Oprah_ A Biography Part 7

morning People Are Talking booked conjoined twins as guests, thirty-twoyear-old women attached at the tops of their heads. They talked about going through life booked conjoined twins as guests, thirty-twoyear-old women attached at the tops of their heads. They talked about going through life sharing everything. Oprah was intrigued. "When one of you has to go to the bathroom at night, does the other one have to go with her?" she asked. Richard Sher nearly fell off his perch.

Oprah soon saw herself as the audience's back-fence neighbor. "I was dis.h.i.+ng the dirt and meddling in other folks' business which is what I do best. My acting came in handy. In acting you lose your personality in favor of the character you're playing but you use it to provide energy for your character. The same way on [a talk show]. I...use it to concentrate on bringing the most out of my guests."

She certainly did that with the poultry mogul Frank Perdue. "He was a difficult guest, almost surly," recalled Barbara Hamm. "Toward the end of the show, Oprah asked if it bothered him when people said he looked like a chicken. He took offense and asked if she minded people saying she looked like a baboon. Oprah couldn't believe...that he would make such a racist remark. Her chicken comment may have been a little rude, but to come back with that...We cut to a commercial. Oprah took it graciously and let it go. It was a stunning moment."

Years later, when she became overly concerned about her public image and did not want to be seen as a victim of racism, Oprah denied the exchange had ever taken place. "Frank Perdue did not call me a baboon," she told Vibe Vibe magazine in 1997, magazine in 1997, dismissing the story as an urban myth. Those at WJZ who saw the show, such as Barbara Hamm and Marty Ba.s.s, could not explain her denial. Bob Leffler, a public relations executive in Baltimore, said, "I forget now whether Frank Perdue called her a gorilla or a monkey or a baboon. But it was some kind of primate....I saw the show and have never forgotten it." The incident was not covered in the Baltimore papers, and few tapes of People Are Talking exist. "We used two-inch tapes then," said Bill Baker. "They were exist. "We used two-inch tapes then," said Bill Baker. "They were very expensive, so we reused them and recorded over [everything]."

WJZ's essayist, Mike Olesker, mentioned the Frank Perdue show in his book about television news, but the most indelible show was the one on which Oprah and Richard interviewed the famous fas.h.i.+on model Beverly Johnson.

"I like handsome, s.e.xy men," she said.

"What's your ideal first date?" Oprah asked.

"To be taken to a nice restaurant and to be wined and dined. And then have the man take me home..."

"Yes?"

"And give me an enema," she said.

Richard Sher immediately broke for a commercial. "He and Oprah hooted about the remark for years," said Olesker. "But at that moment, it was another reminder for Sher: Could he talk to fas.h.i.+on models in the morning, risking diarrheic confessions, and maintain credibility in the evening [reporting the news]?"

Even in retirement, Sher was unapologetic about the tabloid-like shows that he and Oprah did on People Are Talking. People Are Talking. "When s.e.x got big, we did shows on the man with "When s.e.x got big, we did shows on the man with the micro-p.e.n.i.s. We did the thirty-minute o.r.g.a.s.m. We did a lot of the tough topics--the transs.e.xual mother with brittle bone disease."

One of their most exploitive shows became meaningful to Oprah and altered her way of thinking. The guest was a transs.e.xual quadriplegic whose boyfriend's sperm was inserted into her sister. The quadriplegic became the biological aunt/uncle and also adopted the child. The show was criticized when it aired, but afterward Oprah happened to see the child with the transs.e.xual quadriplegic.

"It was just a moving thing," she said. "I thought, 'This child will grow up with more love than most children.' Before, I was one of those people who thought all h.o.m.os.e.xuals or anything like that were going to burn in h.e.l.l because the Scriptures said it."

At the time, Oprah's strong Baptist beliefs were being tested because of her intimate involvement with Tim Watts, a married man with a young son and no intention of leaving his wife, Donna.

"He was her first real love," said Oprah's sister, Patricia Lee Lloyd.

