in New York, Oprah presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. She probably owed him more than any of his other imitators because his show was the competition that whipped hers into the winner’s circle. “I want to thank you for opening the door so wide, wide enough for me to walk through,” she said. “I hope I can carry on the legacy that [you] began.” Donahue blew her a kiss. His good friend Gloria Steinem later recalled, “He always said that if he did his job really well, that the next big talk show host would be a black woman.”

For twenty-nine years Donahue had been jumping into his audiences with a microphone, asking for their opinions (“Help me out here”) and taking questions from his viewers (“Is the caller there?”). He was the king of talk show television until Oprah arrived on the national scene in 1986 and immediately began trouncing him in the ratings. “She changed the ball game,” said Penn State professor Vicki Abt. “She started the down-and-dirty exploitative show, the trailer trash, the unwashed parading of dysfunction….He tried to compete but he couldn’t do it as well or as badly. He was too smart.”

From the beginning Donahue was controversial and sometimes outrageous. His shows provoked thought and discussion, starting with his first guest, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists. Presenting a blunt denier of God to God-fearing America in 1967 was audacious, and it launched a new kind of talk show that all of his successors, including Oprah, would (try to) imitate. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader appeared on
Donahue
thirty-six times and personified the issue-oriented guest he most enjoyed interviewing. Unafraid to engage politicians, Donahue pressed the presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 about his extramarital affairs. His audience booed him, and Clinton berated him, saying, “You are responsible for the cynicism in this country.” But Donahue did not flinch.

Oprah, on the other hand, refused to have politicians on her show for many years because she was afraid of losing viewers. When Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.) asked to appear during the 1996 presidential campaign, she turned him down. “I don’t do politicians,” she said, because their interviews “would lack genuineness and real dialogue.” After rejecting Dole, Oprah polled her audience. “Those of you who’ve been watching
The Oprah Winfrey Show
over the last decade know that I don’t interview politicians while they’re campaigning. The question that’s been causing such a big stir…is whether or not I should break my long-standing policy and invite President Bill Clinton and Senator Bob Dole to be guests on the show. It’s [the issue] been making headlines….I think one [newspaper]…even said ‘Oprah Bounces Bob.’ I did not—it’s just a long-standing policy.” The audience indicated they did not want her to go political.

“Maybe she realized I was too quick-witted and might steal the show,” Dole joked years later. Known for his rapier wit, he once pointed to a photo of Presidents Carter, Ford, and Nixon standing side by side at a White House ceremony. “There they are,” Dole said. “See no evil, hear no evil, and evil.” After losing to Clinton in 1996, Dole went on
The Late Show with David Letterman,
where the host noted that Clinton was “fat” and probably weighed “three hundred pounds.” Dole did not miss a beat. “I never tried to lift him. I just tried to beat him.”

The senator again asked to go on Oprah’s show in 2005, when he published his memoir
One Soldier’s Story.
“It wasn’t a political book but
a story about growing up in Russell, Kansas, and serving in World War II. It’s about my wartime injuries and overcoming adversity, which I thought would appeal to her audience. The book was already a best seller, but it would have been more of a best seller had I been able to get on her show. But she wouldn’t take me because I am a Republican.”

In contrast, Donahue once gave Senator Dole a full hour, and offered a platform to politicians of both parties, engaging in spirited debates with Gerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton. By the time his show was canceled in New York due to low ratings, talk show television had changed, becoming less thoughtful; the terrain had been invaded by men like Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Morton Downey, Jr., Montel Williams, and Maury Povich, who presided over screamers and chair-throwers. The goal was no longer to combine education with entertainment, but rather to pander to the lowest taste to get the highest ratings. “They’re all my illegitimate children,” Donahue said of his successors, “and I love them all equally.” He never criticized his competitors, including Oprah, but he did acknowledge that she had muddied the turf. “After she hit…the talk show game took a significant turn toward the sensational and the bizarre,” he said. His most frequent guest, Ralph Nader, was blunter in blaming her for plunging talk shows into the sewer, but Donahue said that daytime television was closer to the street, more irreverent than any other spot on the dial. “Does it mean that everything on daytime television is wonderful and deserves a Nobel Prize? No,” he said. “There are sins. But I’m saying, let the wildflowers grow.”

In that unruly garden with Oprah were Rosie O’Donnell, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jenny Jones, Joan Rivers, and Rolonda Watts. Each strained to do the kind of memorable television Donahue did at his best. He once lay in a satin-lined coffin to interview a funeral home director. Another time he and his cameras followed a couple as they gave birth. They showed the mother in labor, pushing as hard as she could, with her husband helping, while their three-year-old wandered around the living room. Just as the baby was born, the toddler came into view and shouted, “Mommy, it’s a puppy!”

