Oprah (25 page)

She talked to reporters about her “ticking clock.” “Some days I really want a girl because you can dress her up and she’d be so cute—she’d be like me. Then I think I’d want to have a boy because I’d like to name him Canaan. Canaan Graham is such a strong name.”

Years later she came closer to her own truth in a televised interview for
A&E Biography
in which she said, “I truly feel that what I went through at fourteen was a sign that children were not supposed to be part of the equation for me. I have conceived, I have given birth—and it didn’t work out for me. I’m comfortable with the decision to move on.”

Oprah said she surprised her best friend when she admitted she never really wanted children. “I said, ‘No, never.’ Even in seventh grade
Gayle knew she wanted twins. She says, ‘If I hadn’t gotten married, I would have had a child. I would have felt like my life is not complete without a child.’ I don’t feel that at all.”

Having announced their engagement on television in 1992 and posed for
People,
Oprah later regretted talking so much about her relationship with Stedman. “Someone once told me, ‘Every time you mention his name, the perception is you’re doing it because you’re longing for something you cannot have.’ And it never occurred to me that that’s how it was being perceived….But if I hadn’t [talked about him] then everybody would be asking, ‘Who’s the Mystery Man?’ ‘Is she a lesbian?’ ”

Years later people did begin to wonder. Some dismissed Oprah’s relationship with Stedman as a convenience for both, whispering about their sexuality and suggesting that each was helping the other hide same-sex preferences, especially Oprah, who was seen in public with Gayle King far more often than she was seen with Stedman. All three of them denied that they were homosexual, and so did their close friends, but the rumors persisted, particularly in Hollywood, where Oprah befriended a few glamorous female stars known as lipstick lesbians.

Soon she and Gayle and Stedman became fodder for comedians. Kathy Griffin, who won an Emmy in 2008 for her reality show, regaled a largely gay audience at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., by asking why Oprah had taken Gayle to the Emmys that year. “Can’t she go down in the basement and unleash Stedman? Just for one night?” The audience roared. “Oh, c’mon,” Griffin said. “You know I’m supportive of Oprah and her boyfriend, Gayle.”

On David Steinberg’s television show Robin Williams imitated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking to Oprah on the phone. Williams crossed his legs, daintily pointed his toes, and put his hand to his ear. “Oh, dear. You say Stedman is wearing your clothes again? Not good. Not good at all.” The audience laughed at the send-up of Oprah’s partner as a cross-dresser.

By then the couple was almost inured to public derision. They felt they had faced the worst when
News Extra,
a Canadian tabloid, published a story titled “New Oprah Shocker! Fiancé Stedman Had Gay
Sex with Cousin.” “That was the most difficult time for me,” Oprah told Laura Randolph of
Ebony,
sobbing as she recounted the story of Stedman’s gay cousin saying he had slept with Stedman at a local motel in Whitesboro, New Jersey. She said the rumor about Stedman’s sexuality “hurt him, hurt him bad,” and she blamed herself. “If I were lean and pretty, nobody would ever say that. What people were really saying is why would a straight, good-looking guy be with her?”

Oprah had brought the tabloid home to show Stedman. “He was so brave,” she said, “and I have never loved him more. He taught me so much during that period. When I handed it to him, he looked at it and said, ‘This is not my life. I don’t have anything to do with this. God obviously has something he wants me to learn.’ Now I’m standing in the middle of the floor and I’m crying, I’m hysterical, and you know what he started doing? He started looking in the closet and talking about resoling his shoes. And I’m, like, resoling your shoes! I have never seen greater manhood in my life.”

Within days Oprah and Stedman filed a $300 million lawsuit against the tabloid for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intended infliction of emotional distress. Their attorney told reporters that Carlton Jones had sold his story nine months earlier to a U.S. tabloid but the tabloid had not published it because Oprah’s attorneys convinced them the story was not true. Now, the attorney said, Jones said he had lied to the tabloid for money.
News Extra
chose not to answer the complaint. “I believe the publishers decided that they weren’t going to defend that action,” said the editor. Thirty-five days later, U.S. District Judge Marvin E. Aspen entered a default judgment against the Montreal-based tabloid, which had vacated its offices and gone out of business. Oprah and Stedman felt vindicated by the next day’s headlines: “Oprah Winfrey Wins Suit by Default.”

