Oprah_ A Biography Part 9

jumped into A Historical Dictionary of American Slang. A Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Spielberg was upset by the Spielberg was upset by the criticism his friend received and publicly defended him. "Working with Tom is one of the greatest gifts I've ever been given by this business," he said. He did not mention the time Oprah had exhibited similar exuberance by jumping on his couch in 1985, but by 2005, their twenty-year friends.h.i.+p had frayed. Months after the Cruise couch-jumping, Spielberg stayed away from the Broadway premiere of Oprah's production of The Color The Color Purple--The Musical, and she ignored the presentation of his lifetime achievement award and she ignored the presentation of his lifetime achievement award at the Chicago Film Festival.

In the beginning, Oprah had been in awe of Steven Spielberg. "He's the most wonderful human being I've ever met," she told reporters in 1985, adding that everyone in the cast and crew was "awed out of our brains" to be working for him. "Oh, dear Gawd," she drawled, "I cans believe we is workin' for Mr. Steven." When she saw Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment empire, she elevated him to G.o.dlike status. He was the movie mogul she aspired to be. "That's when I wanted my own production company," she said. Until then, Harpo, Inc., was simply the corporate ent.i.ty she needed for tax purposes-to answer her fan mail--but after seeing Spielberg's operation, she and Jeff Jacobs set about making Oprah the first black woman to own her own studio.

She claimed that as the only non-actor in the cast she was terrified during filming, but her costars laughed at the suggestion that she was intimidated by anybody or anything. Akosua Busia and Margaret Avery jokingly imitated her husky voice to mock her so-called fears: " 'I'm so terrified. Look out, everybody, here I come, and I'm scared out of my wits.' "

Oprah later criticized the casting of people of different skin tones as family.

"[That] was one of the things that bothered me about The Color Purple. The Color Purple. " On the set she " On the set she did not hesitate to tell the director he was making some of her scenes look too slapsticky.

He barred her from watching the dailies. In one memorable scene, where her character wallops the white mayor of the town, Oprah admitted she was not acting. Her response was real and visceral. "Steven had told the white actors to call me 'n.i.g.g.e.r,' but he didn't tell me what he was going to do. 'You big fat n.i.g.g.e.r b.i.t.c.h,' they said....n.o.body had ever called me that, or anything close to it, and I didn't need to be a method actor to react....I was so shaken and angry that I...really decked the mayor." Her character pays with years in jail for a.s.saulting a white man. She emerges broken, empty, and blind in one eye to become a maid for the mayor's wife. "I'm not a subservient person," said Oprah, "so playing that part of Sofia was hard for me."

Spielberg was so impressed by Oprah's talent for improvisation that he enlarged her part during filming, and drew a magnificent performance out of her that, sadly, she never equaled in subsequent films. But in The Color Purple The Color Purple she was superb. she was superb.

"Unforgettable," said the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times. "A brazen delight," said "A brazen delight," said Newsweek. Newsweek.

"Outstanding," agreed The Was.h.i.+ngton Post. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Critics predicted her nomination for a Critics predicted her nomination for a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. The only lackl.u.s.ter review came from her father: "I think I'd put Whoopi Goldberg first, Margaret Avery second, and maybe Oprah was third," said Vernon Winfrey.

In the middle of filming, Oprah flew to Chicago to sign contracts with King World to syndicate The Oprah Winfrey Show The Oprah Winfrey Show in the fall of 1986. At the press conference in the fall of 1986. At the press conference afterward she told reporters, "I'm thrilled at the prospect of beating Phil [Donahue]

throughout the country." With more than one hundred stations committed to carrying her show, she received a $1 million signing bonus. She called her father, then a councilman in Nashville. "Daddy, I'm a millionaire," she shouted. "I'm a millionaire." She returned to North Carolina and told Steven Spielberg that he should reconsider putting her name on the movie's posters, which he did not.

