Oprah (51 page)

She gave these interviews under strict control: she could be quoted, but she would not be photographed unless the photographer agreed to sell her the rights to the images, an almost unheard-of request. Otherwise, all pictures of Oprah—airbrushed and stylized—had to be provided by Harpo. Each article had to run in the local newspaper and could not be put on the wire services, where other newspapers might pick it up. She set similar limitations on
The Today Show
and
Good Morning America,
stipulating one-time use of her words and images.

During a
20/20
segment on ABC with Diane Sawyer, Oprah held forth on the subject of race, saying the country still shows the wounds of slavery. “It will be all right if [only] we’re willing to have the courage to open up the wound, look at it. That’s the only way it’s going to get all right.”

S
AWYER
: What do you see in white people today living with slavery?

W
INFREY
: Denial. Absolute denial.

S
AWYER
: But for everyone to go back and see it, it’s probably white America saying, “Again? Go back again?”

W
INFREY
: That is so ridiculous.

S
AWYER
: What do we gain by going back to it again?

W
INFREY
: We haven’t even gone there. Going back to it again? We have not even begun to peel back those layers. We haven’t even ever gone there. This is the first time.

The public, black and white, did not want “to peel back those layers” and wallow in murder, rape, and racial mayhem. Despite efforts by Oprah and Disney Studios to sell the movie as a mother’s love story, nobody was buying, not even Oprah’s core audience of middle-aged women. Within six weeks of its release,
Beloved
was declared a box office flop, lagging behind the universally panned
Bride of Chucky.
It ultimately had a domestic box office gross of $22,843,047, after costing $83,000,000 to make and market.

People were astonished that the media Midas had produced and promoted something that had not turned to gold. Oprah, too, was shocked, although to the press she remained defiantly proud, and when promoting the film abroad, she blamed its failure on U.S. audiences. She told the
The Times
of London, “I think the reason why the film has not been received as well in America as I expected is because people in America are afraid of race and any discussion about race. I don’t think it has anything to do with me in the role. I think for a lot of Americans the issue of race is so volatile that to bring it out front makes people embarrassed.”

She told the
Sunday Express
that U.S. audiences stayed away because of their guilt over slavery. “The whole country was in denial,” she said. Years later the comedian Jackie Mason rapped Oprah for saying that America was racist. “Please!” he said to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. “There’s very little bigotry against Jews in this country anymore or racism against blacks. Oprah Winfrey stands up and says, ‘This is a racist society.’ She’s got billions. You’ve got a dollar and a quarter, but it’s a racist society. She’s a sick yenta.”

The next day Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column that she did not agree that there was no anti-Semitism or racism in America,
“but you’ve got to hand it to Jackie Mason. There aren’t too many people in showbiz who are brave enough to call Oprah a ‘sick yenta.’ ”

At the time
Beloved
was dying at the box office, Oprah’s friends ached for her. “That film was the dearest thing to her heart,” said Gayle King. “She felt more passionate about it than anything I’ve ever seen her do.” Acknowledging Oprah’s distress, Maya Angelou said, “I don’t know if
Beloved
is a commercial failure. It’s not the commercial hit that Oprah and others wanted, but it’s a majestic film and a great film. It will have its own life.” The director, Jonathan Demme, said, “I’d love to make another movie with Oprah…I’d like to find her a comedy. And we wouldn’t hype it as much as
Beloved.
”

When Whoopi Goldberg appeared at Harvard for a campus event a few weeks after the film was released, she was asked whether Oprah represented all of black womanhood. Goldberg giggled, wrinkled her face, and joked that something “flew up my nose.” The crowd in Sanders Theatre laughed.

“It’s great to see that someone can create a frenzy the way Oprah has,” Whoopi said, “but it’s unfortunate it sort of backfired on the movie.”

Sitting in the front row that day, Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr., asked Goldberg why she thought
Beloved
had failed at the box office.

“I don’t think people are there yet. I believe you have to be very careful when you’re as big as Oprah that your audience doesn’t get lost.” Then she said, “I know if I answer you truthfully I’ll have to answer for it [later] and I don’t want to get into that with her.”

