Oprah (12 page)

Oprah said she had been pursued by the CBS affiliate for the on-air position, but Clark remembers that WVOL pushed for her hiring, and Joseph Davis, a cameraman, formerly with WDCN-TV, the public education channel, concurred. “There was a small group of young black people in Nashville that the NAACP got behind to place in positions above entry level—in middle management and on-camera,” Davis said. “Oprah was part of that group to come out of WVOL.” In 2008 he produced a photograph of the group taken on the set at WDCN, when they appeared to discuss “Blacks and Their Role in the Media.” “Out of the ten people in this picture, Oprah is the only one who did not get sidetracked by marriage or children. She never let life interfere with her ambition to get to the top.”

Chris Clark was sensitive to the demands for diversity at that time. “I felt we needed to look like the face of Nashville, which was then 80 percent white and 20 percent black. We had a brave mayor [Clifton Beverly Briley] who said that segregation was over and we had to move toward integration….I was responsive to this because when I was coming up in television in the 1960s, it was a white-bread world—no room for blacks, women, Jews, or Greeks like me. My real name is Christopher Botsaris, but I had to change it to get a job on the
air. By the time I got to WLAC, Nashville had been through the really rough civil rights battles, but we still needed to show that we were committed to integration.

“As far as I’m concerned, Oprah was not a token. Yeah, she was black and we needed a black face, and she was a woman, so I guess that helped. But she was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “She was drop-dead gorgeous, very well spoken, and known in town from being Miss Black Nashville and Little Miss Spark Plug or whatever she was [Miss Fire Prevention]. So I made her a reporter—we didn’t have correspondents in those days. I sent her out with a Bell and Howell camera to cover city hall. I didn’t find out until later that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.”

Years later Oprah admitted she had lied on her job application and during her job interview about her experience, but she walked into her first assignment with great determination. “I announced to everybody there, ‘This is my first day on the job, and I don’t know anything. Please help me because I have told the news director at Channel 5 that I know what I’m doing. Pleeeeze help me.’ And they did. And from that point on all those councilmen became my friends.”

Chris Clark, who retired in 2007, does not claim a medal for hiring Oprah, but he does acknowledge “getting the fisheye from management….You have to remember it was a very racially tense time in Nashville, and she was the first black woman on television.” He admitted that the front office was not enthusiastic. “I could make the decision because, as anchor, I was also director and producer of news, but they made it quite clear that if Oprah didn’t work out—if the audience did not accept her—it would be on me.”

Others recall the hire as very courageous. “No question,” said Patty Outlaw, who did traffic ads for the station. “It was a big risk for Chris.”

“He went out on a limb when he brought Oprah in,” said Jimmy Norton, who worked in production, “especially when he promoted her to coanchor….There was grumbling in the back of the newsroom….It bothered some to see Oprah on the air doing news, but you have to remember what Nashville was like in those days….The
N
word was still being used freely.”

Ruth Ann Leach recalled her first encounter with the word when Oprah started doing the news. “I accompanied a family member to a pleasant suburban home….I sat with the…wife. She greeted me warmly and told me she used to enjoy watching me on television.

“What do you mean ‘used to?’ I asked.

“ ‘Well, I cain’t watch your station anymore, now that you have a nigger reading the news.’ ”

Oprah herself got walloped with the hateful word when she went on assignment in a segregated area of Nashville. She introduced herself to a shop owner and extended her hand.

“We don’t shake hands with niggers down here,” he said.

She shot back, “I’ll bet the niggers are glad.”

At TSU her classmates considered her television job nothing but a big wet kiss from the affirmative action fairy. They dismissed her as a “two-fer,” a mere token, and she agreed. “No way did I deserve the job,” she said later. “I was a classic token, but I sure was one happy token.”

“She was so excited to be on television,” recalled the makeup artist Joyce Daniel Hill. “I was with the Joe Colter Agency and had been hired by the station to teach the news team to do makeup and get supplies for them every month. We were just getting used to color cameras in those days and had only a few shades of pancake makeup available….I blended a special shade for Oprah….She’s considerably lighter now than she was thirty-four years ago. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just better makeup artists or some kind of skin bleaching….She took me with her to cover the
Ebony
fashion fair because we both loved clothes….She was a joy to work with.”