"I think that hurt Oprah deeply," said Alice Walker, "and may have been the reason why she took over the theater marquee for the musical of The Color Purple The Color Purple twenty twenty years later." The theater marquee did indeed read, "Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color The Color Purple. " "

Being a part of the film changed Oprah's life forever. The confluence of her Oscar nomination with the syndication of her talk show produced a perfect storm for starmaking, and Jeff Jacobs, in conjunction with King World, mounted what Quincy Jones described as "an unprecedented promotional blitz that started her on the path to where she is now." Oprah began a round of radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews that lasted for months, making her name known from the cornfields of Kansas to the penthouses of Manhattan. She was profiled by Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Elle, Interview, Newsweek, Ebony,The Wall Street Journal, and and People. People. She was interviewed She was interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, Good Morning America, The Merv Griffin Show, Good Morning America, a a Barbara Walters Special, 60 Barbara Walters Special, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, and with Mike Wallace, and The Tonight Show The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She also with Johnny Carson. She also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, Late Night with David Letterman, and hosted and hosted Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Sat.u.r.day Night Live. "Seldom "Seldom before in the history of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has one Academy Award nominee received so much publicity," wrote Lou Cedrone in the Baltimore Evening Sun. Evening Sun. "Since the day she won the nomination, it has almost been "Since the day she won the nomination, it has almost been impossible to pick up a newspaper, a magazine or a trade publication without coming face to face with the Winfrey image and attendant stories."

Oprah's movie debut had launched her beyond the realm of daytime television, and she could not help but enjoy her elevated status. TV critics who had characterized her as a big, bra.s.sy, tabloid talker now treated her with a newfound respect. She was no longer relegated to the entertainment sections of their newspapers; her picture now appeared on the front pages with glowing tributes. She became a full-fledged household name as she crisscrossed the country promoting herself, her movie, and her talk show.

She readily acknowledged her new fame--"Ain't I something, child?"--but she refused to act as though she had been blessed by good luck.

"I had sense enough to know that the movie was something very special," she told Luther Young of The Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Sun, "and I expected it to do everything it has done for "and I expected it to do everything it has done for me."

"Yes, I'm coming into my own," she told Ann Kolson of The Philadelphia The Philadelphia Inquirer, "and it's a great feeling to know [I'm] not even there yet." Nonplussed, the "and it's a great feeling to know [I'm] not even there yet." Nonplussed, the reporter wrote, "The world has been good to this big, noisy, hip-shakin' mama who began life poor on a Mississippi farm."

When Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis StarTribune StarTribune suggested she was an suggested she was an "overnight sensation," Oprah let him have it. "I resent that," she said. "I take objection to people saying that because no one gets anywhere overnight. I am where I am just as you are where you are: because of everything you have done up to this moment."

Writing for TV Guide, R. C. Smith was struck by her immense self-confidence. R. C. Smith was struck by her immense self-confidence.

"She claims to have believed, always, that for her anything was possible because she was just that good." When asked if she was going to give up her talk show, Oprah said, "I intend to do and have it all. I want to have a movie career, a television career, a talk show career. So I will do movies for television and movies for the big screen and I will have my talk show. I will have a wonderful life. I will continue to be fulfilled doing all of those things, because no one can tell me how to live my life. I believe in my own possibilities, so I can do whatever I feel I'm capable of doing, and I feel I can do it all."

What looked arrogant in print sounded only slightly less so in person, as Oprah's rich voice and commanding size transfixed listeners while she communicated the kind of self-a.s.suredness only a fool would question. Yet when she leavened self-importance with self-deprecation, she was winning and wonderful.

In the days leading up to Oscar night, she joked with her audiences about having to lose weight and find a gown to camouflage "a behind as big as a boat." At a public appearance in Baltimore she showed up in a $10,000 full-length fox coat dyed purple and a purple sequined gown showing ma.s.sive cleavage. "I'm dieting now. Can't you tell?" she joked. "Thinner thighs by Oscar night. Thinner thighs by Oscar night. That's what I keep telling myself."

Despite mixed reviews, The Color Purple The Color Purple received eleven Academy Award received eleven Academy Award nominations, including one for Whoopi Goldberg as Best Actress, and two for Oprah and Margaret Avery as Best Supporting Actress, but nothing for Spielberg as Best Director.

This caused considerable comment because no director of a movie with that many nominations had ever been ignored. On top of that insult was an angry backlash from the black community, which threatened to doom the film's commercial success. The Coalition Against Black Exploitation boycotted The Color Purple The Color Purple because of its because of its depiction of black men, and the uproar of rancorous debate prompted picket lines at the premieres in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Steven Spielberg was denounced for turning a complex novel into patty-cake and purple flowers. Quincy Jones was slammed for selecting a white director to tell a black story, and Alice Walker was blasted for portraying black men as beasts to white audiences.