Unfortunately, Whoopi’s remarks were reported in 1998, and seven years later Oprah was still so angry she would not invite Whoopi to the “Legends Weekend” she hosted in 2005 to celebrate the accomplishments of African American women. The rebuke was stunning, considering that few African American women had won more artistic awards than Whoopi Goldberg. She is one of only ten artists to receive the five major entertainment awards: an Academy Award (
Ghost
), two Golden Globes (
The Color Purple
and
Ghost
), an Emmy (
Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel
), a Tony for producer (
Thoroughly Modern Millie
), and a Grammy (
Whoopi Goldberg Direct from Broadway
). In addition, she has won a BAFTA award and four People’s Choice
Awards, and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her exclusion from Oprah’s Legends Weekend seemed petty.

After the debacle of
Beloved
and the collapse of her dream to become a grand movie star, Oprah fell into a deep depression. “I was beyond hurt. I was stunned. I was devastated by the reaction….I’ve been so in synch with the way people think and I’ve never been wrong. This was a first. The first time in my life…I felt rejected and it was a public rejection….” She vowed: “I will never do another film about slavery. I won’t try to touch race again in this form.” She said she turned to food for comfort. “Like a heroin addict goes to heroin, I went to carbs,” she said, explaining her macaroni and cheese binges. “I tried praying about it and I gave myself a 30-day limit: If I didn’t feel better, I was heading to a psychiatrist. I asked God what this experience was supposed to teach me. Eventually I realized I was allowing myself to feel bad because of my attachment to an expectation that 60 million people would see the film. When I let go of that, I was healed.”

Making matters worse at the time was losing her status as the country’s number one talk show host. For twenty-five straight weeks Jerry Springer had beaten her in the ratings, and Oprah was reeling. The previous summer she began hinting that she might give up her show, saying she was tired of the grind, but she always made this kind of feint right before contract negotiations.

“I’m not so much saddened by the way [my ratings are] going as stunned,” she said at the time. “Unless you are going to kill people on the air—and not just hit them on the head with chairs—and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse—and not just, as I saw the other day [on Jerry Springer], a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis—then there comes a time when you have oversaturated yourself.” By then what she called Springer’s “vulgarity circus” had beaten her in the ratings forty-six of the previous forty-seven weeks. “I can understand how you can get beaten in the ratings,” she said. “I’m introducing books and they’ve got penises.”

Oprah had come a long way from the days when she, too, loved to shock her audiences. But she no longer wanted to be seen as a vulgarian, hosting shows for nudists and shouting “penis, penis, penis.” She believed that
Beloved
had transported her to a higher level. “It changed my
life,” she said. She told her producers that she felt she now had a moral obligation to change the lives of others. “I want to bring meaning to people’s lives.” She framed a huge photograph of herself as Sethe with “the tree” lashed across her back and hung it outside her Harpo office alongside a big leather whip as a reminder to her staff of her new vision for herself and her show. When Oprah’s protégée Rachael Ray saw the photograph and the whip, she was reported to have said to friends, “Why is she wearing slave drag? She obviously has problems being black.” Ray’s publicist later denied that the TV chef had made the comment.

Oprah announced she would renew her contract with King World through the 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 seasons and begin a new kind of television. She received $130 million in cash advances and 450,000 King World stock options, in addition to the 1,395,000 options she already had from deals made in 1991, 1994, and 1995. By the time CBS took over King World in 1999, Oprah, whose fortune was then worth $725 million, had options on 4.4 million shares, worth $100 million.

Newly enriched and enlightened, she launched what she called “Change Your Life” television. She opened her 1998/1999 season with a new theme song based on an old spiritual, which she sang herself: “I believe I will run on and see what the end will be….Come on and run with me. O-O-O-Oprah!” She introduced New Age guides such as the author John Gray (
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
) to instruct her audience “to determine for yourself your true soul’s desire and to be on purpose with your life.” He taught her viewers to meditate by saying, “O glorious future, my heart is open to you. Come into my life.” Using colorful props in his presentations, he handed a big stick to one woman, who closed her eyes and sobbed when he said, “I’d like you to go back to your inner child. I want you to imagine Mommy and Daddy coming to you, and I want you to express your feelings to them.”

