Oprah_ A Biography Part 11

Interestingly, the university did not offer Oprah an honorary degree, which is customary for a commencement speaker. Instead, they proffered a plaque "in recognition of excellence in television and films." In return, Oprah asked for the college degree she had been denied in 1975. TSU agreed to give her a diploma and to graduate her with the cla.s.s of 1987, if she wrote a paper to fulfill her requirements. (Apparently she did, although the university would not confirm the fact and neither would Oprah.) Graduation day, May 2, 1987, was a dream come true for Vernon Winfrey, who finally had someone in the family with a college degree. "Even though I've gone on and done a few things in life," Oprah teased in her speech, "every time I called home, my father would say, 'When are you going to get that degree? You're not going to amount to anything without that degree....' So this is a special day for my dad." She waved her diploma at Vernon, who beamed from the front row.

Oprah arrived in Nashville like a movie star. She told reporters she had flown in on a chartered jet with her entourage and was met at the airport by two gray limousines.

She walked onto campus in bright yellow patent leather high heels to match the bright yellow sash on her black graduation gown. She charmed the audience with her speech--a mixture of high religious fervor and rollicking good humor. She mitigated the sting of her People comments by announcing plans to fund ten scholars.h.i.+ps in her father's name. comments by announcing plans to fund ten scholars.h.i.+ps in her father's name.

Three months later, when she wrote the first check ($50,000), she asked the university to fly someone to Chicago to pick it up and pose with her for photographs, which she released to the a.s.sociated Press. "This donation is certainly historical for us because we haven't had this kind of support in the past," said Dr. Calvin O. Atchison, executive director of the TSU Foundation, acknowledging that Oprah's donation was the largest the university had ever received.

For the next eight years she committed herself to funding the scholars.h.i.+ps, which covered everything--room, board, books, and tuition, plus a spending allowance. She selected the scholars.h.i.+p winners from a list of incoming students and made sure each knew of the requirement to maintain a B average. When a couple of them let their grades slip, she wrote to them: "I understand that the first year is really difficult and there were a lot of adjustments to be made. I believe in you. We all made an agreement that it would be a three-point average, not a 2.483 and I know you want to uphold your end of the agreement, because I intend to uphold mine."

Her good intentions crashed in 1995 when one of the scholars.h.i.+p students alleged s.e.xual hara.s.sment by Vernon Winfrey after seeking his help for additional funds. "I needed the money to take a summer microbiology cla.s.s," said Pamela D. Kennedy. "Mr.

Winfrey [was] a family friend and asked me to meet him at his barbershop. I expected it to be a short meeting."

After twenty-five minutes, she said, Vernon, sixty-two, excused himself to go to the bathroom. She claimed that when he returned he exposed himself and made an obscene gesture before grabbing her, kissing her, and begging her to touch him. " 'I'm doing you a favor,' he said. 'You need to do me a favor. Tomorrow's my birthday and you could really make an old man happy. Come on, honey.'

"At that moment, I knew I had been set up," she said. "He purposely had me come down to the shop when it was closed so we would be alone. Other girls might fall for his act, but I wouldn't think of prost.i.tuting myself. I told him, 'How dare you! I don't care if you are Oprah's father and can help me. I refuse to have s.e.x with you.' " She said she ran from the barbershop and Vernon chased her down the street, trying to make amends. "

'Honey, I hope this doesn't ruin our friends.h.i.+p,' " he said.

That same day, January 30, 1995, the twenty-eight-year-old student filed a complaint with Nashville police against Vernon, a former member of the Metro Council.

The crime of indecent exposure carried a fine of up to $2,500 and a jail sentence of several months. Vernon denied the charge. "I regret the day I ever let this girl set foot in my barbershop," he said. "Obviously she has dollar signs in her eyes."

When the s.e.x scandal hit the press, Oprah was silent for a day or so. Then she issued a statement, standing foursquare behind her father. "He is one of the most honorable men I know," she said. "In his professional and personal life he has always tried to do what is right and help people."

When the police began investigating her father, she sent lawyers to Nashville to help him. His accuser pa.s.sed a lie detector test, which was made public, but weeks later prosecutors determined there was not sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped the charges against Vernon, in large part because Ms.