"Oh, G.o.d," said Barbara Hamm, remembering when Oprah was so depressed over Tim Watts's breaking up with her that she could not get out of bed for three days.

Arleen Weiner, the producer of People Are Talking People Are Talking, recalled "the many, many tearful phone calls at one, two, three, four in the morning."

The women on the production staff were sympathetic and did all they could to help Oprah, who was so obsessed with the six-foot-six disc jockey that she once ran after him in her nightgown and threw herself on the hood of his car to try to make him stay with her. Another time she blocked the front door of her apartment, screaming, "Don't go, don't leave," and then threw his keys down the toilet. This was the story she later told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes, attributing it to her more benign relations.h.i.+p with Bubba attributing it to her more benign relations.h.i.+p with Bubba Taylor.

After Watts walked out on her at 3:00 A.M., she called her best friend, Gayle King, who she knew had been in a similar situation. "For her it wasn't throwing keys, it was checking the odometer," Oprah said of King. "We both have done equally crazy things. I was on the hood, but Gayle was on the b.u.mper. So because she has been there and lived in that place, she never judged me. But she was always there to listen and support me."

The men on staff were not so tolerant of Oprah's hysterics. More than two decades after working with her, Dave Gosey, the director of People Are Talking, People Are Talking, could not say could not say one kind word about her. "My mother told me if you can't say something nice about someone, say nothing at all. So I have nothing at all to say about Oprah Winfrey."

Her volcanic affair with Tim Watts started in 1979 and crested and cratered for five years, even after she left Baltimore and moved to Chicago. "Those years were the worst of my life," she said. "I had bad man troubles." Being in love with a married man meant s.n.a.t.c.hed hours, empty weekends, and lonely holidays that left her feeling desperate and forlorn.

"Poor thing. She had to spend Thanksgiving with us one year [1980] because she had no place else to go," said Michael Fox, whose parents, Jim and Roberta Fox, were close to Richard and Annabelle Sher. "We didn't know her until the Shers brought her to our house....I sat next to her at dinner. She ate so much food that night I couldn't believe it. I've never seen a human being eat as much as Oprah did....Paul Yates [WJZ's general manager] told me about her affair with Tim Watts and how miserable she was."

Oprah did not mind being seen in public with a married man, but when she found out that he was also having an affair with a pretty young blonde, she said she felt "devastated" about being "two-timed."

"My affair with Tim started in 1980 [in the midst of his with Oprah]," said Judy Lee Colteryahn, the daughter of Lloyd Colteryahn, a former football star from the University of Maryland who played for the Baltimore Colts. "Tim always said that Oprah couldn't know about us because it would ruin his business opportunities [with her]....He led me to believe that he was only seeing her to get a job at Channel 13....He did get a weekly Sunday show there for a while....So I didn't pay much attention at first, but then my friends started seeing Tim and Oprah having dinner at The Rusty Scupper when he was supposed to be with me....He played basketball for the station on Friday nights, so one night I walked into the gym [unexpectedly] just as they were finis.h.i.+ng up a game. I saw Tim walk over to the bleachers with his cowboy boots and hand them to Oprah. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, and she started walking out with his boots. Then he saw me. 'What are you doing here? You need to go home right now. Right now. I'll be over later.' That's when my jealousy of Oprah started....Then I found her credit cards in his pockets....She really took good care of him....He was always broke....But he returned the favor later by keeping his mouth shut."

When Oprah became famous the tabloids pursued Watts and offered to pay him for the story of their love affair, including details of their drug use. "He called Oprah, said he didn't want to talk but he was strapped for cash," said Judy Colteryahn. "He said, 'Look at it from my point of view. I don't want to talk to these people, but I sure could use some money. I've got kids, I've got bills, but I am a friend to you....What can we work out?' That's what he told me.

"That Christmas [1989] Gayle King delivered a gift-wrapped box to Tim in Baltimore, and Tim called me down on the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, where I was staying with my parents. He said, 'Oprah came through. Big-time. She really came through. Fifty thousand dollars, cash. Get your b.u.t.t back here. We're going out for New Year's Eve.'