Believing in spiritual empowerment, Oprah presented the Yoruba priestess and inspirational author Iyanla Vanzant (
Acts of Faith
) to counsel women on finding love and purpose in their lives. Vanzant advised viewers “to surrender to the god of your understanding.” One audience member asked, “I want to know how do you find total and complete peace?”

“Get naked with yourself,” said Iyanla Vanzant.

Oprah also introduced the financial author Suze Orman (
The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom
), who preached that “money is a living entity and responds to energy, including yours.” Orman told Oprah’s audience, “Your self-worth equals your net worth.” She said they needed to get rid of their bad emotions and start believing they were destined for wealth in order to become wealthy.

Another regular “life coach” was Gary Zukav, who wrote
The Seat of the Soul,
which Oprah said was her second favorite book, next to the Bible. She introduced him as a onetime Green Beret and former sex addict who lived on a mountain without television. His purpose was to help Oprah and her audience “delve into their souls” and resolve their fears. “Your feelings are the force field of your soul,” he said, emphasizing that fear is the cause of everything from violence to meanness.

“So,” Oprah said, “fear is the opposite of love?”

“Fear is the opposite of love,” he said.

“And anything that isn’t love is fear?”

“Correct,” he said. “When you really look at your fears and you heal them, you can look at yourself and you’ll be beautiful.”

He and Oprah devoted one entire show to karma. “Energy is energy,” he said, “and you cannot escape it.”

Oprah also embraced Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of
Simple Abundance,
a spiritual self-help book, from which she advised her viewers to keep gratitude journals. “Every night I write down five things in my journal I’m grateful for,” Oprah said. “If you concentrate on what you have, you’ll end up having more. If you constantly focus on what you don’t have, you’ll end up having less.”

One of her most colorful “life strategy experts” was Dr. Phil, who had guided her through the cattlemen’s lawsuit. She introduced him as “the deepest well of common sense I’ve ever encountered.” At first the big, bald, blunt practitioner of tell-it-like-it-is therapy jolted her audience by telling them they were “way wrong,” “full of crap,” and “wimpin’ out.” He didn’t spare Oprah, either. In a segment about weight, he said, “We don’t use food, we abuse food. It’s not what you eat, but why you eat that has you in the problem you’re in.”

“Well, there are some people who are just genetically disposed to being smaller,” said Oprah.

“But the fact is that ain’t you!”

He told one member of the audience, “You talked about flowers and cake and wedding and dress. You’re preparing for the wedding but not for the marriage.”

“Mercy,” said Oprah. “That is a good statement. That is so good!”

Dr. Phil said, “People say, ‘time heals all wounds.’ Let me tell you, time heals nothing. You can do the wrong thing for ten years, and it doesn’t equal the right thing for one day. And the fact that—”

“Whooo,” yelled Oprah. “That’s good, Phil! Whooo! That’s a good Phil-ism.”

Soon Dr. Phil owned Tuesdays on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
where he appeared for three years before entering into negotiations with Harpo to have his own talk show, which started in 2002.

Oprah concluded her “Change Your Life” shows with a segment called “Remembering Your Spirit,” which she introduced with soft lights and New Age music, saying, “I am defined by the world as a talk show host, but I know that I am much more. I am spirit connected to the greater spirit.” She ended one segment sitting in a bubble bath, surrounded by candles. “The bathroom is my favorite room in the house,” she told
Newsweek,
which reported her bathtub sits like a small pond with water pouring out of the rocks that surround it. “I had this structure added on,” she explained, “and the tub was sculpted to fit my body. My favorite thing to do is take a bath.” On the air she sat in her marble tub filled with bubbles and recited a mantra to the spirits; then she addressed the camera. She urged her viewers to sit in their bathtubs for fifteen minutes every day. “Your day will undoubtedly be more focused, more centered,” she said. “Things tend to fall in line.” She talked about her spirit in interviews, saying, “I think I’m just becoming more of myself, which is better than anybody can imagine. By 50, 52, I just can’t wait to see me.”