Oprah_ A Biography Part 17

Oprah had also named all her s.e.xual abusers, including her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, who was still alive. In addition, Oprah felt her father had let her down when she tried to tell him what his brother had done to her during the summer of 1968. "I was in a rage about my abusers," she said. "I went into complete detail of the whole rape scene. How lonely that feels when you're ten [ sic sic] years old and you're somebody's play thing....I was not responsible. No child is. Those men abused me, a baby. And there is nothing more despicable."

She also wrote about her pregnancy at the age of fourteen. "Where I spent half the time in denial and half trying to hurt myself to lose the child."

Stedman felt that such private matters should be discussed within the family and not on the pages of a book for everyone to read. He later flew to Nashville to talk to Vernon Winfrey, who called his daughter and then came to her Indiana farm to say he was sorry about how he had reacted to her story of rape.

"I know she feels that I didn't handle it well [when she first told us]," Vernon said.

"But Trent [who died in 1997] was my closest brother. We were torn." Vernon later admitted that Trent was probably the father of Oprah's baby.

Oprah recalled the conversation with her father at the farm as unsatisfactory. He had said, " 'Were you raped? Did he rape you?' What he was saying was, 'Were you forced against your will? Did you actively partic.i.p.ate?' That's when I said, 'You don't get it. When you're 13 [ sic sic] years old and in the car and it's happening, it is rape.' "

Oprah had also written about her drug use and smoking crack with her married lover in Baltimore. "I thought he was more open and more loving with me [when we were doing drugs]. I had heard about Richard Pryor freebasing but when it was offered to me, I didn't know that that's what it was." This was a brave admission on Oprah's part.

She later went public about her drug use because, as she said, "There are some people who knew it was in the book and had been threatening to go to the press. So because I am a public person more and more shame became attached to the secret."

She admitted her foray into smoking crack in the comfortable setting of her own show in 1995, while tearfully empathizing with two recovering female addicts. "I did your drug," she told a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine, and those four little words made headlines. The British journalist Ginny Dougary found Oprah's confession oddly so-what-ish. "Sensational revelation, including the host's own, is the show's stock in trade," she wrote. "[But this was] unshocking after all the fuss in the press because Oprah never specified the precise nature of her drug use." Dougary asked her if she was a cocaine addict. "No, I was not addicted," Oprah said. Years later Randy Cook, her live-in drug partner for five months in 1985, disputed her statement.

Oprah acknowledged that her fiance, understandably, was not enthusiastic about what she had written. "He didn't say anything was too explicit or shouldn't be said. He said it wasn't powerful enough." She felt her book lacked "clarity" and "introspection,"

and Stedman, a devotee of self-help and how-to books, said that it lacked "inspiration."

He wanted her book to be more than an autobiography. "My experiences were meant to empower people," she said, "and make sense of life."

Yet Stedman's objections to the tone and content of her book were not the sole justifications for the cancellation. In a private conversation with a man who had received a telephone call from Oprah, she said, "The reason I pulled my book was because Maya Angelou came to me after the big ABA announcement and said, 'Is there anything in that book that is exaggerated? Is there anything that is not true in that book?' I said, 'Well, yeah, some things are written to read well. You know that. Some things are, you know...'

"No, baby, I don't know," said Maya. "I only know that you cannot have one exaggerated story, one untruth, one embroidered recollection. You cannot. If you do, take that book back. Do not publish it."

Angelou understood her friend's tendency to embellish for effect, perhaps pad a story for a laugh or a little sympathy. Angelou, who loved Oprah like a daughter, did not want her to be publicly humiliated by the media, which she said would peck her to death if they found manufactured anecdotes.

Interestingly, one of the publishers who read the ma.n.u.script, but whose company did not acquire it, was more concerned about Oprah's hard truths than her soft lies, particularly what she wrote about being a prost.i.tute--the first time she had ever used that word to describe her adolescent promiscuity.

"I told her at the time she didn't need to tell people about that," said the publisher.

"It was not necessary for everyone to know she had been a prost.i.tute. Besides, I knew that she'd see it in print and pull back, which is exactly what she did. I've published enough celebrity memoirs to know what can happen between the initial excitement of selling their story and then actually publis.h.i.+ng it. Once they see the seamy stuff down on the page that they left behind in their crawl to the top, they pull back. They either delete it or rewrite it....It's called revisionist history."