"Naturally I drove right back to Baltimore. Like Oprah, I was always available for Tim. Like her, I was always hanging out the window waiting for him to drive up in his blue Datsun. But...she was smarter than me. She only wasted five years of her life on him. I wasted more....I did not intend to fall in love with a black man....Tim is very lightskinned, so I told my friends that he was mulatto....I nearly fainted the first time I saw a picture of Stedman Graham, because he looked exactly like Tim: tall--six-foot-five or six-foot-six--handsome, with a mustache, and very light-skinned. I thought, 'Wow. Oprah has found a replica for Tim in Stedman.' "

That New Year's Eve, Oprah's gift of $50,000 in cash financed her former lover's trip to Atlantic City with Judy Colteryahn. "Tim got a limousine and we had a big fancy hotel and front-row seats in Remo, a black jazz club....At the time I thought he was a great guy for not selling Oprah out, especially on drugs, which we did all the time in those days....Now that I'm older I realize how much power Oprah had and what she could have done [to him]. So they probably both had nooses around each other's necks.

"I asked [him] what he could say [to the tabloids] that would make Oprah pay him fifty thousand dollars in hush money not to talk....That was big money then [$50,000 in 1989 equals $86,506.85 in 2009]....I was wondering what he knew about her....He said she did not want him to talk about her brother being gay [Jeffrey Lee died of AIDS December 22, 1989]. It's no big deal to have a brother who is h.o.m.os.e.xual, but apparently it was to Oprah....Tim also said he knew about some lesbian affairs or whatever....But that's all he said, and we never went into it."

Oprah never revealed Tim Watts by name as the man who had brought her so low in those years. Over the next two decades she referred to him on television as a "jerk,"

frequently telling her audience of the debas.e.m.e.nts she had endured because of him. "I was in love; it was an obsession," she said. "I was one of those sick women who believed that life was nothing without a man....The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted, powerless....There's nothing worse than rejection. It's worse than death. I would wish sometimes for the guy to die because at least I could go to the grave and visit....I have been down on the floor on my knees crying so hard, my eyes were swollen...then it came to me. I realized there was no difference between me and an abused woman, who has to go to a shelter--except that I could stay home."

African American women understand in their bones the slave mentality that leads sisters like Oprah to give their all to a man in complete subordination. One friend explained Oprah's obsession with Tim Watts and his rejection of her by citing Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy, A Mercy, in which a freed black man rejects a slave woman for not in which a freed black man rejects a slave woman for not owning herself and for being a slave to her desire for him. Oprah tried to fight her own slave mentality but acknowledged through the years that she struggled not to surrender.

"There's always a teeny, tiny little conflict that says, 'Maybe you already have enough.

Why do you keep pus.h.i.+ng?' That comes from lack of self-esteem, from what I consider to be a slavery mentality." Three years later she was still fighting it. "Every year I ask G.o.d for something. Last year it was love. This year it's going to be freedom...from everything that's kept me in bondage."

Oprah was still raw from being rejected by Watts when she told Cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan magazine in 1986, "If I start to talk about it, I'll weep on the floor. But I tell you, I will never travel that road again. The next time somebody tells me he's no good for me, I'm gonna believe him. I'm not going to say to myself, 'Well, maybe I'm too pushy, or maybe I don't talk enough about him, or maybe, maybe, maybe. I'm not racing home to meet him there and then not hear from him until midnight. Uh, uh. Too painful."

Even when she was supposedly happy in a committed relations.h.i.+p with Stedman Graham, she continued to refer to her doormat days with Tim Watts. In 1994 she told Entertainment Weekly that she was reading her journal from that time and was chagrined that she was reading her journal from that time and was chagrined by her pathetic musings: " 'Maybe if I was rich enough or famous enough or was witty, clever, wise enough, I could be enough for you....' This is a guy I used to take the seeds out of the watermelon for so he wouldn't have to spit!"