Hired at $150 a week, Oprah made her television debut in Nashville in January 1974. By the following year she had received several awards as the city’s first black female on television. She was named National Executive Woman of the Year by the National Association of Women Executives. The Middle Tennessee Business Association named her Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year, and she won the Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club award as Woman of the Year in 1975. “She was terrific,” said Chris Clark, “although she wasn’t a great reporter. Couldn’t write. Never could.” In fact, she had so much trouble writing she caused the station to go black for two
minutes of a five-minute cut-in one morning because she had not finished typing. “Chris should have fired me that day,” Oprah said.

Instead, Clark concentrated on her other gifts. “She was wonderful with people,” he recalled. “And that was her downfall as a journalist, because she could not be detached. She’d be sent to cover a fire, come back to the station, and work the phones trying to get help for the burnt-out family instead of writing the story for the evening news.”

Easy and casual at work, Oprah kicked off her shoes and padded around the newsroom in bare feet. “She was as country as cornbread in those days,” said one former coworker.

“I think people expected her to be a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ type, you know—very grateful—but she wasn’t that way at all,” said Jimmy Norton. “She was driven. I saw it shortly after she started, when we were doing a public service spot for Black History Week. The producer was not very good, so Oprah stepped in and completely took over. She shoved the producer aside, told the cameraman what to do, and directed the segment herself. That was an eye-opener for me. This girl knew what she wanted and was willing to do whatever she had to do to accomplish her goals.”

Patty Outlaw agreed. “She was real confident for her young self—ambitious, yes, but not a backstabber. I liked her a lot….I saw her every day in those years, because I worked on the floor above the newsroom. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time—drugs all over the place. They were even selling ‘windowpanes’ [LSD] in the hall.” Drugs were so prevalent that the news staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah’s coanchor, a coke spoon as a gift. “Chris and I looked the other way,” said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana. Years later Oprah indicated that her own drug use started in Nashville, with cocaine, and continued during her years in Baltimore and later in Chicago.

“I remember raving on the elevator about a guy I was dating, and Oprah listened to me carry on for two floors. As she got off, she said, ‘Ooooh, girl. He sounds like Jesus’ brother,’ ” said Patty Outlaw. “In those days Oprah and I talked about boys, diets, and makeup. That’s all
we cared about then….Funny, isn’t it, but she’s still talking about the same things on her show three decades later.”

“She was a little heavy then, but nothing like now,” Patty said in 2008. “I had started taking ballet and mentioned my lessons to Jimmy Norton. ‘Ballet must be big,’ he said. ‘Oprah did a little story during the newscast last night. She did it in her tutu or, in her case, her four-four….’ Oprah lived on junk food then, and nobody got between her and her Ding Dongs.”

Harry Chapman, who coanchored the weekend news with Oprah, recalled her fondness for Chicken Shack chicken. “They used cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce—hottest chicken I ever put in my mouth. We’d have that on weekends, in between newscasts.”

As the thirtieth largest television market, Nashville was a training ground for many young broadcasters. “It was a very exciting time to be in TV,” said Elaine Ganick, former news anchor for the NBC affiliate, WSMV, and later a correspondent for
Entertainment Tonight.
“I started out about the same time as Oprah; Pat Sajak was a weatherman; and John Tesh, our news anchor, hit the big time in New York before his ten years with
Entertainment Tonight.
”

Tesh, the tall (six foot six), handsome, blond anchorman for WSMV, once described his Nashville days and nights with Pat Sajak, Dan Miller, and Oprah: “We were all single, ran in a pack, and got into a lot of trouble acting like jerks.” Sometime after he became the news anchor for WCBS-TV in New York City, Tesh told a woman he dated seriously that when he was in Nashville he had lived with Oprah for a short time, at her apartment in Hickory Hollow. “He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn’t take it anymore. He walked out in the middle of the night….He told me he later felt very guilty about it.” The social pressure then, in Nashville, Tennessee, concerning an interracial couple was extreme.