The story of Oprah's days as an adolescent prost.i.tute had been partially disclosed by her sister in the National Enquirer National Enquirer in 1990, but the tabloid revelation was ignored by in 1990, but the tabloid revelation was ignored by the mainstream media, so those who did not read the grocery store press had no idea about Oprah's sordid past beyond what she chose to share on her show. For her now to admit in her autobiography that she had once been a prost.i.tute--that was the hard truth; the unvarnished version of what her sister had described as Oprah making money by sneaking men into the house to do "The Horse"--was guaranteed to be headline-making news. Such an admission would be particularly difficult for her father, who still could not bring himself to use the word prost.i.tute prost.i.tute to describe his teenage daughter. To this day he to describe his teenage daughter. To this day he cannot face that truth. Instead, he characterizes that troubled period of Oprah's life as one of her "dark secrets."

Oprah was so concerned about Angelou's warning that she summoned her and six other equally close friends to her farm in Indiana for the weekend after ABA. She gave all seven, including Stedman and Gayle, copies of the ma.n.u.script and asked for their honest a.s.sessment of whether she should go forward with publication. To a person, each recommended she cancel. During that weekend she was made to see that some people might not react kindly to finding out that what she had always called her "adolescent s.e.xual promiscuity" was actually prost.i.tution. Having been s.e.xually abused as a child, she had garnered great sympathy from her audiences, who saw her as a victim of vicious predators and someone who had gone on to do great things to help other victims. Why mar that now? Why put forward something that could obliterate all the goodwill she had acc.u.mulated? Viewers might not be prepared to accept their heroine as a former hooker, or overlook the gulf between adolescent promiscuity and selling yourself for money. No one wanted Oprah to chip away at the pedestal on which she stood. "Why give them a club?" was the general reaction of those who wanted to protect her. She had constructed a revered public image as someone who had triumphed over racism, poverty, and s.e.xual abuse, and to now admit to something like this might diminish all that. Her enemies would pounce, her fans could feel betrayed, and her sponsors might withdraw. It was simply too big a risk.

In the past Oprah controlled the release of information about herself, except for her sister's tabloid revelations about her teenage pregnancy. Her sister had alluded to her prost.i.tution, but even in that case Oprah had issued a carefully worded statement about her pregnancy and been allowed to retreat into silence without being subjected to the probing questions of reporters. She would not be given the luxury of that kind of control on a thirty-city book promotional tour during which she could be asked the kinds of questions she frequently asked of others, especially young women, who had sold themselves for money.

A reading of a few of Oprah's past shows indicates how she attempted to explore the subject of the world's oldest profession, prost.i.tution: "Profiling Prost.i.tutes" (11/6/86) "Call Girls and Madams" (10/29/87) "Housewife Prost.i.tutes"

(9/5/88).

"Suburban Teens: The New Prost.i.tutes" (9/25/88) "Who Really Goes to Prost.i.tutes?" (10/31/96) "Living a Secret Life" (9/21/04) "Children Being Sold into s.e.xual Slavery" (11/2/05) "Inside the Lives of Young Prost.i.tutes" (5/8/06) "Inside the Notorious Bunny Ranch Brothel" (4/29/09) Oprah wanted to play a prost.i.tute on-screen after hearing Gloria Steinem's true story about a woman who had been jailed for prost.i.tution and wondered why her pimps and her customers weren't in jail with her. The woman went to the prison library for law books, and upon her release continued studying until she finished high school, attended college at night, and finally became a lawyer. "I'm definitely going to do a l.u.s.ty romantic role," said Oprah, "based on that true story....I'll get to be a hooker and have a pimp. Can't wait for that."

After reading Endesha Ida Mae Holland's autobiographical script about her childhood as a prost.i.tute and her eventual involvement in the civil rights movement, Oprah joined four other women in 1991 to finance a production of From the Mississippi From the Mississippi Delta at New York's Circle in the Square Theatre. at New York's Circle in the Square Theatre.

Years later she returned to the subject of prost.i.tution in one of her After the Show After the Show segments, which she taped for the Oxygen network. She interviewed the writer Jeannette Angell, who received a master's degree from the Yale Divinity School and later wrote a book t.i.tled Callgirl, Callgirl, chronicling her three years as a prost.i.tute. The book is blunt and chronicling her three years as a prost.i.tute. The book is blunt and unapologetic about what she did to pay for her education. "It's really the ideal college job," Angell told the Yale Daily News. Yale Daily News. "I hate to say this but it's true. It's the perfect way "I hate to say this but it's true. It's the perfect way to get through school because you have a minimum of time commitment for a maximum of money."

Oprah was less than hospitable to Angell, and from her facial expressions and cold tone of voice, she appeared to look down on her. "Boy, was your high school shocked," Oprah said. "Did you feel bad...did you feel high about it? Is it like a blind date? I'm just curious how do you do that? Do you get more [money] for...um...other things? Is there at least a pretense?...Do you have a conversation first?"