Kennedy's lawyer, Frank Thompson-McLeod, had solicited a bribe, saying the charges would disappear if Vernon paid a certain amount of money. The attorney was arrested and lost his license to practice. Ms. Kennedy was not charged. "Greed is the only reason I can conclude that he did this," said the circuit court judge after sentencing the lawyer to thirty days in jail.

"I knew, knowing G.o.d as I do, that that would happen," Oprah said, "but I kept asking, 'Why has this happened and what am I supposed to learn from it?' " The answer, she believed, was what she had been telling her father: that her wealth and fame were so immense that people would try to use him to get to her. "My father still doesn't know who I am," she told Ebony, Ebony, saying Vernon did not grasp the enormity of her celebrity. "So I saying Vernon did not grasp the enormity of her celebrity. "So I think something had to happen for him to see he can't continue to be Mr. FriendlyFriendly." She said she felt guilty "because if he didn't have me for a daughter that could not have happened to him." But more than guilt was her fear of what the allegation might do to him. "I was really worried about him for a while, because I thought it was going to break his spirit."

The snakebite of the s.e.x scandal marked the end of Oprah's involvement with TSU and the Vernon Winfrey scholars.h.i.+ps. "They tried everything to reconnect, but she would not come back to Nashville," said Brooks Parker, former aide to Governor Donald K. Sundquist. "I suggested that the city's mayor and the governor send her an invitation saying they were going to give her a special award voted by the state legislature as the Most Outstanding Tennessean, or something like that....It was planned as a citywide celebration, to take place on the campus of TSU....I asked Chris Clark, her first boss, to write her a letter, which he did, and it was a great letter. Then I wrote to her, saying, 'The state and city are set to pay dignified homage to you.' But she never responded."

After sending his letter, Chris Clark, who knows how to dance both sides of the ballroom, called Oprah's a.s.sistant and told her to tell Oprah to ignore what he had written. "I said I wrote the d.a.m.n letter because I had to and she shouldn't pay any attention to it. She didn't have to come home. No one else was going to get that award. It was just a publicity gimmick to get her to come to Nashville and be a.s.sociated with TSU." So Oprah declined the governor's award.

She rarely returned to the city after that, except on occasion, to visit her father.

"When she does come I send my adopted son [Thomas Walker] to pick her up at the airport in his police car," said Vernon. "He's with the Davidson County Sheriff's Office."

Even on those unannounced visits, when they go out to eat catfish, Oprah is pestered for money. "We went to the cafeteria," said Vernon's second wife, Barbara, "and some lady slipped her a note asking for fifty thousand dollars." Oprah ignored most requests from the city's civic leaders for help on local projects. "No one in Nashville can get through to her," said Paul Moore of the William Morris Agency. "Not even Tipper Gore."

At the same time Oprah was funding scholars.h.i.+ps at TSU, she became a benefactor of Morehouse College, a private men's school in Atlanta, Georgia, and the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr. "I did that because I care about black men, I really do," she said. "The last two movies I have been in [ The Color Purple The Color Purple and and Native Son Native Son]

have not been great portrayals of black men, but I have great black men in my life, both my father and Stedman."

After receiving an honorary doctorate from Morehouse in 1988, she established the Oprah Winfrey Endowed Scholars.h.i.+p Fund, to which she donated $7 million. "My dream was--when I first started making money--to pa.s.s it on and I wanted to put 100 men through Morehouse," she said in 2004. "Right now we're at 250 and I want to make it a thousand." She felt she reaped far more goodwill from the men of Morehouse than she ever did from TSU.

Over the years, Oprah became a prized commencement speaker at colleges and universities, including Wesleyan, Stanford, Howard, Meharry, Wellesley, and Duke. In each speech, she cited her personal connection to the school through a friend or a relative, and she shared her beliefs about achieving greatness through service. She always invoked the glories of G.o.d and the need to give praise. Then, at some point, she frequently descended from the lofty to the low.

When her niece Chrishaunda La'ttice Lee graduated from Wesleyan in 1998, Oprah spent part of her ten-minute speech talking about "peeing." "All I can remember ten years later is Oprah talking about herself going to the bathroom," said a member of the cla.s.s of '98. "Very uncommencement-like."

At the Stanford graduation of Gayle King's daughter, Kirby b.u.mpus, in 2008, Oprah quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "Not everyone can be famous." Then she added, "Everybody today seems to want to be famous. But fame is a trip. People follow you to the bathroom, listen to you pee. It's just--Try to pee quietly. It doesn't matter. They come out and say, 'OhmiG.o.d, it's you. You peed.' That's the fame trip so I don't know if you want that."