At the time, Oprah was getting high ratings with titillating shows on homosexuality, up to then a taboo subject for talk show television.
Reflecting her interest in the subject, she continued to explore the topic of gay men and lesbians over the next two decades. Here is only a partial list:

In 1997, long before Ellen DeGeneres entered the talk show arena, she decided that she was going to make television history on her ABC sitcom by coming out as a lesbian. She called Oprah and asked her to appear on the show as the therapist to whom Ellen confides her sexual feelings for women. Oprah agreed, but Ellen was nervous because she had seen one of Oprah’s shows on lesbians and thought the host had been quite judgmental. “I was so afraid you would find out I was gay and not like me,” said Ellen.

Hers was to be the first prime-time series to feature an openly homosexual lead character, and for eight weeks the publicity leading up to the show saturated the media. Before her character came out on television, Ellen outed herself on the cover of
Time
under the headline “Yep. I’m Gay.” General Motors, Chrysler, and Johnson & Johnson, which had aired commercials on previous episodes of
Ellen,
would not buy ads for the coming-out episode, and Oprah later told DeGeneres that she received more hate mail for doing that show than for anything she had done to date. But she frequently made this claim about her more controversial shows.

“I got more heat than I’ve ever gotten,” Oprah said.

“And did you think you would get that?” Ellen asked.

“No, I really didn’t, but it was okay because I did it for you and I did it because I believe I should have done it…so it didn’t really bother me…but at the time it was really shocking to me why [anyone] would write hate mail for that.”

Two days before Ellen’s coming-out episode on April 30, 1997, Liz Smith ran a blind item in her gossip column:

The same day Oprah appeared on
Ellen
as the therapist, who said, “Good for you, you’re gay,” Ellen appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
where Oprah told her, “A lot of people said me being on your show was me promoting lesbianism. I simply wanted to support you in being what you believe was the truth for yourself.”

“Everybody thinks I’m a freak,” Ellen said, looking beleaguered.

Oprah’s audience chastised her for guest-starring in the coming-out episode and then criticized Ellen for being a lesbian and making it public. Yet that night, when the “Ellen” character came out of the closet, she packed America’s living rooms with thirty-six million viewers, and Oprah’s show earlier that day, featuring Ellen and her then-girlfriend Anne Heche, also won high ratings. But Oprah’s cameo appearance, plus the blind item, burned up the Internet for weeks with rumors about her sexuality, the most outlandish being that she was going to come out in
Newsweek
the way Ellen came out in
Time.
Oprah finally issued an official statement denying that she was a lesbian, thereby making her sexual orientation a public issue for years to come. Before her public denial she had denied the lesbian rumors to her audience after taping a show with Rosie O’Donnell, and she again addressed the subject in a keynote speech to a convention of seven thousand broadcasting executives in Chicago. Her words appeared under coy headlines around the country:

The week before that speech, her ratings had slipped 9 percent. “Since my appearance on the ‘Ellen’ show, there have been rumors circulating that I’m gay,” Oprah said in her press release. “I’ve addressed this on my show, but the rumor mill still churns. Several weeks ago, syndicated columnist Liz Smith wrote that ‘one of the biggest and longest-running TV stars is contemplating coming out….’ Apparently, people assume that it’s me. It’s not.

“As I’ve said, I appeared on the Ellen show because I wanted to support her in her desire to free herself—and I thought it was a really good script. I am not in the closet. I am not coming out of the closet. I am not gay.”

Unintentionally or not, Oprah issued her statement during Gay Pride Week, which Barney’s downtown store in New York City celebrated with a window showing mannequins of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche popping out of a volcano. The Ellen mannequin is reading a copy of the
New York Post
’s front page reporting that the Walt Disney Company, which owned ABC, was getting bashed by Baptists over its “gay-friendly” policies. Flying above the whole scene is Oprah Winfrey in an airplane trailing a banner that reads, “I Am Not Gay.” In certain gay circles those words became as infamous as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”

Years later Rosie O’Donnell, who had come out as a lesbian, speculated on Oprah’s relationship with her best friend: “I don’t know that she and Gayle are necessarily doing each other, but I think they are the emotional equivalent of [a gay couple]….When they did that road trip together [“Oprah and Gayle’s Big Adventure,” featured in five episodes on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in 2006], that’s as gay as it gets, and I don’t mean it to be an insult, either. I’m just saying, listen, if you ask me, that’s a [gay] couple.”