The writer soldiered through the segment and tried to laugh off what was a contentious examination by America's most beloved talk show host. When asked how she felt about getting frica.s.seed by Oprah Winfrey on national television after being promised a supportive environment in which to tell her story, Jeannette Angell responded by email: "Unfortunately, I am contractually prohibited from speaking or writing about my experience with anyone at Harpo. The company has far more and far better attorneys than I can afford. You may find that this is true of many people--even people who were with me, but not actually on the show, were obliged to sign contracts. With hindsight that should have raised a red flag right there. I wish I had seen it then."

Oprah reconsidered going public with her youthful tiptoe into prost.i.tution, and after listening to her closest friends, she decided to cancel publication of her memoir. She later said it was the smartest thing she ever did, and from her point of view, she was absolutely right, although the writer Gretchen Reynolds said she "called down upon herself the worst publicity of her career." That characterization seemed a bit overblown for the relatively mild press reaction to Oprah's announcement, but it certainly captured Oprah's own excessive descriptions of her personal experiences, which were always "the most devastating," "the most difficult," "the worst," "the most painful," "the most awful."

Yet, while she always seemed to reach for the superlative to describe her feelings as a victim, she felt her book lacked the emotional insight to make it resonate with readers. She was unable to convey the beguiling contradictions that made her so fascinating, particularly the intriguing composition of a deeply secretive woman whose universal appeal sprang from her openness and her supposed spontaneity. It's part of the human condition to have two selves in the same psyche, but Oprah felt she could not chance exposing her dark self and possibly diminish the luminosity of her bright self.

She also worried that canceling the book would make "all the people at Knopf hate me," so the following year she gave the publisher her chef's book of low-fat recipes and wrote the foreword for In the Kitchen with Rosie. In the Kitchen with Rosie. Oprah's newly slimmed body was Oprah's newly slimmed body was the book's best advertis.e.m.e.nt, but she also invited Rosie onto the show on the day of publication. As a result, the book sold more than a million copies within the first three weeks. A year later it was in its thirty-sixth printing, with 5.9 million copies sold.

"I told Knopf, 'I think this is going to be big.' They were only printing about 400,000 copies," said Oprah. "I called Sonny Mehta and said, 'I don't think that's going to be enough.' He said, 'Oprah, you don't understand. We've done Julia Child, all the great cookbooks, and I'm telling you, 400,000 is an extraordinary amount for a cookbook. It's unheard of.' And I go, 'OK. You don't know what you're dealing with here.' I had been dieting ten years straight on TV. People saw this book as the answer....It [became] the fastest selling book in the history of publis.h.i.+ng. I can't resist an I-Told-You-So. That's really a character flaw. Wooo, I can't resist. Kinda live for that moment when an I-ToldYou-So has to come up. So when you couldn't find the book in the stores, and there were waiting lists everywhere, I couldn't resist calling up Sonny Mehta, who's operating presses 24 hours a day, and saying, 'Sonny, I recall telling you...' And he said...'Never in the history of publis.h.i.+ng have we seen anything like it. Never. It's a phenomenon. No one could have predicted it.' [I said,] 'I tried to tell you.' "

With her own book canceled and her wedding now on hold, Oprah said she needed a grand Hollywood party to celebrate her fortieth birthday on January 29, 1994.

She turned the planning over to Debra DiMaio, a maniac for detail, with only one request: that the weekend include a slumber party. This childhood ritual had been a surprise gift for her birthday the year before. "We even had her favorite Dr. Denton's footie pajamas waiting for her," recalled Gayle King. "As a kid, she never had sleepovers.

She never even had a bicycle."

Gayle, on the other hand, grew up with all the comforts of an upper-middle-cla.s.s family, including a maid and a swimming pool. The eldest of four daughters, she lived with her parents in California before moving to Chevy Chase, Maryland. She had met Oprah in Baltimore, after graduating from the University of Maryland. Pursuing her television career, Gayle moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where she became the local anchor. There she met William G. b.u.mpus, a policeman. They moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and married in 1982. Oprah was the reluctant maid of honor.

She admitted years later that she was sad at her best friend's wedding. "I just didn't think it was going to work out," she told Gayle in a joint interview in 2006. "You know how you go to weddings and they're full of joy....I didn't feel that at yours....It just felt it was kind of pitiful. I never told you because it wasn't my place to say that....Maybe I couldn't feel the joy because I was feeling like our friends.h.i.+p was going to change. But it didn't."