A country girl with bathroom humor, Oprah liked to shock the prissy by announcing at every turn she had "to pee" or "go wee willie winkle." Over the years she softened her rough edges and learned company manners. She mastered thank-you note etiquette and the art of the hostess gift, instructing her audiences never to arrive at someone's home empty-handed. "Bring soaps--really good soaps," she once advised. She thumped gum chewers and smokers, and always tipped well. She sent lavish bouquets for special occasions and never forgot her friends' birthdays. She once spent $4 million to rent the yacht Seabourn Pride Seabourn Pride for a week's cruise for two hundred guests to celebrate for a week's cruise for two hundred guests to celebrate Maya Angelou's seventieth birthday. But for all her social niceties, Oprah still lapsed into potty talk on occasion, and the occasions were often public ones that were supposed to be uplifting.

Some people found these restroom riffs to be funny and a part of her basic, earthy appeal, perhaps attributable to her outhouse years in Kosciusko and having had to empty the slop jar. Others found her comments coa.r.s.e, jarring, and inappropriate.

To a paying audience at the Kennedy Center for the Nation's Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Oprah shared her moments in a bathroom stall at O'Hare Airport. She gave similar information to six thousand people gathered for the American Women's Economic Development Corporation in New York City. In between inspiring quotes from Sojourner Truth and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she told the thunderous crowd, "I can't even pee straight, you see, because everywhere I go, people in the bathroom want me to sign their toilet paper."

Her compulsion to talk about bodily functions once gave her best friend pause when she heard that Oprah had shared with her national television audience the graphic details of watching Gayle give birth to her second child. "She said I p.o.o.ped all over the table during the birth," Gayle recalled during a Q&A session with Oprah. "People literally stopped me on the street after that one."

"You know in retrospect I might have thought a little more before saying that,"

said Oprah. "But I was talking about pregnancy, what actually happens, and that's one of the things people never tell you. Gayle goes, 'Well listen...' "

"[I told her the] next time you're talking about s.h.i.+tting on a table, keep my name out of it," said Gayle. "I was a news anchor [WSBF-TV in Hartford, Connecticut] by then. 'I'm Gayle King. Eyewitness News.' And I'd get people saying: 'Yes, I saw you on the news. I didn't know you p.o.o.ped all over.' "

During a speech at a fund-raising luncheon for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Oprah showed a film clip of her visit to Auschwitz (May 24, 2006) with Elie Wiesel.

That show had been advertised on a jarring billboard over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, showing Oprah, with a dazzling smile, next to the words "OPRAH GOES TO AUSCHWITZ. Wednesday 3 P.M." This drew barbed comments on the Internet: "This is actually part of a series where Oprah tours historic atrocity sites: 'Oprah Goes Beach Blanket Bosnia on Thursday!'

'Hey Ho Hiros.h.i.+ma! Oprah learns the difference between sus.h.i.+ and sas.h.i.+mi--oh,

and a little something about radiation poisoning on Friday!' "

Unfortunately, the interview Oprah conducted with Elie Wiesel on that trip was, in the estimation of frontpagemag.com, "vapid." She sounded inane as she walked the icy grounds of the death camp. "Wow," she said.

"Unbelieveable...wow...wow...unbelievable..."

Granted, the sight of ovens used to dispose of human beings challenges description, but as she interviewed Wiesel, Oprah began to sound like Little Miss Echo: WIESEL: There were three to a bunk.

OPRAH: Three to a bunk...

WIESEL: Straw.

OPRAH: Straw...

WIESEL: There were trees.

OPRAH: There were trees.

WIESEL: But we didn't look at them.

OPRAH: But you didn't look at them.

She frequently repeats what her guests say as if she is a Berlitz translator.

Oprah later sold DVDs of her trip with Wiesel at The Oprah Store across the street from her studio, for thirty dollars apiece, prompting one critic to call it "Holocash."

During her speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, she talked about the devastation of concentration camps and then, inexplicably, segued into how hard it was to be famous and go to the bathroom in public. She said she had used the restroom earlier in the day and the person in the next stall had said, "You pee like a horse." After that, Oprah told the crowd, who had come to donate money in remembrance of the six million Jews who'd perished in death camps, that she had decided from now on to put lots of paper in the toilet to dampen the sound of her peeing. Robert Feder wrote in the Chicago Sun- Chicago Sun- Times that it was "one of the most outrageous utterances" of the year. that it was "one of the most outrageous utterances" of the year.