Twenty years after the affair she was still talking about him, unable to put the past to rest. In 2005 she told Tina Turner, "I just ran across a letter I wrote in my 20s, when I was in an emotionally abusive relations.h.i.+p. I'd written 12 pages to one of the great jerks of all time. I wanted to burn the letter. I want no record of the fact that I was ever so pitiful." In 2006 she told London's Daily Mail, Daily Mail, "I will never be in a position where I love "I will never be in a position where I love someone else more than myself, where I give over my power to someone else. I will never be in a position where I get in my car and follow them to see if they are going where they said they were going. And I'll never be in a position where I'm looking in someone's pocket or their wallet, or checking who they are on the phone with. And I will never be in the position where, if they lie to me more than once, I don't end that relations.h.i.+p."

During her affair with Watts, Oprah was living well in Baltimore, making $100,000 a year. She described herself then as young, attractive, and still slim. "I had so much going for me, but I still thought I was nothing without a man." She had moved into a pretty two-bedroom apartment in Cross Keys and bought a BMW. "I still remember one day we were hanging out and she transferred five thousand dollars from her savings account to her checking account just for the thrill of being able to do it," said Barbara Hamm.

Professionally, Oprah's star was s.h.i.+ning. She and Richard Sher had become the toast of Baltimore as their show began outdrawing Phil Donahue's in the local ratings.

They were so successful that their producers decided to go for syndication, which for Oprah rang the bells of big money and national recognition. It was the main reason she stayed at WJZ after her close friends Maria Shriver and Gayle King moved on to bigger markets.

Oprah and Richard shared the same agent, Ron Shapiro ("That's Sha-pie-row," the lawyer instructed), and she insisted he write into her new contract that if she wasn't working on a syndicated show, she could leave the station at the end of two years (1983) instead of three. So confident was everyone of syndication success that they signed off on the clause without objection.

In March 1981, the staff of People Are Talking People Are Talking went to New York City for the went to New York City for the annual NATPE (National a.s.sociation of Television Program Executives) convention, where syndication deals are made. They rented a suite in the New York Hilton decked out with signs that read: "The Show That Beats Donahue. Donahue. " Richard and Oprah held court " Richard and Oprah held court with programming executives from around the country and sold the show in Rockford, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California, with potential deals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bangor, Maine; Santa Rosa, California; and Casper, Wyoming.

Unfortunately, none of the prospective buyers was a number one station offering a good time slot, but the producers still remained encouraged.

In antic.i.p.ation of national exposure, Arleen Weiner hired an image consultant to help Oprah achieve a more sophisticated look. Up to that point she had been shopping at funky little stores such as The Bead Experience. "We were close to WJZ, a one-size-fitsall kind of store with gauzy, flowy tunics and caftans and palazzo pants," said Susan Rome, who was sixteen years old when she helped Oprah. "I tried to get her away from always buying fat-lady clothes in dark colors because she really wasn't fat--just a bit chunky and thick--but she was very uncomfortable with her size."

When the paid image consultant arrived, she met Oprah at her apartment and tore through her closet. "I was hired to give her an easier, more comfortable fit, and a look that was more stylish but would still play in Peoria," said Ellen Lightman. "There was a little trepidation on her part in the beginning, which is only natural for someone who has been directed to update her style and improve her image....We retired all her beiges and camels, got her into jewel tones and clothes that fit better and were more flattering to her full figure."

The show also began booking more celebrities, for a broader appeal, which gave Oprah the chance to meet and interview Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Pearl Bailey, d.i.c.k Cavett, Uri Geller, Jesse Jackson, Erica Jong, Ted Koppel, Barry Levinson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. People Are Talking People Are Talking also became a major stop for authors on also became a major stop for authors on book promotion tours. "I remember being interviewed by Oprah the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president," said the writer Paul d.i.c.kson. "During a commercial break she talked about how awful Reagan was going to be for the country. She was very upset.

'This man will not be good for my people,' she said." But she said nothing on air because she was prohibited by contract from publicly expressing any political opinions.

Within six months it became clear to the producers that syndication was not going to happen. At its peak, the show was aired by only seventeen stations. Despite Oprah's great warmth on air, People Are Talking People Are Talking was simply too parochial to go national. was simply too parochial to go national.