That was unfortunate for Gayle's husband. "I knew them well in the early days [1985-1990]," said Oprah's good friend Nancy Stoddart. "Nile and I took ski weekends with Oprah and Stedman, and spent country weekends with Gayle and Billy. He was a cop then...and there was no way he could [provide for Gayle the way Oprah could]. He was pretty resentful of the effect that Oprah's fame was having on their relations.h.i.+p....Billy later went to Yale Law School, became a lawyer, and is now a.s.sistant attorney general for the state of Connecticut....He's done great stuff for himself....At the time, he wanted to provide his family with a new house, but Oprah came in and bought Gayle a one-million-dollar home, which in those days was huge--just huge."

Gayle divorced b.u.mpus in 1992 because, as she said, "he cheated," and Oprah encouraged her to leave him rather than forgive his extramarital affair. "I've been to five therapists," Gayle said, "and n.o.body's been better than Oprah in terms of [my]

marriage/life counseling." Bill b.u.mpus told a reporter in 1992 that he blamed Oprah for the breakup. "She didn't mean to hurt us, it wasn't malicious, but she ruined our marriage with her generosity and her insistence on taking up so much of Gayle's time. There probably are lots of husbands who complain about their wives watching Oprah, Oprah, but at but at least they can turn off the television set. They don't have Oprah calling at all hours of the day and night. They don't have her buying their wives expensive presents. They don't have her giving their families things they can't afford...." In the divorce, b.u.mpus paid one dollar and signed over to Gayle owners.h.i.+p of the million-dollar house Oprah had purchased.

By the time of Oprah's fortieth birthday, Gayle had been divorced two years. She continued to live and work as an anchorwoman in Connecticut, in order to share with her ex-husband custody of their two children. Oprah flew her back and forth to Chicago so they could spend more time together. Gayle described those trips as episodes from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. "The limo picks you up and everything is taken care "The limo picks you up and everything is taken care of. You can literally go [to see Oprah] with five dollars in your pockets and return with $4.99--because you spent a penny for some gum."

For the celebration of her fortieth, Oprah had emailed her staff, which always feted her birthdays, that no gifts were expected and none would be accepted. But for the special party in California, "40 for Oprah's 40th," as the engraved invitations read, she relented and said guests could bring a copy of their favorite book for her library.

"All year Oprah's been looking forward to turning forty," said Debra DiMaio.

"For her it is part of a very positive milestone."

At a cost of $130,000, she flew everyone, including Stedman, Gayle, Maya Angelou, select members of her staff, her private photographer, and her five bodyguards, to Los Angeles on a private jet and gave them all $1,000-a-night suites at the Hotel BelAir. The celebration began with a dinner Friday evening at L'Orangerie that, according to press reports, cost more than $15,000. In a long white gown, Oprah, escorted by Stedman, greeted guests, including Steven Spielberg, Tina Turner, Julius "Dr. J" Irving, Quincy Jones and Nasta.s.sja Kinski, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sidney Poitier and his wife, Joanna. Oprah's photographer took pictures of everyone with Oprah, got them developed, placed them in sterling-silver frames, and gift-wrapped them by the end of the evening so that she could give each guest a memento of the dinner, just like Queen Elizabeth II does for guests at state dinners.

The next day, Debra arranged for a fleet of black stretch limousines to chauffeur everyone to lunch at The Ivy, to Montana Avenue in Santa Monica for a shopping spree, and then to the home of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger for a tea party. That night, leaving spouses and partners behind, the women headed for Oprah's bungalow for a slumber party.

During that evening they brainstormed about what they could do to extend Oprah's spiritual reach. Each believed that Oprah was a blessed disciple, a special messenger sent from G.o.d to do good. Maya Angelou later put the feeling into words: "In a queer way...she holds a spiritual position not unlike Norman Vincent Peale once did.

Each culture and each time has its...moral mountains that we looked up to....These are people, who, to lesser or greater degrees, are really the lights, the pinnacles of what is right and kind and true and good and moral. Well...she's sort of that."

Sipping Cristal champagne (Oprah's favorite), and led by her spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, self-described as "the b.i.t.c.h for G.o.d," the women decided that Oprah should contact the Pope, and together the two of them could lead the world in a weekend of prayer. No one voiced the slightest concern that an American talk show host might appear slightly brazen to be calling the Vatican to arrange a global pray-in with His Holiness. The papal weekend never took place, but such was Oprah's power at the time that national leaders--U.S. senators, presidential candidates, First Ladies--clamored to be on her show. Being in a position to pick and choose her guests, she no longer granted access to just any important personage. When it was suggested that she should interview Mother Teresa, the nun who ministered to the poor of Calcutta, Oprah vetoed the idea. "I don't think she's much of a talker," she said. "That would be a long hour on television."