"I don't know what possesses Oprah to talk like that at the most inappropriate times," said Jewette Battles, who helped arrange Oprah's 1988 visit to Kosciusko. "She did something similar when she came back here to dedicate the Oprah Winfrey Road....The whole town turned out to celebrate her on Oprah Winfrey Day and the mayor gave her a key to the city. It was a very big deal....She's the biggest thing to come out of Mississippi since Elvis Presley. So when she got up on the stage of the Attala County Coliseum everyone was cheering, so happy she was there and so proud of her....At first she made the crowd laugh and...then all of a sudden she started performing a piece about a slave girl and the plantation mistress who made her drink urine....I don't know where the urine thing came from--if it was something from the book Jubilee Jubilee or what--but people or what--but people were shocked into absolute silence....I did not understand Oprah's purpose except to say, 'Look at me now. I'm on top....' And if that's what it was, who's to blame her? It's hard to be black and poor in America, but I wondered later if she didn't do that performance to throw up slavery to us as a part of Mississippi's awful past....Even though she's five generations removed from slavery and was much too young to be mistreated when she was here as a child....Besides, things have changed in Mississippi over the years....We have overcome....There's no sense in rubbing our noses in it now."

There are signs in the airport in Jackson, one and a half hours north of Kosciusko, that announce, "No Blacks. No Whites. Just the Blues," and the T-s.h.i.+rts on sale inform visitors "Yes, We Wear Shoes Down Here. Sometimes Even Cleats."

On her visit home on June 4, 1988, Oprah wore a bright turquoise silk dress from The Forgotten Woman, a label for large sizes. She was accompanied by her mother; her father and stepmother; Stedman; her personal secretary, Beverly Coleman; her attorney, Jeff Jacobs; her hairdresser, Andre Walker; her makeup man, Roosevelt Cartwright; three cameramen; and a producer. She planned to make her visit into a show about stars who return to their roots.

"This is a real homecoming," she told the three hundred people standing on a small portion of dirt road that had been named in her honor. "It is a deeply humbling experience to come back to the place where it all started. No one ever goes very far in life without remembering where they came from."

Her grandmother's small wooden shack had long ago been chopped down for firewood, and the outhouse had disappeared into decades of underbrush. There was no trace of the pretty blue hydrangeas that Hattie Mae had grown or the cow she kept to give the family milk. Only the small plot of land remained, which her children had inherited.

They had debated opening a gift shop for people who wanted to see where Oprah Winfrey had grown up, but with it being three miles outside the city limits of Kosciusko, there wasn't enough tourism to support the idea. Instead, they erected a sign on the property: * FIRST HOME SITE OF OPRAH WINFREY *

On January 29, 1954, Oprah Winfrey was born in a wood frame house located on this site. She resided here as a child before moving to Milwaukee at age 6. Within walking distance is the church where she made her first appearance in an Easter citation.

She grew in the information/entertainment industry to become the world's foremost TV talk show host with a daily audience in the millions. At the same time she never forgot or overlooked her heritage and has been a regular support of folks back home as well as a role model to much of America.

With photographers trailing her and cameramen on either side, Oprah made her way to the church where her family had placed another sign: "Oprah Winfrey Faced First Audience Here."

"The church was my life," she recalled. "Baptist Training Union. Every black child in the world who grew up in the church knows about BTU. You did Sunday School, you did the morning service, which started at 11 and didn't end until 2:30, you had dinner on the ground in front of the church, and then you'd go back in for the 4 o'clock service. It was forever, oh, it was forever. It was how you spent your life."

She walked across the parched gra.s.s and into the humble cemetery next to the church, where five generations of her maternal ancestors lay buried. With Vernon on one side and Vernita on the other, she looked like she was flanked by Jack Sprat, who ate no fat, and his wife, who ate no lean. (Vernon would later say, "Oprah is definitely her mother's daughter in that respect. The women in her family are all heavy, very heavy.") They all bowed their heads for a few moments in front of two raised blocks of stone the size of shoe boxes on a sliver of granite:HATTIE M AEEARLEST L EEAPRIL 15, 1900 JUNE 16, 1883 FEBRUARY 27, 1963 DECEMBER 29, 1959.