"The general manager after me was Art Kern, and he sold the show to half a dozen stations, but there was resistance within Westinghouse," said William F. Baker, by then chairman of Group W. "The guy in Hollywood below me did not think Oprah would make it as a talk show host....I told Baltimore we were not to lose Oprah because she was a ma.s.sive a.s.set, but Baltimore was our smallest station and so the one I paid least attention to."

On Monday, September 7, 1981, the dreaded headline appeared in the TV and Radio section of The Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Sun: " 'People Are Talking' Flops as Syndicated Show." " 'People Are Talking' Flops as Syndicated Show."

Richard Sher was disappointed, but Oprah was devastated. This was her second big public failure in Baltimore. That evening she had another row with Tim Watts and he walked out on her, slamming the door on her hand.

"The problem with you, baby doll, is you think you're special," he said. As Oprah recalled, she was on the floor crying: " 'I'm not, please. I don't think I'm special. I don't, please come back.' Then, as I went to pick myself up, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I saw an image of my mother and I remembered her screaming one night when her boyfriend had left her. And I remembered my cousin, Alice, saying, 'It's all right. He's coming back.' That same cousin was in an abusive relations.h.i.+p. Her boyfriend had knocked her down the stairs and broken her leg and arms, and she still took him back. I saw myself through their eyes in that mirror. I always said I would not be a battered woman. I would not be screaming for some man. And when I heard myself saying, 'Come back. I don't think I'm special,' I'd become that. I got myself up, washed my face and said, 'That is it.' "

At 8:30 P.M. on September 8, 1981, she wrote a note to Gayle King, saying that personally and professionally her life did not seem worth living. "I'm so depressed, I want to die," she wrote. She told Gayle where to find her will and her insurance policies. "I even told her to water my plants," Oprah said later. She told the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison that she had not considered the ways and means to accomplish her death. "I didn't even have the courage to end the relations.h.i.+p," she said. Years later Gayle returned the note to Oprah, who said, "I see it now as a cry of self-pity. I never would have had the courage to do it." She told her audience: "The whole idea that you're going to kill yourself and they're all going to be mourning--that's not really the reality. I realized that if he even came to my funeral he would go on with the other girl and on with his life and still be happy."

The one-two punch of losing syndication, plus the love of her life, seemed unbearable at the time. Her friends were concerned enough to keep a quiet suicide watch, and one gently suggested that she seek psychotherapy, but Oprah refused. "I was so adamant about being my own person that I wouldn't go for counseling," she said. Her only solace was her star status in Baltimore. "She was known and loved throughout the city," said WJZ's former executive producer Eileen Solomon. "In that era Baltimore was still pretty much a town that saw itself in the shadow of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., with more of a blue-collar sensibility." And Oprah was its queen.

"She was a very big deal here," said Bob Leffler, "and we're a sports town, where the biggest celebrities are baseball and football stars....I remember seeing Oprah at Ron Shapiro's spring party, where everyone ignored legendary Orioles like Eddie Murray and Jim Palmer and flocked to her....Now that's saying something for Baltimore."

As a testament to Oprah's popularity, she was chosen by the students at Goucher, a prestigious women's college in Maryland, to deliver the commencement address in 1981, a huge honor for a twenty-seven-year-old woman, only five years older than most of the graduates. She spoke to them about her dreams as a little girl growing up in Mississippi and wanting what they had--the chance to go to a fine school, to graduate, and to begin life with the full expectation that all her dreams would come true. "When I became old enough or wise enough to know I couldn't be just like you, I wanted to be Diana Ross, or just be somebody's Supreme." Finally, she said she realized that wasn't going to be possible, either, so she learned to accept the numerators that set her apart-s.e.x, race, education, talent, economics, family background. She said that even with all the differences that separated her from them, the Goucher graduates, they were more alike than unalike in their struggle to be good human beings. She said the struggle was harder for them as women, powerless in a man's world.

