Oprah (52 page)

The bubble bath segment unleashed a torrent of “Deepak Oprah” criticism, comparing her to New Age guru Deepak Chopra. There was a severe media backlash, especially in Chicago. “[A]s I stand in the eye of this latest hurricane of national [self-] worship, may I point out one thing,” wrote Richard Roeper in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“She’s getting really goofy with all the spiritual questing.” Oprah had told
TV Guide
she was so happy she was “splendiferous,” but Roeper disagreed. “It
seems to me we’re watching a woman go through an almost frantic search for spiritual bliss and higher consciousness.”

The
Sun-Times
later reported that a seventy-three-year-old woman following Oprah’s advice to light scented candles and “be reminded of the essential qualities of your light” had accidentally set fire to her retirement high-rise, sending a dozen people to the hospital.

The
Chicago Tribune
’s TV critic, Steve Johnson, advised Oprah-holics to draw a bubble bath for their guru. “Her spirit—battered of late by indifference, criticism and the befuddlement on the faces of all those devotees who don’t even know what she means when she preaches ‘remembering your spirit’ on her show every day—just might need it.” He pronounced Oprah’s “Change Your Life” television “a fairly skin-crawling thing.

“Winfrey, by giving it a label, was not just saying ‘I want to help you change your life,’ but making a more aggressive suggestion: ‘You need to change your life.’ And coming from a woman who can snap her fingers and get what she wants, who just signed a $150 million contract to do her talk show through 2002 and whose personal fortune has been estimated at closer to $1 billion than $0, it rings a little patronizing.”

He also took aim at her for presenting blatant medical quackery by endorsing a woman who described herself as a “medical intuitive,” who Oprah said was genuine because the woman had intuited that Oprah was worried about joint pain. As if a medical psychic, this woman diagnosed members of Oprah’s audience simply by having them stand and give their first names and ages. She told a man with chronic migraine headaches: “Life owes me an explanation. That thought is in your liver and so it’s burning. And what happens from the liver is there’s an energetic circuit and it goes right up to the brain channel. And that starts the fire neurologically and that’s why you have migraines.”

Oprah soon became a moving target for the mainstream media.
Psychology Today
lambasted her for contributing to lunacy. “It is apparently arrogant to think that psychiatrists, physicists, evolutionary scientists, and epidemiologists might know more about their areas of expertise than say, Oprah,” wrote Gad Saad, PhD, in an article about narcissistic celebrities who play doctor. A decade later
Newsweek
put Oprah on the cover (June 8, 2009), with an eleven-page article that
castigated her for “crazy talk” and “wacky cures.” Like the Pardoner in
The Canterbury Tales
who sold fake relics and spurious indulgences, Oprah was blasted as irresponsible for not knowing the difference between useful medical information and New Age nonsense. This was a complete turnaround for the magazine that had lauded her eight years before with a breathless cover story proclaiming “The Age of Oprah,” saying, “She’s changing more lives than ever.” During her “Change Your Life” phase the magazine nicked her with a “Periscope” item titled “Oprah-Di, Oprah Da,” giving five takes on “The Big O”:

It was not just the Chicago critics who came down on Oprah for presuming her viewers needed their lives changed. She took it on the chin from the
Orlando Sentinel
’s Hal Boedeker, who said her bubble-bath segment screamed for a parody on
Saturday Night Live.
He suggested an appropriate topic for her next show would be “Celebrity Run Amok” with a new theme song, “You’re So Vain,” which, he said, Oprah could sing to herself. “Her confident style has given way to arrogance.”

Perhaps the cruelest blow came when Wiley A. Hall III compared Louis Farrakhan to Oprah in the
Afro-American Red Star.
Hall wrote that with his “feel-good” Million Man March on Washington in 2000, the Nation of Islam leader was “trying to position himself as another Oprah Winfrey….[Like Oprah] he’s become a master of the obvious, earnestly stated, passionately put….With Oprah Winfrey and her new clone Louis Farrakhan, I have this strong sense that we’re
being manipulated. I just can’t tell whether it’s for good or ill.” The kicker came the following week, when Hall reported that followers of Farrakhan, known for race-baiting and virulent anti-Semitism, felt he was being insulted to be compared to Oprah.