The all-female slumber party ended with a group prayer led by Marianne Williamson, and Oprah left determined to present more spiritual and less sensational shows in the future. "I've been guilty of doing trash TV and not even thinking it was trash," she told Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly. She later made a mea culpa to She later made a mea culpa to TV Guide TV Guide and and resolved to elevate her shows. Her timing was perfect. Within a year, William Bennett, who wrote the bestselling The Book of Virtues, The Book of Virtues, joined forces with Senator Joseph joined forces with Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) to denounce daytime television talk shows and the companies that produced them. Bennett, who was contemplating a presidential run in 1996, exempted Oprah and Phil Donahue because he had been on their shows to promote his books, but he castigated the hosts, owners, guests, advertisers, and viewers of Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Montel Williams, and Geraldo Rivera, saying they all must share the blame for the televised "rot" that "degrades human personality." A few years later Bennett, satirized as "The Virtues Czar," was publicly exposed as a compulsive gambler, and he apologized for blowing $8 million in Las Vegas, but his rant on rot had been effective. Procter & Gamble, the nation's biggest daytime television advertiser, announced its decision to pull $15 million to $20 million in advertising from four daytime talk shows, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. did the same, citing "offensive content" as the reason.

Flying back to Chicago after her birthday celebration, Oprah felt she had launched her forty-first year in great style. Finally in shape thanks to Bob Greene and his twicedaily workouts, she announced she was starting to train for the Marine Corps Marathon in October. Having pared herself down to a trim size eight, she again decided she would never need her "fat" wardrobe, so she staged a benefit sale of nine hundred dresses, plus hundreds of pants, blouses, and jackets, at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago for two thousand of the fifty thousand viewers who sent in postcards for tickets. She reserved fifteen special outfits to sell at a silent auction, including the purple sequined dress she had worn to the premiere of The Color Purple The Color Purple in 1985. She raised $150,000, which she in 1985. She raised $150,000, which she donated to Chicago's Hull House and to FamiliesFirst in Sacramento, California.

The day before the The Oprah Winfrey Show The Oprah Winfrey Show was to go on summer hiatus in 1994, was to go on summer hiatus in 1994, her senior producers presented her with their ultimatum: Either the "dictatorial" Debra DiMaio goes or we go. Having lost a dozen producers and a.s.sociate producers over the last two years, Oprah could not afford any more staff upheaval. So she called in her executive producer, who was also vice president of Harpo, one of her oldest friends, and her closest professional colleague, and allowed her to resign. DiMaio signed a lifetime confidentiality agreement that she would never speak or write about her a.s.sociation with Oprah, and she walked out of Harpo with a check for $3.8 million. Oprah was now without the hard nose and soft shoulder of the woman who had functioned as her alter ego for the past ten years. Within the industry the unexplained departure of DiMaio, who had launched Oprah into national syndication and kept her at number one, resounded like thunder. Her successor, Dianne Hudson, pledged to keep the show "out of the talk-show gutter." Oprah immediately closed the studio, dispatched her staff, and disappeared on vacation, where she was "not available" for media calls, all of which fell again to Colleen Raleigh, her publicist.

In losing DiMaio, Oprah had lost her executive producer, chief of staff, party planner, confidante, nanny, and buffer against Jeff Jacobs. As a consequence, she became even more dependent on her personal a.s.sistant, Beverly Coleman, who soon caved under the strain and resigned two months later, saying she was "totally burned out." Oprah offered her $1 million to stay, but Beverly said she could no longer take the twenty-fourhour workdays.

Then, in September, Colleen Raleigh gave notice, and a few weeks later she sued Oprah for breach of contract, claiming she had been promised $200,000 in severance pay, $17,500 in back pay, and $6,000 in vacation pay. "As a public relations professional with a reputation as a reliable and honest source, she was no longer able, in good conscience, to foster the image of Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Harpo as happy and and Harpo as happy and harmonious and humane," said Raleigh's lawyer. "She was continually placed in the position of trying to hide the truth about the disorganized management of Harpo" and about Oprah's "tumultuous partners.h.i.+p" with her company's chief operating officer, Jeffrey Jacobs. "Colleen devoted eight years of her life to Ms. Winfrey, but could no longer work in an environment of dishonesty and chaos."

