Oprah (13 page)

“I hated to see Oprah leave Nashville, but I wanted to give her a great send-off,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler, “so I threw a big going-away party—made all the arrangements for invitations, food, drinks, and music. I had it at the Gazebo apartments off Thompson Lane, and strange as this may sound, she never even thanked me for it. She left
town and basically never came back, except when she returned to promote
The Color Purple.
…That was the last I saw of Oprah before all those Arnold Schwarzenegger types took over her life and she got all Maria Shrivered up. She divorced herself from Nashville. Probably because it was too painful for her to come back because we knew her when, or else because we’re just too down-country for her now.”

Oprah’s friend, who became president of the League of Women Voters in Nashville, did not try to conceal her disappointment over the lost friendship. “I don’t think Oprah knows how much we admire her for all she’s done, especially for the little girls in South Africa.”

Perhaps for Oprah the price of surviving was to forget, and the down payment on dreams as big as hers meant dropping a guillotine on the past. She did return to Nashville in 2004, for the fiftieth anniversary of WTVF-TV, and appeared on television to congratulate NewsChannel 5, but she did not come back three years later for Chris Clark’s retirement party. “We were all there,” said one former coworker. “Jimmy Norton cut short a church mission in New Orleans to be on hand, and Ruth Ann Leach flew in from New York City. Even the governor was there, but Oprah didn’t show.”

Her absence surprised many. “We have always been a family at the station, and Chris was on the air there for forty years, probably a record for any anchorman in the country, which is why his retirement party was a big deal,” said Jimmy Norton. “So I think everyone expected Oprah would be there. After all, Chris had given her her big break….But thirty years had passed and…well…Oprah has changed….She’s not the same sweet nineteen-year-old kid we used to know….She did invite Chris to her big splashy fiftieth birthday party earlier that same year, and sent a plane for him and all, so maybe she felt she had done enough for him, I don’t know….I won’t say she
wouldn’t
come to his retirement party. I’ll just say she
didn’t
come.”

C
OUNTEE CULLEN
, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote “Incident,” his most famous poem, about what happened to him as a child:

Baltimore had changed since that poem was published in 1925, but even with a 55 percent black population, its attempts at integration were often hesitant and halting. Situated north of the Confederacy,
south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the shadow of Washington, D.C., the city produced world-renowned figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Post, Upton Sinclair, H. L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Thurgood Marshall. By the time Oprah Winfrey arrived in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Baltimore was known as “Charm City,” after a gimmick to lure tourists with charm bracelets. The ad campaign was launched ten days into a garbage strike that was exacerbated by a 110-degree heat wave that baked the city in a gagging stench and triggered riots requiring the deployment of state troopers in gas masks.

“It took me a year to become charmed by Baltimore,” Oprah said, unimpressed by the city’s historic row houses. “I didn’t understand why they were all stuck together….[And] the first time I saw the downtown area I got so depressed that I called my daddy in Nashville and burst into tears. In Nashville you had a yard, even if you didn’t have a porch. But the houses on Pennsylvania Avenue [in Baltimore] had neither. I picked Columbia for the grass and trees.”

A lovely verdant suburb, Columbia, Maryland, was designed in 1967 to look like a village spread across fourteen thousand acres and to eliminate subdivisions as well as segregation by race, religion, and income. The neighborhoods contained single-family homes, town houses, condominiums, and apartments like the one Oprah rented. The street names came from famous works of art and literature: Hobbit’s Glen, from J.R.R. Tolkien; Running Brook, from the poetry of Robert Frost; and Clemens Crossing, from Mark Twain. Oprah lived on Windstream Drive near Bryant Woods, where the street names came from the poetry of William Cullen Bryant.

After driving her to Baltimore and helping her unpack, her Nashville boyfriend, William “Bubba” Taylor, was ready to return home. “We agreed she had to make the move and I had to stay,” he said many years later. “It was too small a TV market for her in Nashville, and I had many things to keep me here, such as my family’s funeral home.”