Few movies up to that time had caused such rabid racial reactions. Columnists and radio talk shows focused on the controversy, historical black colleges sponsored forums and seminars, and black churches across the country filled with pa.s.sionate debate.

The biggest outcry came from African American men who felt defiled by the film.

"It is very dangerous," said Leroy Clark, a law professor at Catholic University.

"The men [in the film] are raping, committing incest, speaking harshly, separating people from their families....It reinforces the notion of black men as beasts."

The cast rushed to the film's defense, including Oprah, whose excellent performance was untouched by the public vitriol. "This movie is not trying to represent the history of black people in this country any more than The G.o.dfather The G.o.dfather was trying to was trying to represent the history of Italian Americans," she said.

" The Color Purple The Color Purple in no way identifies itself as the story of all black men," said in no way identifies itself as the story of all black men," said Danny Glover, one of its male stars. "This is just this woman's story."

After receiving the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Whoopi Goldberg dismissed the protesters as "p.i.s.sy."

The respected film critic Roger Ebert declared The Color Purple The Color Purple the best film of the best film of 1985, but when he viewed it again twenty years later, even he admitted "that the movie is single-minded in its conviction that African-American women are strong, brave, true and will endure, but African-American men are weak, cruel or comic caricatures." Still, he found humanity in the story of how Celie endures and finally finds hope.

Oscar night arrived, but without thinner thighs for Oprah. In fact, she said it took four people laying her on the floor to pull her dress on her, and at the end of the evening they had to scissor it off. "It was the worst night of my life....I sat in that gown all night and I couldn't breathe. I was afraid the seams were gonna bust." When Lionel Richie appeared on her talk show later, he said she had looked nervous at the Oscars. "I'm telling you, there aren't many black faces at the Oscars," she said. "So when you walk through the door, everybody looks around to see. 'Is it Lionel Richie? No. It's not Brenda Richie.

Who is it? It's some black girl in a tight dress,' is what they say. And that's why I was so uncomfortable. I thought, 'Oh, G.o.d! Lionel Richie is gonna see me in this dress!' It was the tightest dress known to womankind. It was a horrible night."

Oprah lost Best Supporting Actress to Anjelica Huston ( Prizzi's Honor Prizzi's Honor ) and in ) and in one of the most stunning shutouts in the Academy's history The Color Purple The Color Purple did not win did not win one of its eleven nominations, while Out of Africa Out of Africa won seven awards, including Best won seven awards, including Best Picture. "I could not go through the night pretending that it was OK that Color Purple Color Purple did did not win an Oscar," Oprah said. "I was p.i.s.sed and I was stunned."

Whoopi Goldberg blamed the Hollywood NAACP. "They killed the chances for me, Oprah, Margaret Avery, Quincy, everybody--I truly believe that. And blacks in Hollywood paid a price for years to come. Because after all the h.e.l.l that was raised, the studios didn't want to do any more black movies for fear of the picket lines and boycotts."

The movie's loss did not dampen Oprah's intention to become a great star. "When you mention great actresses, you'll have to say my name: 'Meryl...Oprah,'

'Hepburn...Oprah.' That's what I want. What I am is an actress. I don't get paid for acting.

But I was born to act." She continued her publicity blitz long after the movie's run, and piled up reams of reverential press in time for the September 1986 launch of her talk show. Her laudatory media coverage hit its first speed b.u.mp when Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, a.s.signed Chicago writer Bill Zehme to profile Oprah. He a.s.signed Chicago writer Bill Zehme to profile Oprah. He accompanied her on her rounds of the good and the great, and described how, "with unabashed l.u.s.tfulness," she pawed through the possessions of rich Chicagoans and poked in their closets, counting their shoes.

"She was like a little kid running around my apartment just oohing and aahing,"

said Rockefeller heiress Abra Prentice Anderson Wilkin. Chicago socialite Sugar Rautbord, who had profiled Oprah for Interview, Interview, Andy Warhol's monthly magazine, said, Andy Warhol's monthly magazine, said, "There's a wonderful hunger about her. Some people yearn to be free. Oprah yearns to be rich."