Infuriated at being publicly embarra.s.sed, Oprah told reporters she would fight Raleigh's suit to the bitter end. "There will be no settlement," she said. Her lawyers tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, but managed only to require Raleigh's lawyer to file amended complaints. This continued for months, until Oprah was. .h.i.t with interrogatories requiring her to respond under oath to questions about her turbulent relations.h.i.+p with Jeffrey Jacobs and all the work she had made Colleen Raleigh do for Stedman Graham to promote him and his business with the Graham Williams Group and Athletes Against Drugs, and to help him promote his clients the American Double-Dutch League World Invitational Champions.h.i.+p and the Volvo Tennis Tournament. After four more months of court pleadings, Oprah saw that it was in her best interest (and Stedman's) to pay off her former employee and bind Colleen Raleigh for life with a confidentiality agreement that prevented her from ever talking or writing about her or Harpo. So, on March 29, 1996, Oprah settled the Raleigh lawsuit and put into place even more binding lifetime confidentiality agreements so that her employees--past, present, and future--could never talk or write about her. Now they were forbidden to take any candid photos of her, and banned from using cameras, camera phones, and tape recorders at work. These agreements were not simply for Harpo employees but for everyone within her realm-guests on her show, domestic workers, caterers, security guards, pilots, dog walkers, chauffeurs, upholsterers, the little man in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., who waxed her eyebrows, the physician in Maryland who gave her Botox shots, and the head of the Oprah Winfrey Leaders.h.i.+p Academy in South Africa. When asked about her gag rule over her universe, Oprah said, "It's all about trust," not realizing it was all about her distrust.

She expected her friends to abide by her dictates on not photographing her without her permission, and most did, with the exception of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., known as "Skip," who could not resist the temptation to sneak snapshots of her on his cell phone. "He likes to come into the faculty room and show us the pictures he's secretly taken of Oprah without her knowledge," said a professor at Harvard University.

Professionally, 1994 was the worst year of Oprah's life. She had driven her staff to exhaustion, and when her senior producers threatened to walk out because they no longer could endure the demands of Debra DiMaio for bigger and better ratings, she had to allow her dear friend to resign. By that point Oprah believed she had evolved beyond what Debra could deliver into a more exalted realm than a mere talk show host. She saw herself as a G.o.d-inspired missionary with a divine message to deliver. She no longer wanted to lead the trash pack. Instead, she sought the kind of respect that does not come from tabloid programming. With the exodus of DiMaio, Oprah decided to raise her show out of the gutter. She had read a report in The Journal of Popular Culture The Journal of Popular Culture written by written by Vicki Abt, professor of sociology at Penn State, t.i.tled "The Shameless World of Phil, Sally, and Oprah." Now encouraged by her senior producers, she decided to chase her glory with a softer focus.

Professor Abt was surprised by Oprah's sudden about-face, but not filled with admiration. "I'm glad she has changed, but it's ten years and $350 million later. I think a lot of what these people do is self-serving. They do the dirty deed and then they cry mea culpa."

The year ended with a sucker punch when the December 1994 issue of Redbook Redbook hit the stands. The article, t.i.tled "Christmas at Oprah's," by former Harpo producer Dan Santow, looked like a frothy recollection of how Harpo employees honored their boss at Christmas and how she generously reciprocated. In between the lines was a searing X-ray of wretched excess and unimaginable extravagance in the workplace. Most d.a.m.ning was the fawning obeisance to the multi-millionaire boss and the slavish time and attention spent purchasing and presenting her gifts. This office ritual later evolved into the annual holiday show called "Oprah's Favorite Things," in which sponsors donated thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise that Oprah selected throughout the year as one of her favorite things (e.g., HDTV refrigerators, diamond necklaces, BlackBerrys, digital video cameras, flat-screen televisions) and then gave to her audience, complete with a list of retail prices.

Prior to that time, Debra DiMaio had organized the yearly Christmas luncheon, which lasted eleven hours so that Oprah and her senior producers could exchange presents. "The actual presentation of the gift at this luncheon was [extremely] important,"

recalled Santow, who was new to the staff and could not believe that Oprah really cared about how a gift was wrapped.

"She notices everything," he was told. The year before, Debra had given Oprah an antique porcelain tea set, and she had hand-stamped the tissue wrapping paper with little cups and saucers.

"I bet she didn't even notice," someone said.

"I bet she did," said DiMaio, picking up the phone. "Oprah, I'm here in my office with all of the producers....We're just curious, but do you remember the tea service I gave you last year?"

"The one with the hand-stamped tissue paper?"

Santow started sweating.

A month before the 1993 Christmas luncheon producers had received an email from DiMaio asking them to answer a survey for Oprah: List your hat, sweater, shoe, dress, glove and s.h.i.+rt size.

List five really expensive gift items I would cry with delight if I received.

Here is where you can purchase them: list stores, addresses and 800 numbers.

List five things that would make me very happy to receive as a gift.

List five possible gifts that you could buy and I would harbor no resentment toward you throughout the year.

Here are five gifts I would hate.

Here are five stores you should avoid buying me anything at.