The couple had been dating semi-seriously since Oprah had gotten Taylor a job at WVOL radio. “I hired Billy just to keep Oprah’s sanity,” recalled Clarence Kilcrease, the station manager. “She kept pushing me to do it. She was gaga over him.” They had met at the Progressive
Baptist Church when Taylor, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam vet, was attending John A. Gupton Mortuary College.

“She was just nineteen but she was driven even back then,” Taylor said. “She’d tell me: ‘Someday, I’m going to be famous!’ You could see that she meant it.” So he was not surprised to see Oprah on
60 Minutes
a decade later, but he was floored by her melodramatic recollection of their parting in Baltimore.

“Lord, I wanted him,” Oprah told Mike Wallace. “I threw his keys down the toilet, stood in front of the door and threatened to jump off the balcony if he didn’t stay. I was on my knees begging him, ‘Please don’t go, please don’t go.’ ”

Bubba Taylor chuckled, knowing he had not been the man who had sparked those theatrics. “When she took me to the airport for my flight back to Nashville, her eyes glistened and she squeezed my hand before kissing me goodbye. We promised to stay in touch, of course, but I guess we both knew it was over.” Oprah later fell in love with a married disc jockey in Baltimore who would bring her to her knees, and it was her desperation over losing him that she recounted on
60 Minutes,
to illustrate how far she had traveled from her doormat days. Some might consider that recollection an example of what Oprah’s “aunt” Katharine Esters called another one of “Oprah’s lies,” while others would accept her tendency to rearrange the truth as her way of telling a good, if inconsistent, story. Or perhaps the only way Oprah can deal with a painful truth is by attributing it to a situation that doesn’t hurt (Bubba) rather than to one that still pains (the Baltimore disc jockey).

In the 1970s, local news became a real moneymaker for television, especially in Baltimore, where Jerry Turner anchored on WJZ-TV every night, and consistently outdrew Walter Cronkite, then the Brahmin of broadcasting.

“You cannot overstate the stature of Jerry Turner in this town at that time,” said WJZ’s weatherman, Bob Turk. “He simply had no peers.”

The former general manager of WJZ concurred. “Jerry Turner was as superb an anchor as you could find anywhere in the business,” said William F. Baker. “He was appealing, authoritative, and, most importantly, he was adored by the Baltimore community. Absolutely
worshipped. He was the reason WJZ ranked number one in the market for years, and as you know, news is the jewel of the crown in television, and determines how a station fares in terms of money and prestige.”

In 1976 the station decided to go to an hour news format, which was too much for one person to anchor. So they announced they were launching an “intensive search” for a coanchor to share Turner’s throne. This was tantamount to a trumpet throughout the kingdom: the forty-six-year-old prince is looking for a princess to wear the glass slipper. (The assumption then was that since Turner was a white male, his coanchor had to be a black female.) Seven months later the so-called search team announced they had found their princess. They paid her $40,000 a year ($150,816.87 in 2009 dollars).

“I was news director at WJZ and I hired Oprah after seeing a demo tape that she had sent,” Gary Elion said in 2007. “It was very impressive; she had a compelling delivery, and we hired her on the basis of that tape.”

The newsroom was aghast. “It did not matter that Oprah Winfrey from Nashville, Tennessee, knew nothing about Baltimore, or that she was twenty-two years old, or that she had almost no reporting experience,” recalled Michael Olesker, a former print journalist who became WJZ’s on-air essayist. “For television news Oprah was perfect….Why? Because in television news, journalism has always been considered optional.”

At the time there were only two black women on television in Baltimore, despite the city’s large black population. Maria Broom, a dancer with little experience in journalism, had been hired by WJZ to be the consumer reporter before Oprah arrived. “I was black, and I had a nice bush,” said Broom, who achieved national recognition in the (2000–2008) HBO hit series
The Wire.
“It was a time of big Afros. I was a picture of the modern black woman. So it was like a movie. They said, ‘We’re going to make you a star,’ and then they did….I was what they gave the black people.”