Oprah did not hide her acquisitiveness from Zehme, who wrote that within the first hour of their meeting she had told him she was a millionaire. " 'I knew I'd be a millionaire by the time I turned 32,' she said...again and again....By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, 'I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.' " Zehme captured Oprah's obsession with money but lacked the sensitivity to note that for a descendant of slaves, money would mean freedom from servitude forever.

She told him about her many fur coats ("I say minks were born to die!") and her immense income ("Money just falls off me, I mean it falls off!"). She opened the doors to her new $800,000 lakefront condominium, a marbled palace with a dripping crystal chandelier in the dressing room and ornate gold swans on the bathtub spigots, and led him into her bedroom, with its panoramic view of the city.

"She is sprawled lumpily across her bed at this point and I sit on its lower edge,"

he wrote as Oprah continued her me-me-me monologue: " 'I transcend race, really. I believe that I have a higher calling. What I do goes beyond the realm of everyday parameters. I am profoundly effective. The response I get on the street--I mean Joan Lunden [former host of Good Morning America Good Morning America] doesn't get that and I know it. I know people really really love me, love me, love me. A bonding of the human spirit takes place. Being able to lift a whole consciousness--that's what I do.' "

Describing her as "an economy size glamour puss" and a " hyperkinetic amalgam of Mae West, Reverend Ike, Richard Simmons and Hulk Hogan," Zehme mentions her trademark "big mama earrings" and the way "she will name-drop unashamedly--the most frequent is 'Steven,' her director in The Color Purple. The Color Purple. " "

What the writer found most curious about Oprah was her conquest of the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport through her friends.h.i.+p with Maria Shriver, whom she had met in Baltimore. Oprah was asked to recite the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem "How Do I Love Thee?" at Shriver's 1986 wedding to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she told Zehme the only other speakers at the April ceremony were the bride's parents and her uncle Senator Ted Kennedy. Afterward, Oprah said she played charades at Ethel Kennedy's house and had several intimate chats with Jacqueline Kennedy Ona.s.sis.

"We talked life and perms and spirituality," Oprah said. "I was moved by her."

She also mentioned that she had sent $650 replicas of a leather sailing jacket she had worn that weekend to Eunice Shriver and Ethel Kennedy because both had admired it. "I love that family," she said.

Years later few wedding guests recalled Oprah's poetry recitation as vividly as they remembered Arnold Schwarzenegger's endors.e.m.e.nt of Kurt Waldheim, the president of Austria, who had been exposed for partic.i.p.ating in n.a.z.i war crimes during World War II. During the wedding reception Schwarzenegger strolled the broad expanse of lawn at Hyannisport carrying a large papier-mache statue of himself in lederhosen and his bride in a dirndl. "I want you all to see the wedding present we have just received from my good friend Kurt Waldheim," Schwarzenegger told the crowd of judges, priests, and politicians. "My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name, because of all the recent n.a.z.i stuff...but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt." Waldheim could not attend the wedding because he had been officially declared persona non grata by the United States.

When Bill Zehme submitted his profile to Vanity Fair Vanity Fair about the "capaciously about the "capaciously built, black and extremely noisy Oprah Winfrey" with "her great lippy smile," Tina Brown killed the piece, "not wis.h.i.+ng to stir racial teacup tempests," said someone directly involved in the editorial decision. She paid Zehme in full and encouraged him to publish elsewhere. The piece appeared in the December 1986 issue of Spy Spy magazine. magazine.

If the profile wasn't s.e.xist, or even racist, in tone, it was certainly elitist. Zehme seemed to filet Oprah for being fat, famous, and full of herself, something he may have accepted from a fat, famous, full-of-himself white man. Undone by her own messianic p.r.o.nouncements, she rallied with good humor and fired off a note, saying, "Dear Bill, I forgive you. Oprah." Zehme sent her flowers to make amends, but she never responded.

He should not have been surprised, having written about "disapproving hostesses who carp that Oprah never RSVPs and surmise that she has no notion of thank-you note etiquette." In later years, when Oprah became omnipotent, Zehme tried to distance himself from the profile and even omitted it from a collection of his published writings.

But it did him little good as far as Oprah was concerned. She never spoke to him again.