The day of the luncheon Oprah began the gift-giving by handing her personal a.s.sistant, Beverly Coleman, a small box. Inside was a brochure of a Jeep Cherokee, and outside a horn was blaring. Then everyone heard Oprah's theme song, "I'm Every Woman." The producers ran to the window and saw the s.h.i.+ny black Jeep Grand Cherokee awaiting Beverly from the boss who saw herself as Everywoman. Her other stupendous gifts to her producers included: a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, a set of luggage with $10,000 worth of travel gift certificates, diamond earrings, and a truckload of antique furniture. She gave her executive producer a year's certificate for once-a-month dinners with friends in different cities around the world--Montreal, Paris, London--all expenses paid.

"When you work for one of the richest and most famous entertainers in America,"

said the Redbook Redbook subt.i.tle, "two questions rule your holiday season: What will you give subt.i.tle, "two questions rule your holiday season: What will you give her? And what will you get?" The article hit Harpo like a wrecking ball. Yet, as one former employee said, "It wasn't a complete takedown....I remember on Santow's list of 'Five Things That Would Make Me Very Happy to Receive as a Gift,' he had written 'Anything by Modigliani.' He saw Oprah a couple days later and she asked him if Modigliani was a local artist. I know he felt embarra.s.sed for her that she didn't know who Modigliani was, and if he'd put that into the article he might have made her look really foolish."

Dan Santow retained the distinction of being one of the last employees to get over the fence without signing a lifetime confidentiality agreement, and the only one to put his hand in the cage to write about working for Oprah. His article dropped the hammer on all of Harpo, binding each and every future employee to a lifetime of silence about their employer. He also put an end to the annual rite of the producers' Christmas luncheon.

Fifteen.

JUST WHEN Oprah decided to yank her show out of the trough of trash television, she lost one million viewers. But so did all the other talk show hosts. None of them--not Donahue, Geraldo, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer--could compete with O. J. Simpson and the most notorious murder in American history. On June 17, 1994, they were all run over by a white Bronco leading police on a sixty-mile chase across the freeways of Los Angeles with cameras whirring overhead as helicopters followed the sport utility vehicle until it finally stopped at Simpson's Tudor mansion in Brentwood. There he was immediately arrested, charged, and jailed for the slas.h.i.+ng murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

For the next sixteen months every lurid detail of the vicious crime was disseminated and debated on television as the country became fixated on all things O. J.

Court TV shows were created to a.n.a.lyze the crime, the suspect, the victims and their families, the prosecutors, the defense team, and the judge, who welcomed cameras to his courtroom, where the trial was televised live. Reporters such as ABC's Terry Moran, MSNBC's Dan Abrams, and Greta Van Susteren of Fox News became celebrities simply for covering the O. J. Simpson trial, and twentieth-century Americans sat in front of their television sets like Romans once gathered in the Colosseum to watch lions devour Christians and gladiators battle for their lives.

People who did not know their next-door neighbors came to know everyone a.s.sociated with Orenthal James Simpson: his b.u.mptious houseguest, Kato Kaelin; the 911 operator who took the call from Nicole in 1989 as O. J. was beating her; the criminal defense attorney Johnnie ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit") Cochran; the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden; the celebrity-loving judge, Lance Ito; and the disgraced LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, whose racial epithet and Fifth Amendment evasions greatly swayed the jury. As Eric Zorn wrote in the Chicago Tribune: Chicago Tribune: "The O. J. "The O. J.

Simpson trial became the most tabloid friendly story since Elvis died on the toilet."

Until that night in June 1994, Simpson had reigned as the golden boy of American sports, who, upon retirement from football, never stopped hearing the cheers. The former Heisman Trophy winner, who for most of his career played for the Buffalo Bills, extended his fame as the high-flying star who galloped through airports in a series of television commercials for Hertz rent-a-car. He appeared in films such as The Towering The Towering Inferno and and The Naked Gun, The Naked Gun, and worked with stars such as Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, and worked with stars such as Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, and Sophia Loren. He played golf at the most exclusive country clubs and received hefty honorariums just for showing up at Hollywood benefits to smile and shake hands. A black man embraced by white America, O. J. Simpson had it all--money, position, national recognition, and universal respect--until the night his ex-wife was found butchered alongside the waiter who had stopped by her house to return the sungla.s.ses she had left at the Mezzaluna Trattoria earlier in the evening.

When the trial began in January 1995, Oprah saw her ratings tank. "I can look at the numbers and say, 'Was Kato on the stand? Who was on the stand?' Like yesterday, our numbers shot up a point and a half from what they've averaged for the past couple weeks because there was no court." Tim Bennett, the new president of Harpo Productions, defended her dip in the ratings. "While these are not the most outstanding numbers we've ever had, they're leading our nearest compet.i.tor by close to 100 percent.

