Oprah (2 page)

O
PRAH WINFREY
blew into Chicago from Baltimore in December 1983 when a dangerous cold wave plunged the Windy City temperatures to twenty-three degrees below zero.

She had arrived to host a local daytime talk show and, on January 2, 1984, introduced all 233 pounds of herself to the city by marching in her very own parade, arranged by WLS-TV. She wore one of her five fur coats, a Jheri curl, and what she called her “big mama earrings.” Waving to people along State Street, she yelled, “Hi, I’m Oprah Winfrey. I’m the new host of
A.M. Chicago.
…Miss Negro on the air.”

She was a big one-woman carnival full of yeow, whoopee, and hallelujah. “I thought WLS was crazy when I heard they had hired an African American woman to host the morning show in the most racially divided city in America for their audience of suburban, white stay-at-home moms,” said Bill Zwecker of the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“Happily, I was wrong.”

Chicago was in for a lollapalooza of a ride. During Oprah’s first week, her local morning show trounced the nationally syndicated
Donahue
show in the ratings, and within a year Phil Donahue, the master of talk show television, was packing his bags for New York City. Oprah continued her ratings rout and, having forced him to change his locale,
she now compelled him to change his time slot, so as not to compete with her. By then she was on the verge of becoming nationally syndicated herself, having received a $1 million signing bonus when
The Oprah Winfrey Show
was sold in 138 markets. During that first year she became such an immediate sensation that she appeared on
The Tonight Show,
won two local Emmys, and was poised to make her movie debut in
The Color Purple.
Her “discovery” for the role of Sofia in that film had brought her a Cinderella following, and would later reward her with Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress.

“I was just like Lana Turner at the soda fountain, only a different color,” Oprah joked, telling the story of how Quincy Jones, in Chicago on business, had seen her on television one morning and called Steven Spielberg to say he had found the perfect person to play Sofia. “She is so fine,” said Jones. “Fat and feisty. Very feisty.”

Oprah spent the summer of 1985 filming the movie, which she later recalled as the happiest time of her life. “
The Color Purple
was the first time I ever remember being in a family of people where I truly felt loved…when people genuinely see your soul and love your soul, when they love you for who you are and what you have to give.”

By that time she felt she was on the cusp of the kind of success she had always dreamed of for herself. “I was destined for great things,” she said. “I’m Diana Ross, and Tina Turner, and Maya Angelou.” Brimming with confidence, she told Steven Spielberg he should put her name on theater marquees and her face on the film’s posters. “I am probably the most popular person in Chicago,” she said. When Spielberg demurred, saying it was not in her contract, she chided him for making a big mistake. “You wait. You’ll see. I’m going national. I’m going to be huge.”

Spielberg did not change his mind, and Oprah did not forget. When she became as “huge” as she had predicted, he became a weed in her garden of grudges. She recounted their conversation thirteen years later in a 1998 interview with
Vogue:
“I’m gonna be on TV and people are gonna, like, know me. And Steven said, ‘Really?’ And I said, ‘You might want to put my name on the poster for the movie.’ He said, ‘No, can’t do that….’ And I say: ‘But I think I’m really gonna be kinda
famous.’ Which is my favorite I-told-you-so, Steven, you should’ve put my name on that poster!”

A week before the movie’s premiere Oprah decided to do a show on rape, incest, and sexual molestation. When management balked, she said she was going to be seen on the big screen in a few days in a film about the subject, so why not explore it first for her local audience. The station agreed, reluctantly at first, and then ran announcements asking for volunteers to talk about their sexual abuse on the air.

This particular show became Oprah’s signature program—a victim who triumphs over adversity—and the start of the Oprah Winfrey phenomenon. No one realized it at the time, but that show would elevate her to national prominence and eventually make her a champion for victims of sexual abuse. During that program, she introduced a new kind of television that plunged her viewers into two decades of muddy lows and starry highs. In the process, she became the world’s first black female billionaire and a cultural icon of near-saintly status.

“I am the instrument of God,” she said at various times along the way. “I am his messenger….My show is my ministry.”

Oprah’s show on sexual abuse was promoted for days in advance to draw an audience interested in “Incest Victims.” Except for her small staff, no one knew what she intended to do, other than present a titillating subject, which she had been doing since she started on WLS. No one had any idea that she was about to blur the long-standing line in television between discussion and confession, between interviewing and self-revelation. Between objectivity and a fuzzy area of fantasy and factual manipulation.

On Thursday, December 5, 1985, Oprah began her 9:00
A.M.
show by introducing a young white woman she identified only as Laurie.

“One out of three women in this country have been sexually abused or molested,” she told her audience before turning to her guest.

“Your father started out fondling you. When did it lead to something other than fondling?”

“I think around between nine and ten,” said Laurie.

“What happened? Do you remember the first time your father had sexual intercourse with you? What did he say to you, how did he tell you, what did he tell you?”

There was not a sound from the audience of mostly white women.

“He just told me that he wanted to make me feel good,” said Laurie.

“Where was your mother?”

“She had gone on a trip somewhere—she was out of town. She was gone for three weeks and I stayed with my father for those three weeks.”

“So he came into your room…and he started fondling you. That has to be a pretty frightening thing when you’re nine years old and your father has sexual intercourse with you.”

Laurie nodded but said nothing.