Years later, when Tina Brown left Vanity Fair Vanity Fair to become editor of to become editor of The New The New Yorker, she decided again to a.s.sign an in-depth profile on Oprah. She called the writer she decided again to a.s.sign an in-depth profile on Oprah. She called the writer Erica Jong. "Tina knew that I knew Oprah--we had met in the sauna bath at Rancho La Puerta years and years before, and talked about how difficult men were. She invited me to come on her show in Baltimore, which I did....She was so warm and sweet then."

Now Oprah was wary. She felt slammed by a cover story in The New York Times The New York Times Magazine, t.i.tled "The Importance of Being Oprah," by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. While t.i.tled "The Importance of Being Oprah," by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. While Zehme's arrow had grazed the good s.h.i.+p Oprah, Oprah, Harrison's was a torpedo to the hull. Not Harrison's was a torpedo to the hull. Not only did the writer declare Oprah's candor to be more apparent than real, but she also branded Oprah's New Age p.r.o.nouncements nonsensical and her self-interest extreme.

Further, she a.s.serted that Oprah's message--"you can be born poor and black and female and make it to the top"--was a fraudulent sop to her white audience: In a racist society, the majority needs and seeks, from time to time, proof that they are loved by the minority whom they have so long been accustomed to oppress, to fear exaggeratedly, or to disdain. They need that love, and they need to love in return, in order to believe that they are good. Oprah Winfrey--a one-person demilitarized zone--has served that purpose.

Most d.a.m.ning was the writer's a.s.sessment of Oprah's dangerous influence on the millions of her viewers "who lonely and uninstructed draw sustenance from her, from the flickering presence in their living rooms they call a friend." Obviously Barbara Grizzuti Harrison did not believe that false comfort is better than no comfort at all.

As a media darling accustomed to ribbons of praise, Oprah was irate. It wasn't just the writer's bite or her disdain for what she called Oprah's "superficial quality," it was also the prestigious placement of the profile. Getting shredded in a satirical magazine like Spy was one thing, but to be dissected on the cover of the country's most important was one thing, but to be dissected on the cover of the country's most important Sunday magazine was intolerable.

"Oprah was furious about that article," said Erica Jong, "and she told me she did not want anyone writing about her, especially a white woman for a white publication. 'I don't need a honky magazine to canonize me,' she said. I a.s.sured her I would not be writing about her negatively, but she did not trust Tina Brown.

" 'What if she tells you to put in barbs? Will you be able to resist?' She said she'd pray on it and call me back, which she did, but in the end I was not able to give her the editorial control that she demanded."

Later, when Tina Brown left The New Yorker The New Yorker and started and started Talk Talk magazine, she again magazine, she again wanted to profile Oprah. Sitting with several art directors to discuss possible covers, Tina said, "Oprah has really gotten full of herself....Who the h.e.l.l does she think she is? Let's do Oprah Pope-rah." The artists whipped up a mock cover of Oprah's black face halfcovered with the white ceremonial miter of the Pontiff. "We couldn't put her whole face on the cover because we had to leave room for a big fat halo," said one of the artists. But the profile never got written because by then Oprah had stopped giving interviews.

After Talk folded, Brown wrote a book about Diana, the Princess of Wales, but folded, Brown wrote a book about Diana, the Princess of Wales, but could not get booked on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Oprah Winfrey Show. When she started her news site, When she started her news site, The The Daily Beast, she again took a poke at Oprah, for getting hoodwinked in 2008 by a she again took a poke at Oprah, for getting hoodwinked in 2008 by a Holocaust memoir that Oprah had recommended on her show but that had turned out not to be a true story. "You have to wonder why the big fat budget of that show doesn't at least extend to a fact checker," Brown wrote. In 2009 she dismissed Oprah as a "juggernaut business franchise" whose "authenticity can't help trans.m.u.ting into something manufactured." She wrote that Oprah had become a brand, no longer a person.

"[She] might as well have a little R in a circle next to [her] name."

Later in 2009, Brown's Daily Beast Daily Beast devoted a web page to "Oprah's Bad Press," devoted a web page to "Oprah's Bad Press,"

with links to stories about a poet's $1.2 trillion lawsuit against Oprah for plagiarism; the lawsuit of a flight attendant on Oprah's plane who claimed she was wrongfully fired by Oprah; two deaths at a spiritual retreat led "by [an] Oprah-approved author"; the s.e.x scandal at Oprah's school in South Africa; and Oprah's "ill advice," saying "she's not a doctor but plays one on TV."