Sue Simmons had arrived in 1974 to work at WBAL. She stayed two years before moving to Washington, D.C., and then to New York City, where she has anchored the news at WNBC for more than two
decades. Upon leaving Baltimore, a reporter asked what her strengths were. Simmons replied, “I’m pretty and I can read.”

In 1976, for any woman—black, white, yellow, or brown—to share the throne of Jerry Turner was to receive a crown never before bestowed.

“Getting that…news coanchor job at twenty-two was such a big deal,” Oprah said many years later. “It felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time.”

When it was announced that a young black woman from Nashville had been anointed, even Baltimore’s major television critic was taken aback. “That they have this much confidence in a new face for Baltimore is interesting,” Bill Carter wrote in
The Baltimore Sun.
“It must be considered a risk anytime the news is handled by anyone other than Turner at Channel 13.

“But if Winfrey can be established as a popular news person, the station will have a big leg up when it finally does get its act together and puts the full hour news on the air.”

WJZ immediately began working with Mayor William D. Shaefer’s office to develop a series of feature stories about Baltimore neighborhoods that Oprah could present each night during the forty-five-day City Fair between July and September.

“It’s good P.R. for me,” she told reporters, admitting she did no research or reporting for the series. She simply showed up at a different neighborhood each day with a camera crew to interview whomever had been selected by the community association. “It was a great way of introducing me to the city. I probably know more about the neighborhoods now than anybody else at the station.”

Her comment irked some in the newsroom, particularly Al Sanders, a black reporter who had effectively anchored the news in Turner’s absence and expected to be considered as his coanchor. “For up to three years before we went to the hour format, there had been talk that if a coanchor situation were to come along I would be considered,” he said. “When it did come along, no one at the station was considered. Someone was brought in from the outside.”

Still, the deck was stacked against Oprah. “Even before she hit
town, WJZ ran a childish series of promotional spots, asking, ‘Do you know what an Oprah is?’ ” recalled Michael Olesker.

“ ‘Ofrey?’ the people in the commercial would answer.

“ ‘Oprah? What’s an Oprah?’

“In hindsight no one could imagine CBS introducing its anchor years earlier by asking, ‘Do you know what a Cronkite is?’ The spots demeaned Oprah and the entire notion of news anchors as serious figures.”

Oprah saw the promotion as anticlimactic. “The whole thing backfired,” she said. “People were expecting The Second Coming and all they got was me.”

Oprah made her debut on August 16, 1976, but all the hoorahs went to Jerry Turner. “He has managed to become a co-anchor without losing any of his impressive prestige and class,” wrote television critic Bill Carter. “More and more he drives home the point that he is head and shoulders above anyone else as a local newsman, maybe above most of the local newsmen in any market in the country. Which brings up the question of why he was ever given any anchor help at all.”

Oprah was saluted for “flawless” news reading and accorded “some style,” but not much. “It is a subdued kind of style that might be easily forgettable….This is not to demean her on-camera abilities, which are considerable. But…Oprah’s personality is not as strong as some of the other Channel 13 people or else it has not really come through yet….[S]he is not in any way arresting—at least not yet.”

Within weeks it became clear that the chemistry between Oprah and her silver-haired, silver-tongued coanchor was toxic. He saw himself as the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, and to him she looked like an imposter who had no right to serve the sacred host of television news to the community of Baltimore. He was astounded that she allowed others to write her copy and then went on the air without reading it ahead of time. This was incomprehensible to a man who revered writing and always came to the office early to compose his newscast. He was appalled by the arch manner she assumed on the air, which she later mocked herself as her condescending lady-to-the-manor-born tone of voice, saying she thought that was how an anchorwoman was supposed to sound. Turner was flabbergasted when Oprah read the
word
Canada
from the teleprompter as “Ca-NAY-da” three times in one newscast. She later mispronounced
Barbados
as “Barb-a-DOZE.” She read a report about a vote in absentia in California as if “Inabsentia” were a town near San Francisco. A few nights later she characterized someone as having “a blaze attitude,” not knowing how to pronounce
blasé.
Then she began editorializing on the news, breaking in at one point to say, “Wow, that’s terrible.” Ratings tanked.