Stedman still had to steel himself against the derision of being tagged “Mr. Oprah,” “The Little Mister,” or, as the
National Review
put it, “the terminally affianced Stedman Graham, Miss Adelaide to Oprah’s Nathan Detroit.” In the early days he occasionally lashed out when he was referred to as “Oprah’s boyfriend,” but seven years into the relationship, Oprah told him to get over it. “It’s the thing that
bothers him most,” she said, “but I told him if he dies, if he leaves, if he ends up owning Chicago, people are still going to say, ‘That’s Oprah Winfrey’s boyfriend.’ ”

Stedman continued chafing at the description. “There’s no respect in it,” he said. “Although there is credibility in being able to hang with one of the most powerful women in the world, no one respects you for that.” Respect was paramount to this proud man, who was working in a prison when he first met Oprah. During the day he wore the starched blue uniform of a corrections employee whose job was to pat down prisoners; at night he slipped into tasseled loafers, drove a Mercedes, and lived what he later called “a false life.”

Through the pretty broadcaster Robin Robinson, Stedman had been given entrée into the gold coast of Chicago’s black society, which included media stars like Oprah, athletes like Michael Jordan, and publishing mogul Linda Johnson Rice, whose family owned
Ebony
and
Jet.
Within this elite circle were Ivy League doctors, lawyers, bankers, and professors, who had achieved the kind of success Stedman never dreamed possible for himself. While he looked like he could belong to the crowd of accomplished professionals—all smooth, smart, and stylish—he knew his degree from the tiny Baptist college Hardin-Simmons in Abilene, Texas, gave him few bragging rights alongside graduates of Harvard.

Flying at that high altitude was transformative for Stedman, and soon he saw that body-searching felons was not going to give him the life he wanted. Prison guards did not get to socialize with Michael Jordan. As a high-school and college basketball star, Stedman wanted nothing more than to play for the NBA, and not being selected had been the biggest disappointment of his life. So when Michael Jordan started doing commercials and needed a stand-in, Stedman leaped, eager to be a part—any part—of Jordan’s world. He idolized the Chicago Bulls forward, not simply for his dazzling athleticism but for turning his success on the court into a lucrative business.

Wanting to associate himself with professional athletes, Stedman devised his plan for the nonprofit organization called Athletes Against Drugs. He enlisted Michael Jordan’s endorsement to get other athletes to join and sign vague statements that they were “drug-free and…
positive role models for today’s youth.” The wording of his first mission statement was equally vague: “Educate children to live a better lifestyle.” He then refined it to “Educate youth to make healthy life decisions.” He envisioned arranging public appearances for big-name athletes at sporting events and tournaments, to be underwritten by corporate sponsors, which would enable him to look like he was doing well by doing good while associating with big-time athletes. “Don’t call Stedman a jock sniffer,” warned Armstrong Williams. “He hates that image.”

To start AAD, Stedman sold his Mercedes and cashed in his retirement fund from the corrections system, and used the little he had accumulated from his first job as a police officer in Fort Worth, Texas, followed by three years in the army. Even without an income or a business plan, he finally felt he had a sense of purpose and a little status. He continued runway modeling to pay expenses after resigning from the Bureau of Prisons, where he claimed to have been “on track to one day become a warden in the federal corrections system.”

The tax returns for AAD indicate the organization collects an average of $275,000 a year, most of which is raised from an annual celebrity golf tournament. Contributors to AAD pay for the annual dinner gala that allows Stedman to sit at the head table with professional athletes. Being chairman of Athletes Against Drugs certainly gives him a grand title, but no longer a salary. Sometime before 2002, he had to lend his organization more than $200,000 to keep it afloat. How AAD distributes funds “to educate youth to make healthy life decisions” is not specified.

Oprah, who did not publicly admit her drug use until 1995, told Stedman about it early in their relationship. “I was concerned about how it would affect him, but he knew from the start it was one of the secrets I was having trouble dealing with and he encouraged me not to let it be a big fear,” she said. “He’s never taken a single drug and doesn’t drink alcohol.”