Like Inspector Javert chasing Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, Les Miserables, Tina Brown Tina Brown seemed more than a little preoccupied with Oprah, but when asked to discuss the matter, Brown avoided further controversy by responding through her a.s.sistant, who said, "Tina has never been a big student of Oprah and has no time to spend answering questions about her."

By then Oprah Winfrey was in total control of her public image. She had become exactly what she wanted--a gigantic mogul. She had her own media empire: her own television network, her own radio show, her own website, her own daily talk show, and her own magazine, whose every cover featured...her.

Nine.

AFTER THE seedling years of 1984-1986, Oprah burst into full bloom. She flowered as a national success at the age of thirty-two, and money rained down on her in torrents. Variety Variety reported she would earn more than $31 million in 1987, making her reported she would earn more than $31 million in 1987, making her television's highest-paid talk show host, topping even Johnny Carson, who made $20 million on The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show. As Miss Fire Prevention, Oprah had vowed to become "a As Miss Fire Prevention, Oprah had vowed to become "a spending fool" if she ever saw $1 million, and now she sprang with all fours. "I have allotted myself personally only to spend one million dollars this year," she said. "That's how much I'm giving myself to play with."

She began by buying herself a Mercedes and a Jaguar, and then she lavished mink coats on everyone--her mentor Maya Angelou; her cousins Jo Baldwin and Alice Cooper; and her female staff, who were accustomed to her extravagance. The year they had been denied Christmas bonuses by WLS station bosses, she had stepped in, giving each $10,000 in cash stuffed inside rolls of toilet paper. She also gave her producer, Debbie DiMaio, a fox jacket as a "thank you for getting me the talk show." Now she gave DiMaio a six-carat diamond bracelet. ("Brilliance deserves brilliance," Oprah wrote on the card.) She gave the only male on her staff, Billy Rizzo, the keys to a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. She sent two producers to Switzerland on vacation, paid for the wedding of another, and took them all on a shopping spree in New York, where she turned them loose in three stores--an hour at a time--with orders to buy anything they wanted. "I get the biggest kick out of buying great presents," she said, listing her largesse for reporters. "That's why I'm a great friend to have. Once I gave my best friend [Gayle King] and her husband [William b.u.mpus] an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for two weeks in all first-cla.s.s hotels--and money to spend. But my best present to date was when I gave her a nanny to care for her two babies." Gayle recalled the day Oprah visited her and her husband in Connecticut, arriving in a stretch limo. "She was wearing one of her five fur coats, probably a $25,000 number, and white tennis shoes with rhinestones on them and a red sweat s.h.i.+rt that said, 'Husbands Can Be Temporary but Best Friends Last Forever.' " The story that she gave Gayle a check for $1,250,000 for Christmas so they could both be millionaires is also part of the Oprah legend. Years later she bought Gayle a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, for $3.6 million.

She made sure the media knew that Phil Donahue offered congratulations when she won Daytime Emmy Awards in 1987 for Best Talk Show and for Best Talk Show Host. "He kissed me," said Oprah. "Yep. That's right, Phil kissed me." She was so grateful for his public acknowledgment that she sent him twenty bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne to mark the twentieth anniversary of his talk show, pointing out to reporters that Cristal sold for eighty dollars a bottle.

She bought her father a new set of tires and a large television set for his barbershop, so he could watch her show, because he'd said that was all he wanted. She later bought him and his wife, Zelma, a new twelve-room house in Brentwood, Tennessee. "I called him and said, 'Dad, I'm a millionaire! I want to send you and your friends to any place in the world you want to go.' He said, 'All I want is some new tires for my truck.' I was so upset." Her mother, Vernita Lee, was another matter.

"I retired her, bought her a house, bought her a car and pay her double the salary that she made all of her life," Oprah told the Chicago Sun-Times. Chicago Sun-Times. "So now she has no "So now she has no bills to pay and nothing to do all day. And you know what she said to me? 'Well, I'll try to make it.' Can you believe that? I said, 'You're going to try try to make it? See if you can, to make it? See if you can, Mom.' Then just the other day, she called me up to say, 'I need a new coat.' So I said, 'Go to Marshall Field's and get you one.' She says, 'I don't need a Marshall Field's coat. I need a fur coat.' So I said, 'n.o.body needs needs a fur coat, Mother. n.o.body a fur coat, Mother. n.o.body needs needs one.' Well, I did one.' Well, I did buy her a mink coat. So now she has a fur coat, a new car, a new house, no bills and double her salary. And she's gonna try try to make it." to make it."