As if advising herself, she urged the graduates to nurture themselves. "Because unlike our mothers, we know that by the time we are middle-aged we have more than a fifty percent chance of never being married, divorced, widowed, or separated. So there's no denying the obvious. We have to take care of ourselves."

Her experience as an emotionally abused woman seemed to inform her speech. "I found myself one black woman rendered powerless. Being preyed upon by other people who were not only unreasonable, but just unfair. Powerless because I kept trying to be liked by people who didn't even like themselves. Powerless! Because I believed the world was one big popularity contest that I had to win or accept failure as a woman--as a human being."

Having grown up watching The Donna Reed Show, The Donna Reed Show, Oprah gently p.r.i.c.ked the Oprah gently p.r.i.c.ked the fantasy balloon of girls like herself who imagined themselves growing up, becoming Donna Reed, and living happily ever after as wives and mothers. She told them not to believe that Mr. Right was the answer to their prayers. She recited a Carolyn Rodgers poem about lonely women who are powerless because they judge their self-worth by the kind of man they attract. She spoke of the inequities facing women in the marketplace, making less money than men in the same jobs. Having experienced a secret and unwanted pregnancy, she chided the men who made policies that denied women the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. She did not use the word abortion, abortion, but she but she said those same men were denying women equality, rendering them powerless. Her wealthy white audience cheered when she repeated the words of slaves: "Ain't n.o.body free til we all is free." She recited Maya Angelou's poem "Phenomenal Woman," and concluded with the proud words of Sojourner Truth: "Everywhere I go people wants to talk to me about this women's rights. I tells them just like I'm telling you now. It seems to me if one woman, Eve, was able to turn this world upside down all by herself, then all of us womens in here together ought to be able to turn it right side up! And now that we's askin' to do it, y'all mens better let us." The ovation was long and loud and deserved.

While Oprah would deliver many more commencement addresses over the years, none would be as heartfelt as that first one at Goucher College.

Around this time Oprah and Judy Colteryahn had to deal with the news of their lover getting his wife, Donna, pregnant and having a second son. Later, Tim Watts would have another child with a woman not his wife. Court records indicate that he had two children out of wedlock, plus two children with Donna, who eventually divorced him.

"When his daughter was born on Oprah's birthday [January 29], Tim told me that Oprah took it as a sign she had been forgiven by G.o.d," said Judy Colteryahn. She had had to terminate a pregnancy and a.s.sumed that Oprah did as well. "She became the child's honorary G.o.dmother, and when her dog had puppies, she flew Tim and the little girl to New York City to give them a puppy. Tim showed me the pictures of all of them standing outside the Waldorf-Astoria hotel."

In spite of her previous resolve, Oprah resumed her rocky relations.h.i.+p with Watts in 1981, but this time she tried to protect herself with a workload that would leave less time to think about him. "I remember waiting for phone calls and being afraid to run the bathwater because I wouldn't hear the phone," she said. Still, she woke up on her twentyeighth birthday and wept for hours because she had no one with whom to share her life.

From 1982 to 1983 she appeared on the air three times a day. "She did the early-morning news, the hour talk show, and then the noon news," said Eileen Solomon. "That's an incredible amount of work every day, but she did it, and she won all her time slots against the compet.i.tion."

By 1983, Oprah had to decide whether to renew her contract with WJZ and stay a big star in a small sky, or try to find another job. She was torn, especially after Debra DiMaio, one of her favorite producers, left for Chicago. When Oprah was poised to sign a new contract, DiMaio called and begged her to hold off. She said a great job was opening up because Robb Weller was leaving A.M. Chicago. A.M. Chicago. "For G.o.d's sakes, don't sign yet." "For G.o.d's sakes, don't sign yet."

DiMaio urged her to send a tape and resume to WLS, and on Labor Day, Oprah flew to Chicago for a formal interview.

Beforehand, she sat in her hotel room and watched the show. "I'd never seen it before," she said, adding that she was not impressed. "They baked cookies and gave you the latest in mascara techniques." When she went for her interview, she told WLS management their show was no good. "Too frivolous! I'm best at combinations: A s.e.xual surrogate one day, Donny and Marie Osmond the next day. Then the Klan."

