Oprah (61 page)

The confidentiality agreements gave Oprah a sense of security about anyone stepping forward to sully the image she had created. Not that the image was totally fraudulent, but it was fragile to exposure, because as open as she appeared to be, Oprah shared herself only in the most measured ways, doling out dollops of what she called “the bad stuff” in settings that she controlled totally. Having been “sold out for $19,000” by her sister, Patricia, who had been paid by the tabloids to
talk about Oprah’s promiscuous childhood, her truancy, her teenage pregnancy, and the death of her baby boy, Oprah feared further tell-alls. Unable to put her trust in her Harpo “family,” she assumed the worst of everyone and threw up the strongest defense she could devise. Realistically, there was no way for her to pursue every former employee who might talk, but the prospect that she could kept most of them in line. Fear directed traffic on both sides of the street: she was as terrified of their revelations as they were of her lawsuits.

In addition to her five hundred employees at Harpo, Oprah required everyone at
O, The Oprah Magazine,
to sign confidentiality agreements and swear never to reveal anything about her, something few other publications required of their employees. When Oprah was asked why she imposed such imperial restrictions on those who worked for her, she again said it was all about “trust,” but this time
Chicago Tribune
journalists Ellen Warren and Terry Armour called her on it. “Actually, that’s precisely what it’s not about,” they wrote. “It’s about mistrust.”

Oprah made the headhunters who helped recruit teachers for her leadership academy, and every member of the faculty and all the dorm matrons, sign nondisclosure agreements. Her visits to the school were always shrouded in secrecy, and she insisted that guests at functions she attended in South Africa sign agreements banning cameras and tape recorders. People who purchased her real estate also had to sign covenants not to reveal details about her ownership. Her caterers, florists, party planners, interior decorators, upholsterers, painters, electricians, plumbers, gardeners, pilots, security guards, and even the veterinarians who treated her dogs had to sign. She once sent a cease-and-desist order during the taping of a VH1 reality show about dating because one of Gayle King’s ex-boyfriends was a contestant, and he had signed a confidentiality agreement not to talk about Oprah and Gayle.

“Everyone who works at Atlantic Aviation, the hangar where Oprah keeps her plane [the $47 million Bombardier BD-700 Global Express high-speed jet she purchased in 2006] has been signed to secrecy,” said Laura Aye, a former airfield safety officer. “They are not allowed to discuss her. If you ask about her, they say, ‘We can’t talk or we’ll lose our jobs.’ The girls there are very nervous. Before Oprah got her Global, she had a Gulfstream, and I had dealings with her at Midway….I saw
her about twenty times in the years I worked there and I never once saw her with a man. She always traveled with women….She was cold, standoffish, and very difficult….She’s not nice to the employees, except at Christmas, when she distributes gifts to everyone. I once had to yell at her when she took her dog out on the AOA [air operations area] to pee. No one is ever supposed to be there, because planes come in and out, and the jet blast could be fatal. I got a call from the tower that some woman was walking her dog and I had to get her out of there fast. I ran out and saw it was Oprah.

“ ‘Please, get out of the area right away, ma’am,’ I said.

“She roared back, ‘I beg your pardon?…’

“ ‘Right now, ma’am. That dog will get sucked up. We can’t have you out here. It’s regulations.’ She was furious….I had to report the incident.”

The sense of entitlement that accompanies the life of a billionaire celebrity seemed to surface shortly after Oprah purchased her first plane (a $40 million Gulfstream GIV). “She was going in and out of Signature then, a field-based operation for private jets, which is separate from the commercial airport,” said Laura Aye, “and she did not want the fuelers around because she didn’t like the smell of gas and grease. Her pilot would radio her arrival, and the fuelers would all be banned from the hangar. The guys inside quickly whipped up a batch of popcorn to cover the fumes. That way she wouldn’t have to smell anything for the thirty feet she had to walk from her plane to her security van.”