In
The New York Times,
the newspaper she cared most about, Jeff MacGregor dismissed Oprah’s “Change Your Life” television as “host worship,” filled with “mind numbing clichés of personal improvement.” He said that “like many gurus and circuit riders before her, Oprah has found a way to shamelessly market the history of her own misery and confusion as a form of worship.”

Yet what sounded loopy to critics resonated with many in Oprah’s audience, who shared her hunger for greater meaning in their lives. “I was a rural mail carrier in Stem, North Carolina,” said Susan Karns, who runs the beauty shop at Hillcrest Convalescent Center in Durham, “and if it wasn’t for Oprah and her ‘Change Your Life’ television, I would never have gone to beauty school at night and gotten this great job….It was scary to change my life but I’m so glad I did. I love what I do now because I make people feel good every day and they are so grateful.”

While some questioned Oprah’s common sense, none doubted her sincerity. “I want people to see things on our show that makes them think differently about their lives,” she said. “To be a light for people. To make a difference…to open their minds and see things differently…how to get in touch with the spiritual part of their life.” However, she disliked being called a “New Ager.” She told one woman in her audience, “I am not New Age anything and I resent being called that. I am just trying to open a door so that people can see themselves more clearly and perhaps be the light to get them to God, whatever they may call that. I don’t see spirits in the trees and I don’t sit in the room with crystals.”

“Oh, but she does invoke spirits,” insisted Peter A. Colasante, owner of L’Enfant Gallery in Washington, D.C. He then added facetiously, “She probably speaks in tongues, too….I do know she waves her hands above her head like a Pentecostal when she says she feels vibrations. At least that’s been my personal experience with her.”

After buying some oil paintings through her decorator Anthony
Browne, Oprah wanted to purchase more by the same artist [John Kirthian Court], so she contacted the L’Enfant Gallery directly. “Her people from Harpo called endlessly to set up an appointment on the same day she was going to Deborah Gore Dean’s shop, across the street from mine in Georgetown. We were both told to deliver photos of what Oprah wanted to see, and the photos were to be awaiting her arrival at the Four Season Hotel the night before. We were told to have our galleries ready for her arrival and her viewing because she did not have much time…We were told that Oprah is micromanaged to the minute, like the president of the United States. We received a partial schedule:

“Well, you don’t just consign a few paintings by John Kirthian Court for a viewing. He’s the grand-nephew of James McNeill Whistler two times removed and is considered a great painter and portraitist in his own right. He lives in San Miguel. You must buy his paintings outright [$60,000–$80,000 average price] and then sell them after you’ve air-freighted them from Portugal and insured their transport for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s what I did: I purchased three paintings for Oprah’s two thirty viewing.” The gallery owner admitted feeling tentative about the investment because he’d had “trouble getting paid for the first three paintings” he had sold to Oprah a year or so before. “But I went ahead and did it,” he said.

“Because her secretaries told me she only had a few minutes and would be gone by three
P.M.
, I made a three thirty
P.M.
appointment with another client. The day arrived and we waited and waited and waited for Oprah. Finally, we saw her two limousines pull up to Deborah’s shop at two thirty-five
P.M.
Time was passing, so around two fifty-five
P.M.
I went across the street, where Oprah was bellowing at Deborah for not having had her photos delivered to the hotel the night before. Apparently, when she walked into the shop, she said to Deborah, ‘Are you Anthony’s girl?’ Deborah, who owns her own store, naturally got a little huffy. ‘No. I’m
not
Anthony’s girl. I’m not anybody’s girl.’ Oprah
berated her for not having anything ready and kept yelling about how precious her time was. That’s when I interrupted.

“ ‘Hey. You’ve kept me waiting for over thirty minutes.’ Her security guards moved in, and Deborah started laughing. ‘C’mon,’ I said to Oprah. ‘I need to show you your paintings so I can get to my own appointment.’ With that I started to walk her out of the shop.