The general manager, Dennis Swanson, had already made up his mind about hiring Oprah, but just to make sure he auditioned her by setting up an interview with a group of s.e.xually impotent men; then he told her to reminisce on camera about her deprived childhood and her time as a teenage runaway. "Her astute merger of prurience and uplift proved irresistible," wrote Peter Conrad in The Observer. The Observer. Offered the job on Offered the job on the spot, she jumped at it. "The country's third market! My own show!"

Dennis Swanson was also dizzy with delight. "He was like a kid in a candy store,"

recalled Wayne S. Kabak, then vice president of the talent agency ICM. "I had traveled to Chicago to visit a client I represented named Candace Hasey, who hosted WLS's morning show. I stopped by to visit Swanson, her boss, who told me he had some bad news. He was going to fire Candy because he had found an extraordinarily talented replacement, who he thought would become a huge star. Notwithstanding that I was sitting in his office feeling rather downtrodden about Candy's fate, Dennis was so excited about his discovery that he insisted on showing me the tape of the woman who was replacing my client. He put the tape in the machine showing Oprah in Baltimore and, in a flash, I knew he was right. If any executive should have reaped the huge rewards of Oprah when she finally hit syndication, it was Dennis, who sadly did not because the laws at the time prevented companies that owned networks from syndicating shows. Since ABC owned WLS, syndication rights were dealt to King World which made hundreds of millions, if not more, from Oprah."

After her audition, she returned to Baltimore and called Ron Shapiro to negotiate her new contract. WJZ tried to keep her with inducements of a bigger salary (WLS was offering $200,000 a year), a company car, and a new apartment. "No one wanted her to go," said Eileen Solomon, "and some tried to pressure her by saying she'd never make it on her own in Chicago."

Bill Baker, then the chairman of Group W, called. "Oprah, you can't leave WJZ,"

he said. "Baltimore is your home. You're the leading lady of the city. You must stay." But Oprah had made her decision. Baker said he saw to it that Paul Yates, the general manager, was fired for letting her go.

Bill Carter felt that Oprah would succeed in Chicago, but he acknowledged that others did not. "There was an undercurrent of feeling here that this woman was not all that special," he said. "I guess because people are used to turning on their television sets and seeing nothing but attractive women, s.e.xy or whatever. They really didn't see that substance in her. I think there's an element of racism in that. Oprah is a very blacklooking black woman....There were expectations that she would flop in Chicago."

Seeing he was losing her, Paul Yates would not release her until her contract expired at the end of the year. Then he played rough. "There's no way you can make it in Chicago up against Donahue," he said. "It's his home base. You're walking into a land mine and you can't even see it. You're committing career suicide. You're going to fail."

Yates, an African American, said Chicago was a racist city that had not been entirely welcoming to its first black mayor, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, and certainly wouldn't be welcoming to her. But Oprah had already factored race into her decision.

"I made a deliberate choice about where to go," she said. "Los Angeles? I'm black and female and they don't work in LA. Orientals and Hispanics are their minorities. New York? I don't like New York, period. Was.h.i.+ngton? There are thirteen women to every man in D.C. Forget it. I have enough problems." Chicago, the third largest television market in the country, seemed ideal. "It's a big little town, sort of cosmopolitan country.

The energy is different than Baltimore. It's more like New York, but you're not overwhelmed like in New York."

Having decided to make the move, she now had to wait four months to finish her contract in Baltimore before starting her new job. "I thought the [Chicago] show might not survive without a host for that long. I started eating. First I ate to celebrate getting the job, then [I ate] out of insecurity. If I failed in Chicago, I could say it was because I was fat." By the time she got to Chicago she had gained forty pounds.

"I was hired to take Oprah's place as coanchor of People Are Talking, People Are Talking, " said " said Beverly Burke, a television news reporter from North Carolina, "and it was a huge adjustment for me. But Oprah was great. She took me to lunch at the deli in Cross Keys and told me how the show worked. She talked candidly about Richard Sher, said he was Mr. Television--always on--and would totally dominate the show but that he was very good at what he does and quite professional....If it weren't for Oprah, I wouldn't have gotten that job. If not for her success, they would've been looking for a white coanchor....