Stedman was intent on improving his lot, but if he needed goading, Oprah certainly provided it when she was asked if she cared what a man did for a living. She did not hesitate.

“I do care about whether or not he’s a ditch digger. I know that sounds elitist. But I have such great aspirations for myself in life—to
really fulfill my human potential—that I just don’t understand people who don’t aspire to do or be anything.”

Oprah’s ambitions were gargantuan, and her craving for recognition almost insatiable. Without an Off button, her engine churned constantly as she jammed her days and nights with nonstop activity. “My schedule is very hectic, but it’s exactly the kind of life I’ve always wanted,” she said. “I’ve always said I wanted to be so busy that I wouldn’t have time to breathe.”

Every morning after doing her talk show, at least in the early years, she spent time with her audiences—shaking hands, posing for pictures, signing autographs. She met with her producers to discuss the next day’s show, and she scrutinized the overnight ratings. She pushed forward with plans to build her $10 million studio (“I’ve got to move on from millionaire to mogul”); she pursued movie roles (“I’m going to be a great, great actress”); she purchased book rights to produce her own films, the first being the biography of Madame C. J. Walker, who developed cosmetics for black women that were sold door-to-door, making her the first self-made female millionaire in America. Oprah explored developing her own clothing line for “the more substantial woman,” because she couldn’t find designer clothes to fit her. When she did find something she loved, her dresser had to buy two outfits in the largest size available and have them sewn together, which was costly and time-consuming. She met with Chicago’s Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises to discuss opening a restaurant. She agreed to be a partner but would not allow her name to be used, because if it failed, she did not want to be blamed. She wanted to establish an institute for women as “an extension of what we try to do for an hour on the show…I don’t know what to call it other than a center for self-improvement.” She worked with Maya Angelou to write a one-woman show for her to take to Broadway, and she discussed writing her autobiography. Oprah knew 1987 was her time, as blacks stepped to the forefront in politics (Jesse Jackson), movies (Eddie Murphy), music (Whitney Houston), network news (Bryant Gumbel), and prime-time television (Bill Cosby).

Hell-bent on becoming a presence in prime time herself, Oprah wanted to star in her own sitcom, like Bill Cosby. “I will produce it and
sell it to the network,” she said, “and it will be a raging success.” Having proved her genius on television, she considered herself a natural for a comedy about what goes on behind the scenes of a television talk show based in Chicago. She sold the idea for
Chicago Grapevine
and spent weeks in 1987 flying back and forth to Los Angeles to work on the pilot, but in the end Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Entertainment, was unimpressed. He pronounced the concept “misguided,” said the Oprah character was not depicted successfully as “outspoken and realistic,” and canceled the thirteen-week series. Oprah did not see the cancelation as a failure, or even a setback. It was simply another step in her mystical evolution.

After filling her days, she booked her nights and weekends with photo shoots, interviews, speeches, and public appearances. “Even doing the number one talk show isn’t enough—it’s like breathing to me—I need something else to do,” she said. She wanted Stedman to accompany her everywhere, as if to show him off and perhaps prove she could attract a delicious-looking man.

A year into their relationship they got walloped with the first of many tabloid “exclusives,” this one claiming that Stedman had called off their wedding. Oprah, who had never learned to ignore the grocery store press, flew into a smackdown and denounced the story on her show and to every reporter within range.

“It’s outrageous,” she told Bill Carter of
The Baltimore Sun.
“We were going to sue,” until the paper promised a retraction. “This story said I was jilted, and crying my heart out, thinking of taking a leave of absence from the show. I was shattered and bitter. And that wedding dress I was waiting to lose weight to get into. It was the worst thing I’ve ever [read]. I can’t remember feeling that bad. Because people believed it and because of the kind of image not only that I created, but that I also believe in: Women being responsible for themselves. And so being portrayed as falling apart because I’d been jilted by some man that was just too much. It was even worse than the wedding dress stuff.”

Oprah told the reporter that she had called Jackie Onassis for consolation. “She had called me earlier about possibly doing a book,” Oprah said, “and she told me I can’t control [what] other people [write].”