During her Gulfstream days she gave an interview to Harry Allen of
Vibe,
who asked how much her plane had cost. Oprah said, “I’m not going to discuss that. Jet etiquette means you never discuss how much the plane costs….But sometimes, and I get a kick out of this—there’s all black people on the plane. Just the other day the flight attendant was passing out some lobster and I said, ‘We still black! It’s not like we turned white! We still black, y’all. Oprah’s still black.’ It’s like, who knew?”

The
Vibe
writer said, “Do you understand the effect of stories like these? You’re the richest black person in the universe.”

Sounding disingenuous, Oprah said, “Am I? Let me think….
I always think of other people as being rich. It’s not a concept that I’m attuned to.”

When she upgraded from her $40 million Gulfstream to her $47 million Global Express, she moved hangars and secured a new space near the Sara Lee jets. “It was an old, dilapidated warehouse with sliding doors—imagine a garage for an airplane,” said one airport employee. “She poured a million dollars into it, completely refurbishing the place. She carpeted the concrete floor, redid the walls and cuttings and doors. She even built offices upstairs with elaborate fittings and got the City of Chicago to put in a parking lot, and then she redid the parking lot….She tapes her shows in Chicago on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and flies to Santa Barbara every Thursday night, arriving back in Chicago on Sunday at nine
P.M.
” If Oprah is asleep on either leg of the flight, her pilots are under orders not to disturb her until she’s slept eight hours….They must sit and wait until she wakes up.

Oprah could not force celebrities to sign her confidentiality agreements, so she frequently isolated herself at galas and benefits. “When we performed
The Vagina Monologues
at Madison Square Garden [February 2001], the one person with a private entrance and a private dressing room was Oprah,” recalled Erica Jong. “The rest of us—me, Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Rita Wilson, Calista Flockhart, Shirley Knight, Amy Irving, all the rest—were girls together in our panty hose getting dressed and made up gratis by Bobbi Brown. No one was paid. No one had star privileges, except Oprah. She was separate and apart from all of us, and I think it was because she was afraid and not confident, but why, I don’t know.”

That evening Oprah had used the Garden’s rock star entrance—with an elevator big enough to accommodate limousines—so that she could bypass fans and be driven from the street to her dressing room. A friend later suggested she might have removed herself from the rest of the cast because she felt self-conscious about her size. “Maybe she was uncomfortable being the only heavy black woman among all those skinny white girls.”

Race was definitely the reason Oprah cited when she was barred from Hermès in Paris. She and Gayle arrived at the luxury retail store fifteen minutes after closing and expected to be admitted because they
saw shoppers inside. Oprah said she wanted to buy a particular watch for Tina Turner, with whom she was having dinner that evening, but the salesclerk at the door would not let her in, and neither would the store manager. Later Hermès said the store was preparing for a special event that evening.

“I saw it,” said Gayle King, “and it was really, really very bad. Oprah describes it herself as one of the most humiliating moments of her life….We are calling it her
Crash
moment [referring to the film detailing racism].” She added, “If it had been Céline Dion or Britney Spears or Barbra Streisand, there is no way they would not be let in that store.”

Some news reports said the Hermès salesclerk did not recognize Oprah (
The Oprah Winfrey Show
is not seen in France), and the store had been “having a problem with North Africans.” Oprah called the U.S. president of Hermès and said she had been publicly humiliated, and although she had recently bought twelve Hermès handbags ($6,500 apiece), she would no longer be spending her money on the firm’s luxury goods. The company immediately issued a statement of regret for “not having been able to welcome Madame Winfrey” to the store, saying that “a private public relations event was being prepared inside.”

Je suis désolée, monsieur.
Oprah issued her own statement, saying she would address the matter on her season’s opening show in the fall, giving people weeks to weigh in on the international furor.

“Had Winfrey been turned away in regular hours, the racism charge might have traction,” wrote Anne Kingston in Canada’s
National Post.
“But she wasn’t, which suggests other ‘isms’ might be at play. Maybe it was celebrity-ism.”