There are far more impressive grave sites than the ones for Oprah's grandparents, but as Katharine Carr Esters explained, it was what Hattie Mae's children could afford from the Davidson Marble and Granite Works in Kosciusko. "Poor black folks save their whole lives to buy these tombstones," she said. The name of Oprah's grandfather Earlist is misspelled on the gravestone. "Suzie Mae [his daughter and Oprah's aunt] spelled it the way she knew," said Mrs. Esters. "He didn't read or write, so he wouldn't have been much help."

The cemetery, a small field of scrubby gra.s.s filled with granite stones the size of For Sale signs, is sprinkled with a few pyramid towers and a couple of large crosses banked by plastic flowers, but most of the markers are modest. One is particularly joyful: a model of a coffin with an aluminum cover that reads, "Gone Fis.h.i.+ng in Crystal Clear Water."

Oprah paid homage to her grandmother on that visit. "It was not in any words she said, it was just the way she lived. She instilled in me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, that I could be whatever I wanted to be, that I could go wherever I wanted to go."

This was for the hometown folks. For other audiences she told a different story about her grandmother was.h.i.+ng clothes in a boiling cauldron and telling Oprah to pay attention so that when she grew up she could get herself "some good white folks to work for." Oprah always ended that story by saying she knew at the age of four she would never take in wash like her grandmother: "I just wish she had lived long enough to see that I did grow up and I've now got some good white folks working for me."

That evening the family and several community leaders met with Oprah at Katharine Esters's home to discuss what Oprah could do to fulfill the sign's declaration that she supported the "folks back home." Her secretary took notes on the various suggestions, and Oprah promised to get back to them with her decision. Ten years later she returned to Kosciusko to dedicate a $30,000 Habitat for Humanity house that she had financed through Oprah's Angel Network. Ordinarily, she built Habitat houses in towns where television stations carried her talk show, but she made an exception for Kosciusko, and the town showed its appreciation. The front-page headline of The Star-Herald The Star-Herald (circulation: 5,200) trumpeted, "Kosciusko Prepares for Oprah's Visit." One old-timer observed, "We haven't had that kind of a headline since Allied forces landed in Normandy."

The day before Oprah was to be photographed handing over the house keys to the lucky family, she visited the home and saw that it was empty. She called a nearby Eddie Bauer store and told them to furnish it overnight, from curtains and couches to towels and dishes. She also had every closet filled with clothes in the right size for each family member. Some estimated it cost more to furnish the house than to build it. Oprah laughed. "I couldn't give them an empty house," she said.

Most of the town was on its knees in grat.i.tude, but Katharine Carr Esters, who spent years badgering the city to bring running water to the nearby black community, pushed Oprah to do more, especially for the poor children of Kosciusko. "That's when the seed was planted for the $5 million Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club, which Oprah opened in 2006," she said. "It took eight years to complete but...the Boys and Girls Club has done more good than anything this community has ever seen. Teenage pregnancy has dropped, juvenile crime has decreased, and vandalism has almost disappeared because of the programs offered. In addition, the club has provided jobs for people. So Oprah did a wonderful thing for the people here, and praise G.o.d that she did....But..."

Mrs. Esters cannot help but add a clear-eyed caveat about her cousin's philanthropy. "She does a lot of good things for people with her money, but it's easy when you have that much and you need tax deductions and all. And Oprah doesn't bang a nail for Habitat unless her cameras are running. Yes, she should get publicity for all her good works, and she certainly makes sure that she does. She never misses an opportunity, especially to make money. She does not come home to visit. She only comes home to do a show. She's been here all of three times in the last twenty years, and each time was to do a show. It's all business with Oprah. In 1988 she filmed the visit to Oprah Winfrey Road for one of her shows. In 1998 she dedicated a Habitat house at the same time her film Beloved Beloved was opening at our local theater, so she promoted her movie by giving a was opening at our local theater, so she promoted her movie by giving a speech before every showing. In 2006 she had her cameras here again, to film the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club....Nothing is wasted with that girl."