But that, apparently, was not enough for Vernita. "Oprah told me that her mother stole her personal checkbook, wrote twenty thousand dollars in checks to herself, and thought nothing of it," said the designer Nancy Stoddart, who became close to Oprah in the 1980s. "I met Oprah and Stedman when I was with [the musician, composer, and producer] Nile Rodgers at La Samanna in St. Martin. Oprah and I immediately bonded when I held forth over dinner one night about the Theory of Relativity, which had nothing to do with Einstein and everything to do with greedy relatives who jump out of the woodwork to grab your money when you become rich. That's when Oprah began telling me about her mother and how greedy and grasping she was....She really didn't like her mother at all.

"She said Vernita felt totally ent.i.tled....She was just a greedy greenback....But she got the big-time bucks because Oprah probably knew she would make her life a living h.e.l.l if she didn't [by selling stories to the tabloids]."

As generous as Oprah was to her mother--one Mother's Day she arrived with a gift-wrapped box containing $100,000 in cash--she was still bitter toward Vernita for "giving me away," and she ricocheted from resentment to grat.i.tude over those motherless years. She understood that the lack of her mother's unconditional love drove her to develop skills to get praise from others, but she also saw that she tried to fill her motherless hole with food as a subst.i.tute for love and comfort and security. It would be many years before she reckoned with the depth of her psychological damage.

"If [my mother] hadn't given me up, I would be in deep trouble now," she said. "I would have been barefoot and pregnant, had at least three kids by the time I was 20. No doubt about it. I would have been part of that whole ghetto mentality that's waiting for somebody to do something for them."

She was quite clear about what she thought of Vernita. "I don't feel I owe anybody anything but my mother feels I do....She says, 'There are dues to pay.' I barely knew her [when I was little]....That's why it's so hard now. My mother wants this whole wonderful relations.h.i.+p. She has another daughter and a son. And everyone now wants this close family relations.h.i.+p....They want to pretend as though our past did not happen."

Oprah occasionally derided her mother on the air, once telling her audience that Vernita had borrowed her BMW two years before and hadn't returned it. She told Life Life magazine her mother cursed her as a child for being a bookworm, saying, "You think you're better than the other kids." She told Tina Turner her mother did not want her. "[I]t affected my self-esteem for years," said Oprah. "It's unnatural to not be wanted by your mother. That takes some overcoming." She told BET's Ed Gordon that she was hesitant to have children because of the poor mothering she'd received. "I would be afraid that I would make a lot of the mistakes that were made with me."

The strained relations.h.i.+p between Oprah and her mother became obvious to everyone who watched them on Oprah's 1987 Mother's Day show. "I could not hug her,"

Oprah said later. "Oprah Winfrey who hugs everyone could not hug her own mother. But we have never hugged, we have never said, 'I love you.' " By then Oprah had emotionally erased Vernita as her mother, relegating her to the horde of grabby relatives she said always had their hands out. "I think that Maya Angelou was my mother in another life,"

Oprah said. "I love her deeply. Something is there between us. So fallopian tubes and ovaries do not a mother make."

Eventually Oprah created a new family for herself, one that she felt she deserved and could claim with pride. In place of her welfare mother with three illegitimate children, she selected the celebrated poet and author, an autodidact with no formal education beyond high school, who claimed the t.i.tle of Dr. Angelou because of her many honorary degrees. Oprah carried Maya's monthly itinerary in her purse at all times so she could reach her morning, noon, and night. Quincy Jones stepped into the role of beloved uncle. "I truly learned how to love as a result of this man," Oprah said. "It's the first time I came to terms with, 'Yes, I love this man, and it has nothing to do with wanting to go to bed with him or be romantically involved. I unconditionally love him and...I would slap the living s.h.i.+t out of somebody who said anything bad about Quincy." Gayle King was the adoring sister Oprah had subst.i.tuted for the drug-addicted Patricia Lee, and John Travolta seemed to replace her brother, Jeffrey Lee, who died of AIDS. Even Vernon Winfrey was supplanted. Once Oprah met Sidney Poitier, she bound him to her like a kind and loving father. "I call Sidney every Sunday and...we talk about life, we talk about reincarnation, we talk about the cosmos, we talk about the stars, we talk about the planets, we talk about energy. We talk about everything."