What other genre in all of television--comedies in prime time, network newscasts, latenight talk shows--can claim that?" He conceded the impact of the trial coverage "to the tune of 15 percent almost on a daily basis."

During the court's first day off in April 1995, Oprah leaped to recoup some of that lost percentage by booking four network trial commentators, plus the writer Dominick Dunne, who had been given a prize seat in the judge's courtroom because he was covering the trial for Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair. As soon as Oprah's audience had a chance to speak, As soon as Oprah's audience had a chance to speak, they quickly established themselves as pa.s.sionately in support of O. J. Simpson, and for the next six months they and the rest of the country wrangled about whether he could or would or should be found guilty. The debate went on behind the scenes at Harpo as well, and Oprah decided to do a show on October 3, 1995, following the verdict. When it was announced that O. J. was found not guilty, she appeared visibly shocked. Most of the black members of her audience shrieked and clapped and danced around, while some of the white members sat in stunned, disbelieving silence. The trial had splintered the country on race. Polls showed that 72 percent of white Americans believed O. J. was guilty, while 71 percent of black Americans believed he was innocent. Although privately Oprah had predicted the outcome, publicly she stood with white America. Ten years later polls recorded a s.h.i.+ft, with only 40 percent of black Americans believing O. J. innocent, which brought black opinions closer to those of whites.

"For a long time after that, people wrote in asking what I was really thinking when they read the Not Guilty verdict," Oprah said. "So here it is: I was completely shocked. I couldn't believe that verdict. As a journalist, I was trying to keep some sense of balance in the midst of my own very strong opinions, but it was difficult to do that day." It was surprising to hear Oprah identify herself as a journalist, trying to keep "strong opinions" at bay. Rather, she was a shrewd talk show host not wanting to alienate members of her audience who believed O. J. should have been found not guilty.

A former Harpo employee remembers that before the verdict, those in the control room predicted O. J. would be convicted, but Oprah disagreed. "You don't know my people," she said of the predominantly black jury, understanding that Mark Fuhrman's racist comments would deny him any credibility among African American jurors.

Publicly she said there was a perception among black people that almost all white people feel the way Fuhrman did. In a column for the Nashville Banner, Nashville Banner, Oprah's friend and Oprah's friend and former coworker at WTVF-TV, Ruth Ann Leach, focused on Oprah's belief that "most white people harbor deep hatred of black people." Pointing out that "Oprah's entire career has been nurtured, supported and made possible mainly by white people," Leach wrote, "This woman knows full well that she is wors.h.i.+pped by millions of white Americans. If she still feels that most whites hate most blacks, what must the less privileged people of color feel? Whites claim to be baffled by the polls that show African Americans believe O. J. Simpson did not do the crimes. How could anyone dismiss every drop of blood, every strand of fiber? Easily. Black people--not limited to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury--simply did not believe anything the racist cops and their racist support teams produced as evidence."

For two days after the verdict, Oprah dedicated her shows to "O. J. Simpson: The Aftermath." The tabloids reported that she had been promised his first broadcast interview, which she rushed to deny. "I will never interview O. J. Simpson," she declared.

Days later she welcomed the TV star Loni Anderson, ex-wife of Burt Reynolds, who Anderson said had thrown her into furniture and smashed her head against the wall of their Hollywood home. Oprah looked shocked.

"I've had it with men who beat up women," she said. Turning to her audience, she announced she was banning all wife-beaters from her show. She again recited the humiliation of her married lover walking out on her in Baltimore and slamming the door on her hand. "I remember falling to the floor and crying. I remember being down on that floor and saying, 'Who am I really?' From that time on I made the decision that I was going to take charge of myself."

From the beginning of her career Oprah had established herself as America's girlfriend. She was the beloved sister-woman who knew the sorority secrets, some of which she divined from how-to books such as Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Simple Abundance, an advice book for women. To her viewers, Oprah was the neighbor lady an advice book for women. To her viewers, Oprah was the neighbor lady down the street who poured coffee for the wives after their husbands lunch-pailed to work. She was the misery madam who soothed and comforted and occasionally scolded.

She was the town crier warning against pedophiles, wife-beaters, and all manner of abusers, and as such, she became a champion for women, especially downtrodden women who had been done wrong by men.

"If I could just get Black women connected to this whole abuse issue," she told Laura Randolph of Ebony. Ebony. "I hear it all the time from Black women who say, 'Well, he "I hear it all the time from Black women who say, 'Well, he slapped me around a few times, but he doesn't really beat me.' We are so accustomed to being treated badly that we don't even know that love is supposed to really feel good."

She used her own life as an example of how her female viewers could shake free from the loser men in their lives and reclaim their self-esteem. "If I can do it," preached America's first black female billionaire, "you can do it."