Worried that her friend, the straight-shooting Mrs. Esters, might have taken too deadly an aim, Jewette Battles interjected. "Oprah has her faults and frailties, just like the rest of us, but she does do good work. It's just that she presents her generosity as the whole of herself and her character, and that's not quite accurate." Both women had occasions over the years to see Oprah in various incarnations. The one they liked best was Oprah the philanthropist. The one they liked least was Oprah the self-promoter. "She will give money, but only if it's on her terms or her idea," said Mrs. Battles. "Every move is calculated to further her brand and lift her image, which is why she does good works."

During one of her visits to Kosciusko, Oprah had a late-night talk with her "aunt"

Katharine and broke down in sobs, begging to know the name of her real father.

"She put her head on my shoulder and cried and cried," recalled Mrs. Esters. " 'I know it's not Vernon,' she said to me. 'There is nothing of Vernon in me. I know that and you know that....You know the whole story; you were there. So, please, Aunt Katharine, tell me who my real father is.' "

"I just couldn't do it," said Mrs. Esters many years later. "I told her it was her mother's place to tell her, not mine.

" 'My mother says it's Vernon,' Oprah said."

Katharine Carr Esters raised her eyes as she related the story, torn between wanting Oprah to know the truth and disapproving of Oprah's mother for not telling her.

"I guess Bunny--that's what the family calls Vernita--doesn't want to get into it all at this stage, but I feel her daughter has a right to know if she wants to know. I just don't have the right to tell her."*

Mrs. Esters understood why Vernita Lee was not inclined to rock her well-heeled boat late in life and admit that someone other than Vernon Winfrey was Oprah's real father, especially since Oprah had never demanded a DNA test. Vernon had admitted he had not sired Oprah, but he took great pride in knowing that he had given her something better than blood.

"Oprah has taken very good care of her mother, who now buys five-hundreddollar hats and has drivers who have drivers and helpers and cooks and all, but the story of Oprah and Vernita is sad and complicated," said Mrs. Esters. "Oprah does not love her mother at all....She gives her a great deal financially but she does not give her the respect and affection a daughter should, and that bothers me. Vernita did the best she could with Oprah, who was a willful, runaway child....Her mother has had to bury two of her three children over the years, and I can tell you that when a parent loses a child it can bring you to your knees. I know. I had to bury my son." She gestured to the painting of a young man hanging over her bed. "So Oprah should be more forgiving of her mother....Even when she has had Bunny on her show she won't let her talk, because Bunny speaks colored dialect....She's not as educated as Oprah would like."

Oprah had moved so far beyond the life of her grandmother's farm that there was nothing left for her in Kosciusko. After one of her visits she told a luncheon audience, "I was recently back in my hometown...and some of the people that I grew up with are still sitting on the same porch, doing the same thing. It's like time stopped and continues to stand still in parts of Mississippi. There's not a day that I'm not on my knees thanking G.o.d that I was one of the blessed ones to be able to leave that place and do something with my life."

Yet there was something she needed from the past, which she said she finally found in a $1 million mansion on a sprawling 160-acre estate in Rolling Prairie, Indiana.

Having invented a family she could love, she now decided to invent her ideal home, with rolling hills, meadows of purple flowers, stables, a heated dog kennel, twelve bedrooms, a heliport, nine palomino horses, ten golden retrievers, three herds of black-faced sheep, one eight-room guesthouse, a log cabin, a pool, tennis courts, and pretty blue hydrangeas.

"I've never loved a place the way I love my farm," she said. "I grew up in the country, which is probably why I'm so attached to the land. I love it. I love the lay of the land. I love walking the land. And I love knowing that it's my land....When I'm pulling into the gate and my dog comes running out to meet me because he knows the sound of the truck, I'm the happiest I've ever been. I walk in the woods. I do Tai Chi Ch'uan by the pond. I grow my own collards."

"The landscaping alone for that farm was a four-year project and cost nine million dollars," said the landscape architect James van Sweden of Oehme, van Sweden and a.s.sociates. "I met with Oprah every three weeks for four years to discuss the design. We had a wonderful time bricking the parking area, erecting limestone walls, laying flagstone walkways, gra.s.sing the pond, moving the tennis court and the swimming pool. I built her an eighty-five-foot-long pool, but the poor thing could not use it because she was at her heaviest then--she was hugely heavy--and the paparazzi were always buzzing the farm in helicopters and hiding across the lane with cameras that could catch a perfect picture from three thousand feet away. There was no way she could go into her pool without having her three-hundred-pound self splattered all over the tabloids. We also built a twelve-hundred-square-foot pool house so she could hold meetings. She was totally involved in the project from start to finish, and spent three to four hours with me at every meeting. Then I would spend weeks at the farm....