“I know it’s hard to tell—I really do. I know how hard it is. When he was finished, what did he—or during this act—well, first of all, wasn’t it painful for you?”

Laurie squirmed a bit. “Um. He used to tell me that he was sorry and that he would never do it again. A lot of times after he would do something, he would kneel down and make me pray to the Lord that he wouldn’t do it anymore.”

Moments later Oprah waded into the audience and planted her microphone in front of a middle-aged white woman in glasses.

“I was sexually abused, too,” the woman said. “Well, my life kind of started like Laurie’s with the fondling and…It resulted in a child who’s now—he’s thirty years old right now, but sixteen years of his life he’s been in a state institution [for autism].”

“Were you sexually abused by a member of your family?”

The woman choked up as she admitted being impregnated by her father.

“So this is your father’s child?” said Oprah.

“Yes. It happened very frequently—as with Laurie also—practically every day when my mother would go to work. One of the most horrible experiences that I can remember.”

As the woman broke down and struggled to regain control, Oprah flung her arm around her and then burst into tears herself, covering her eyes with her left hand. With the mic in her right hand, she signaled to the control room. She said later it was to stop the cameras, but they kept rolling as she sobbed into the woman’s shoulder. “The same thing
happened to me,” she said. “The fact that I had all these unfortunate experiences permeates my life.”

For the next few seconds Oprah appeared to be discovering for the first time that what she had experienced as a nine-year-old child was indeed rape, a defilement so unspeakable that she had never been able to put it into words until that very moment. Her audience felt as if they were watching the fissures of a soul split open as she admitted her shameful secret. Oprah revealed that she had been raped by her nineteen-year-old cousin when she was forced to share a bed with him in her mother’s apartment. “He told me not to tell. Then he took me to the zoo and bought me an ice-cream cone.” Later she said she was also sexually molested by her cousin’s boyfriend and then her favorite uncle. “I was continually molested from the age of nine until I was fourteen.”

Oprah’s staggering personal confession made national news, and she was applauded by many for her honesty and forthrightness. But her family vehemently denied her accusations, and some people suggested that she was trying to get publicity for her movie role, since she had never discussed her abuse with
anyone
before her public revelation. “I was so offended [by that],” she said later. “There was something in
Parade
magazine, a question published not too long ago: ‘Was Oprah Winfrey really sexually abused, or was that just hype for the Oscars?’ Well, I thought, it amazes me that somebody would think that I’d do that as hype. But I suppose it has been done. I suppose.”

She said the management of her station was upset by her “shocking” revelations, and even twenty-three years later, Dennis Swanson, former vice president and general manager of WLS-TV, would not discuss the matter. Long credited with hiring Oprah and bringing her to Chicago, he would not comment on his reactions to her first show about sexual abuse.

At the time, Swanson and his promotion manager, Tim Bennett, were elated by Oprah’s spectacular ratings but stung by press criticism of her emphasis on sex shows, particularly the show she had done on pornography. The TV critic of the
Chicago Sun-Times,
P. J. Bednarski, had castigated them and the “corporate morality” of WLS for allowing Oprah to devote an hour-long show to hard-core sex. “Shame on them,”
he wrote, and then blasted Oprah for inviting three female porn stars to talk about male organs, male endurance, and male ejaculations.

“For someone with the natural talent of Winfrey, it was telling evidence she’s got some growing up to do,” Bednarski wrote, before adding that Oprah’s porn show got a 30 percent share of the 9:00
A.M.
Chicago audience, much larger than usual. “It also got mentioned all around town and got its own column right here.” The column’s headline: “When Nothing’s Off Limits: Oprah Winfrey Profits from Porn Stars’ Appeal.”

Oprah understood the axiom of television: She who gets ratings rules. “My mandate is to win,” she told reporters. During crucial “sweeps” weeks she insisted on “bang-bang, shoot-’em-up” shows, for which her producer, Debra DiMaio, led the eureka hunt, with Oprah weighing in with her own ideas. “I’d love to get a priest to talk about sex,” she said. “I’d love to get one to say, ‘Yes, I have a lover. I worship Jesus and her. Yes, I love her and her name is Carolyn.’ ”

In her race for ratings during Black History Month, Oprah booked members of the Ku Klux Klan in their white sheets and cone hoods. She also did a show featuring members of a nudist colony who sat onstage naked. Only their faces were shown on television, but the studio audience got a full frontal view, so management insisted the show be taped. “That will allow us to make sure nothing that’s not supposed to be seen on TV will get on,” said Debra DiMaio. Management also said that each member of the audience who arranged to attend had to be called and reminded that the guests would be nude. “No one was turned off,” said DiMaio. “On the contrary, they were excited. I mean, what fun.”

Oprah admitted to being nervous during the nudist show. “I pride myself in being real honest, but on that show I was really faking it. I had to act like it was a perfectly normal thing to be interviewing a bunch of naked people and not look. I wanted to look into the camera and say, ‘My God! There are penises here!’ But I couldn’t. And that made me real nervous.”

When she told her bosses she wanted to do “Women with Sexual Disorders” and interview a woman who had not had an orgasm once during her eighteen-year marriage, and then interview the male sex surrogate who gave her orgasm lessons, and then a young woman so sexually addicted that one night she had twenty-five men in her bed, the program director blanched.