“ ‘Oprah does not walk,’ she said.

“ ‘Aw, c’mon. It’s only a few yards,’ I said with my hand on her shoulder, steering her across the street. She started screaming at her secretary.

“ ‘Who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. Who is he? Tell me what’s going on here.’

“I said, ‘Your people made appointments for you, insisted on absolute times, and said that we all had to be ready for your arrival and let nothing interfere, so I’m doing exactly what your people told me to do.’

“The secretary was so frightened she couldn’t speak and she started shaking so hard her notebook bobbed up and down. This only incensed Oprah more. I thought she was going to swat the secretary and then decapitate me. Just as this was happening, a busload of kids passed by. They immediately recognized Oprah and started screaming. Then the most amazing thing happened: Oprah stopped hissing and spitting, and her serpent eyes softened as she waved and beamed. ‘Hi, y’all.’…She actually turned from screeching harridan to sweet goddess in less time than it takes to blink. I swear I thought I was in the middle of an alien attack….Then I marched her into my gallery, trailed by her pilot, her secretary, her hairdresser, her makeup man, and two big security guards. She walked through the front door and started waving her hands over her head like she was doing a very slow St. Vitus’ dance.

“ ‘I just don’t feel it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just don’t feel it. The vibrations aren’t right…they’re not speaking to me….’

“ ‘You’ll feel ’em once you see the paintings we’ve assembled for you,’ I said, pointing up the stairs where the Court oils had been hung.

“ ‘Oprah does not do stairs,’ she said. Before I could even respond to this one, my assistant let her have it.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I did,” recalled Maureen Taylor. “She had been so impossible to deal with even before she arrived, and then after all the trouble she had put Peter to for that appointment, she came in here
waving her hands like some kind of mumbo jumbo mystic, saying, ‘I just don’t feel it….I just don’t feel it.’ When she said, ‘Stairs? Stairs? Oprah does not do stairs,’ I lost it. I said, ‘Well, maybe you should try them, sister. You certainly could use the exercise.’ ”

“That did it,” said Colasante. “Oprah flounced out of the gallery, and I followed her down the street to her limousines. She yelled at her pilot. ‘Get the plane…Get the plane. We’re leaving.’ And that was the end of Oprah Winfrey and her spirits and her vibrations.”

To reporters, Oprah tried to dismiss the avalanche of criticism about her “Change Your Life” shows by suggesting it might be a matter of overexposure. “Was it too much
Beloved
publicity? Was the so-called backlash because I did the [theme] song the same year I was on the
Vogue
cover?” Most of that “so-called backlash” came from white male critics, who had trouble understanding the increasing “Oprahfication” of female America. As the comic Jimmy Kimmel joked when introducing
The Man Show
on Comedy Central, “We’re here because we have a serious problem in this country—and her name is Oprah. Millions and millions of women are under Oprah’s spell. This woman has half of America brainwashed.”

Several critics, some within her own family, took Oprah to task when, in 2007, she promoted
The Secret,
a DVD and book by Rhonda Byrne, as the answer to living a good life. “I took God out of the box,” Oprah told her viewers before pushing
The Secret,
which describes Jesus Christ not as divine or as the son of God, but merely as one of the “prosperity teachers” in the Bible.

“That is not the way I raised Oprah Gail,” said Vernon Winfrey, who was so disgusted by his daughter’s embrace of New Age beliefs that he no longer watched her show. “I need her show like a hog needs a holiday,” he said. “Besides, the show is not that good anymore.”

Oprah’s “aunt” Katharine, who keeps a Bible by her bedside, was horrified by Oprah’s embrace of “that New Age nonsense,” as was Katharine’s daughter, Jo Baldwin, Oprah’s cousin, who was once vice president of Harpo. Baldwin now teaches English at Mississippi Valley State University and preaches in church on Sundays in Centobia, Mississippi. “I brought Katharine a copy of
The Secret,
and Jo wouldn’t get near the book—wouldn’t touch it,” said Jewette Battles.