"I remember when I first walked into her Indiana living room and saw those overstuffed couches and plump tufted chairs and what looked like one million pillows strewn everywhere. That's her decorator Anthony Browne's idea of 'Country English,'

which poor Oprah bought into totally. She liked puffy things. Big puffy things....Browne put fringe and ruche and piping and ruffles and cording on everything." The internationally acclaimed van Sweden is known for sleek, uncluttered design. "All of Oprah's servants are white, but her walls are black. She's got paintings of black shepherds and black farmers and black angels--all very tacky, but that, too, might've been Anthony Browne's fault for steering her to junky art. The color, though, Oprah insisted on. She said, 'I'm not going to have counts and countesses on my walls. Just black folks.'

"After our first lunch at the farm we walked outside and she told me I had to transform her meadows into The Color Purple. The Color Purple. She insisted that she be able to see purple She insisted that she be able to see purple flowers from every angle of her bedroom. She couldn't understand why I couldn't plant that meadow (forty acres) as fast as Steven Spielberg did for the movie. 'It only took him three weeks,' she said. I tried to explain that was Hollywood and he'd done it with mirrors and lenses. I spent days in her bedroom designing plans from every window, so that by the time I was finished I knew every inch of that room, inside the closets and out, which is why I can tell you that there were no men's clothes in any of Oprah's closets and no trace of Stedman anywhere. Maybe she put him in the log cabin she built, which she called 'The Love Nest,' but I can tell you that Oprah sleeps alone in her bedroom and keeps a Bible next to her bed with loads of books.

"I designed a circle in the parking lot for her wedding, because I'd heard her talk on her show about eventually wanting to get married. I didn't tell her this at the time, but I had it in mind for her. Then I met Stedman and knew there wouldn't ever be a wedding.

He's simply a fixture in her life. Window dressing. A way for a single, childless woman to appear normal to her married audience of women with husbands and children. Stedman is a nice man. I remember his beautiful, elegant, long fingers. He was handsome, too, but he's nothing more than an attractive escort. I never saw any warmth or affection between them--any at all during the four years I worked with Oprah. I never saw touching or hugging or kissing between them ever. They didn't even hold hands. But Oprah wants to come across as normal to her audience, so she needs to have Stedman around so she can refer to him....She talked about Gayle far more than she ever did Stedman, but I don't think that she and Gayle are a lesbian couple. They're just very good friends....Oprah keeps Stedman around because she wants her audience to accept her as a normal woman with a man in her life, but from what I saw during those four years I can tell you there's nothing there with Stedman. Nothing at all."

Months after van Sweden had planted the last purple flower on Oprah's Rolling Prairie farm, she and Stedman and Gayle were spending a fall weekend together. Gayle had arrived from Connecticut and was in the kitchen when Oprah went outside to greet Stedman, who was arriving from Chicago. She later related their brief conversation.

"I want you to marry me," he said.

"Is this the proposal?" asked Oprah.

"I think it's time."

"Oh, that's really great."

She walked into the kitchen a bit breathless. "You are not going to believe this,"

she whispered to Gayle. "Stedman just proposed." They planned to be married on September 8 of the following year, because that was the date of Vernon's wedding to Zelma. Oprah called Oscar de la Renta to design her wedding dress. She and Stedman announced their engagement in an interview with Gayle on television--or rather, Oprah made the announcement, which she said upset Stedman. Days later, on November 23, 1992, during the ratings sweeps, they were on the cover of People, People, next to a blaring next to a blaring headline: "OPRAH'S ENGAGED!"

Months before, in what was hyped as their first joint interview, Oprah and Stedman appeared on Inside Edition Inside Edition and complained to Nancy Gla.s.s that too much and complained to Nancy Gla.s.s that too much publicity threatened their relations.h.i.+p. "We've been through a lot of stress," Stedman said. "Not having any privacy when you go out." Apparently, neither saw the irony in going on national television to bemoan the public attention they attracted.

After six years, Stedman had officially progressed from boyfriend to fiance. A decade later he would be politely described as Oprah's life partner, which is how he has remained for years and years--a perpetual escort, a roommate, and an occasional traveling companion.