Oprah continued to see her natural family on occasion, gave them money when they asked ("Gobs of it," she said), and then fumed on the air about being treated like an ATM. Her sister, Patricia, felt that Oprah preferred giving money to her family instead of giving them her time and attention. "At times Oprah acts like she's embarra.s.sed by her family," said Patricia. "She acts ashamed of her own mother, probably because Mom doesn't always p.r.o.nounce things correctly and doesn't have a good education." Patricia said that Oprah gave their mother a $50,000 Mercedes but would not give Vernita her home phone number. "If Mom wants to get in touch with Oprah, she has to call the studio like any fan and leave a message for Oprah to call her. In a real emergency, Mom would have to call Oprah's secretary."

For Father's Day one year, Oprah gave Vernon a new Mercedes. "The 600 Mercedes," she told a reporter for publication. "The $130,000 600 Mercedes, black on black, fully loaded Mercedes. Had Roosevelt [her makeup artist] drive it down there. A couple days pa.s.sed and I hadn't heard from my dad. So I called and said, 'Did the car get there?' He goes, 'Yes, it did and I sure do appreciate that.' I said, 'Do you think you could've called and said, "I received the brand new 600 Mercedes?" You think you could show a little excitement?' "

Her blood family knew they did not have Oprah's heart like the celebrity family she had reinvented for herself, and they resented their secondary position in her affections, but they knew their lack of acclaim could not enhance the image she wanted to present.

"We're just country folk," said her cousin Katharine Carr Esters, whom Oprah continued to embrace as "Aunt Katharine." "She needs more for herself than what we have....Oprah doesn't see her real family much. Harpo is her family. She told me so....I don't like Gayle much, but Oprah does and that's fine. I just think Gayle is too much into Gayle."

Oprah made it clear to all her relatives that "Gayle is the most important person in the world to me," and, as she told TV Guide, TV Guide, she gave them the steel-toed boot when they she gave them the steel-toed boot when they criticized Gayle. As she related to the writer: "It was my birthday party and all these family members were gathered in my house, and Gayle walked out of the room. And this distant relative says, 'What's sheee doing here? She's not family.' Well, I hit the ceiling.

My hair stood up on my head. I had a screaming, raging, maniacal fit. I told them all--and I don't care who they were--my family, my mother--that they could get out of my house now and never set foot in it again....My friends are are my family." my family."

Oprah frequently mentioned on her show how disgusted she was with all the beggars in her life. "I'm hearing from so many people now who want me to give them money, or lend them money. I say, 'I'll give you the s.h.i.+rt off my back, as long as you don't ask me for it.' "

On the heels of her multimillions came thirty-five-year-old Stedman Sardar Graham, the man she had been telling audiences was walking ("slowly, very slowly") from Africa to be her Mr. Right. "He's coming, I just know it," she said, "and when he finally shows up, please G.o.d make him tall."

Graham, a prison guard by day and a part-time model by night, was handsome and light-skinned. "He's terrific," said Oprah. "Six feet six of terrific." A little too terrific for her protective staff, who wondered why such a gorgeous man would be attracted to their overweight boss.

"I remember they were very worried about why Stedman was dating her," said Nancy Stoddart. "When we went skiing together, Oprah was so fat that she had to buy her ski clothes in the men's department."

Oprah acknowledged her employees' concern. "They figured if he looked like that, he had to be either a jerk or want something," she said. "He was so handsome--oooh, what a body--so I figured the same thing. If he's calling me...there's something wrong with him I should know about." She turned him down the first few times he asked her out. "I thought he was kind of dorky because everyone said what a nice guy he was [and]

I'm used to being mistreated. I'm not used to a nice guy who's gonna treat me well.

When she finally did accept a date, Stedman arrived with roses and paid for dinner. After several more dates people a.s.sumed he was after her money. "They say, 'She's this fat girl and he's this hot-looking guy, what else could there be?' [But] that invalidates me as a person," said Oprah. "Even though I understand, because when he first asked me out, that's exactly what I thought. But Stedman's spirit is so totally the opposite of somebody who's out to get something material from the relations.h.i.+p."