An editorial in the Montreal
Gazette
accused Oprah of being quick to “play the race card,” saying, “Everyone has endured something like this. Fortunately few of us fly into ‘don’t you know who I am?’ mode. This is Paris, Madame Winfrey, not Chicago. Even if they know who you are, they just don’t care.”

The conservative
National Review
said, “What she should have done, in our opinion, is buy Hermès on the spot.” The comic strip
The Boondocks
showed the ten-year-old black radical Huey Freeman watching television news and hearing:

The comedian Rosie O’Donnell wrote in her blog:

Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s eminent professor of sociology, later asked in
The New York Times,
“Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age—being waited on in luxury stores after hours—but had she been the victim of racism?”

Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, answered the question in his provocative book
The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse:
“If the reason for Oprah’s humiliation was that the incident at Hermès triggered memories of her past experiences with racism, then Oprah’s race was the reason she felt humiliated. In that sense, Oprah was humiliated because of her race.”

In the early part of her career Oprah maintained she had never experienced racism. “I transcend race, really,” she said in 1986. Yet the following year she told
People
she had been refused entrance to a Manhattan boutique. In 1995 she told
The Times Magazine
(London) that she had been barred from “one of Chicago’s ritziest department stores.” She laughed as she told the writer, “They didn’t recognize me because I was wearing my hair all kind of [bouffant]. I was with my hairdresser,
a black man. They hummed and they hummed and then they said that they’d been robbed the week before by two black transvestites. ‘And we thought they’d come back.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I’m changing my hair-do.’ Then I turned to my hairdresser and said, ‘I think we are experiencing a racial moment….So this is what it’s like. Oh, man!’ ”

Six years later she retold a similar version of that same story, but by 2001 it was a Madison Avenue boutique that had kept her out. She said she had seen a sweater in the window and rang to be buzzed in, but the door was not opened. Then she saw two white women entering the store. So she rang again, but still was not admitted. “I certainly didn’t think, ‘This is a racial moment!’ ” she said. She called from a pay phone to make sure the store was open. “We started banging on the windows.” Nothing. Back in Chicago she called the store. “This is Oprah Winfrey. I was trying to get in your store the other day and…” She quoted the manager as saying, “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but we were robbed last week by two black transsexuals—and we thought they’d come back.”

Whether these stories were real or rhetorical, Oprah certainly was accustomed to celebrity treatment from stores that opened their doors after hours so she could shop. In Chicago, Bloomingdale’s had extended this courtesy and even accommodated her insistence that all nonessential employees be kept off the floor so they would not gawk or report what she had purchased. (She was irate when the
National Enquirer
revealed the Christmas presents she had bought for her employees at the studio and the magazine—fourteen-karat gold and diamond
O
initial pendants.)

A few days before her season’s opening show in September 2005, billed as “Oprah’s 20th Anniversary Season Premiere,” her publicist announced that Robert B. Chavez, the president and CEO of Hermès USA, would be Oprah’s guest, stirring speculation about a monumental slapdown on national television.

Oprah opened the show by joking about what she did on her summer vacation and later launched into her version of what had happened in Paris. She claimed that most of the press reports were “flat-out wrong,” although her best friend had been the source of those reports.
She scolded her audience for thinking she might have been upset for not being able to get into a closed store to shop. “Please,” she said. “I didn’t get to be this old to be that stupid. I was not upset about not getting to buy a bag—I was upset because one person at the store was so rude, not the whole company.”

Mr. Chavez looked at Oprah as she continued to berate his company. “There were reports that I was turned away because the store was closed. The store was in the process of being closed—the store was very active….The doors were not locked. My friends and I were standing inside the doorway and there was much discussion among the staff about whether or not to let me in. That’s what was embarrassing….I know the difference between a store being closed and a store being closed to me.