Toasting her talk show’s tenth anniversary in 1996, Oprah invited John Tesh to appear with his
ET
cohost Mary Hart, and reminded him of what she called their “one date—strictly two friends having dinner.” More than three decades later some people who worked with them in Nashville found their intimate relationship hard to believe. “[I would’ve
thought] Oprah would’ve been leery about dating a white person…interracial dating was not acceptable then,” said Jimmy Norton. “After all, we were just ninety miles south of Pulaski, home of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Patty Outlaw acknowledged that the coupling of a black woman and a white man was considered “pretty scandalous” at the time, but she remembered a snowy evening when the station put a lot of people up for the night at a Ramada Inn. “I think if you asked Oprah and Vic Mason about that night they might have some fond recollections of each other.”

In 1975, Oprah, who was coanchoring the weeknight news, was recruited by WSB in Atlanta. “It was time for a black anchor on weekday TV,” said former news director Kenneth Tiven. “She came down and was terrific. I remember having her home to dinner….She had even then an extraordinary sense of self-confidence, an eerie comprehension of what was expected of her as an upwardly mobile black woman and budding television star. However, I suddenly bolted Atlanta for Philadelphia KYW as news director, and she said, ‘Without you I am not coming.’ ”

Chris Clark recalled Oprah coming to him with the WSB job offer. “I talked her out of it because she wasn’t ready and we didn’t want to lose her. We were just starting field anchoring and I thought she’d be great. So I gave her a five-thousand-dollar raise, and she stayed with us—for a while. Then, a year or so later, she got an offer from Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. Again, management told me to talk her out of leaving. So I called her in. ‘Oprah, management has told me to talk you out of leaving. Have I tried to talk you out of it? Good. Now I think you should take the job. You’re ready.’ ”

Baltimore was a much larger television market, and the job paid $40,000 a year, but Oprah did not leap at the opportunity to coanchor the news on WJZ. “I hated Baltimore when I first went there,” she told WDCN’s Gail Choice in her “Farewell to Nashville” interview. “But I took the free trip they offered and looked at the Westinghouse-owned station, which I loved. They own[ed] five other stations, and they said, ‘We have big plans for you.’ They wanted me to sign a five-year contract but I said no. ‘I’ll be too old in five years to do what I want to do.’
So I negotiated it down to three years.” Oprah, then twenty-one, said she envisioned herself going from coanchoring the news in Baltimore to transferring to the more glamorous ABC affiliate in San Francisco and finally to becoming “the black Barbara Walters….If she can make $1 million a year, I figure we can make $500,000,” Oprah told her black interviewer.

“I hate to leave but it’s just about necessary for me to do what I want to do later, and that’s to anchor in one of the top 10 markets.” Oprah said she would not have considered moving to Baltimore if WJZ had not been the number one station in its market.

Gail Choice appeared wide-eyed with wonder at her colleague’s strategic vision, and, dripping with admiration, she commended Oprah on her good fortune. “I was lucky, lucky, lucky…in the right place at the right time,” said Oprah. Years later she would say it was all a part of God’s plan for her.

When she signed her three-year contract with WJZ and prepared to move to Baltimore, she asked her father for a loan until she started getting paid in her new job. “Vernon Winfrey was a good customer of mine at the Third National Bank in East Nashville,” said Janet Wassom. “He took out papers and cosigned with Oprah for a loan to pay her expenses for relocating….He was known in the black community as someone people went to for help, and he helped those who helped themselves. Didn’t believe in handouts. Made everyone pay him back, and I’m sure he did the same with Oprah.”

Oprah repaid her father many times over in the years to come, with luxury cars, fine clothes, gold watches, immense houses, and exotic vacations. She even offered to retire him for life. “She calls this place a crummy old dump,” he said in 2008 of his dilapidated barbershop on Vernon Winfrey Avenue. Yet, even at the age of seventy-five and following a stroke, the man who believed in a hand up ignored his daughter’s offer of a handout.