"Still it was a huge adjustment for me. But I didn't feel I had to be Oprah....She had never been an in-the-trenches reporter, which was more my style. Oprah was flash.

She was criticized for showing up to do a news story wearing a fur coat."

In the weeks before she left, Richard Sher teased Oprah on the air. "She's leaving us behind and she'll forget all about us in no time....Remember where you got your start."

Beverly Burke saw an edge to his teasing. "She was leaving him behind and everybody knew it." But unlike others at the station, Sher encouraged Oprah. "I thought [the move]

would be great for her," he said years later. "I knew she would become as big a star as she has become." As a going-away present, Oprah gave him a gold Rolex watch, on the back of which she had engraved, "Ope, 1978-1983."

The decision to leave Baltimore was the most important of Oprah's life, and she never forgot who encouraged her and who tried to hold her back. She remained close to Richard Sher, spoke at his synagogue, and even attended his sixtieth birthday party.

Publicly, she said she would be forever grateful to Bill Baker for giving her the start, but inexplicably, she never spoke to him again, despite his ill.u.s.trious rise in broadcasting to become president of WNET public television in New York. Upon his retirement in 2007 he was celebrated with a magazine of tributes from networks and esteemed television colleagues: Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, Joan Ganz c.o.o.ney, Newton Minow, and Bob Wright. But there was no tribute from Oprah Winfrey. She never spoke to Paul Yates again, either, but when Skip Ball, an engineer at WJZ, was dying, she flew to Baltimore to spend time with him in the hospital.

In December 1983 the station threw her a farewell party at Cafe des Artistes in Baltimore, which her mother, Vernita Lee, attended with Oprah's brother, Jeffrey. All of WJZ's on-air stars showed up--Jerry Turner, Al Sanders, Bob Turk, Don Scott, Marty Ba.s.s, and Richard Sher. Paul Yates presented her with a Cuisinart, a photo alb.u.m of her days at the station, a basketful of her favorite ballpoint pens, and a twenty-five-inch Sony Trinitron television, but the gift that brought her to tears was the life-size Oprah doll wearing a copy of her favorite dress, made by Jorge Gonzalez, the station's makeup artist and graphic designer.

In her farewell speech, Oprah thanked everyone and praised Baltimore as the place where she grew up and became a woman. She then called Beverly Burke to the stage, gave her a warm introduction, and wagged her finger at the crowd, telling them to be nice to her.

Days later she packed up her five coats from Mano Swartz Furs and headed for Chicago, while Tim Watts quietly left town for Los Angeles to try to become a stand-up comic. For the next five months they planned to see each other on weekends, with Oprah flying back and forth to the West Coast. So leaving Baltimore was not as wrenching as she had antic.i.p.ated. In fact, the future looked bright. Arleen Weiner drove her to the airport and kissed her goodbye, shouting down the terminal, "I hope you make it, hon....I hope you make it."

Seven.

UNLEASHED AND uninhibited, Oprah chewed up the talk show compet.i.tion.

Chicago television viewers had never seen an overweight black female host before, and they were knocked breathless by the tornado that whirled into their homes every morning, shaking the rafters and jostling the furniture. Accustomed as they were to the cerebral style of Phil Donahue, the raunchy antics of Oprah Winfrey were a jolt, especially when she charged into the no-go zone of tabloid s.e.x. "She receives higher ratings with controversial shows on male impotence, women who mother their men, and guys who roll over after doing it," observed the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune's "INC." column, "while Donahue tries to combat her with right-wing spokesmen and computer crimes."

"I usually don't do homework," said Oprah. "I really have learned that for me and my style of interviewing, the less preparation I do, the better because what everybody is now calling Oprah's success is me being spontaneous and that's all it is." The Chicago Chicago Sun-Times's Richard Roeper disagreed. He said her success was due "largely to loud, selfcentered and often cheesy programming."