Authors: Kitty Kelley
“Management doesn’t want problems, but they want ratings,” Oprah said. “I told them I’ll be decent and I was. They don’t understand what women feel, and I do. Men think, for instance, that if you do a show about mastectomy, you can’t show a breast. I say you have to show the breast.”
The day after her sexual disorders show, the WLS switchboard lit up with irate callers, so Oprah asked her producer to come onstage and invited comments from her studio audience.
“Yesterday’s show was gross,” said one woman. “I don’t know how else to describe it. Absolutely degrading.”
“There are millions of women who never experience sexual pleasure,” said Oprah. “We had six hundred and thirty-three calls from women yesterday after the show, on the computer. We made lots of women feel they are not alone.”
“With so many quality subjects, why go to the bottom of the barrel?”
DiMaio fielded that question: “What’s bottom of the barrel for one person may not be for someone else. We feel good about shows in which we talk about problems, whether it’s incest or agoraphobia or lack of orgasm.”
Oprah stepped in. “It bothers me when we’re accused of being sensational and exploitive. We are not. We are a caring group of people.” A brief pause. “Sometimes we make mistakes.”
Oprah might have been referring to one of her earlier shows, titled “Does Sexual Size Matter?” During a discussion about penis size, she
had blurted out, “If you had your choice, you’d like to have a big one if you could. Bring a big one home to Mama!” You could almost hear the collective gasp of 2.95 million TV households in the Chicago market. When the local media had picked themselves off the floor, most were sputtering. P. J. Bednarski said that Oprah had “stretched the limits of taste,” but Alan G. Artner wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
that Oprah was simply being natural in the way that many people are when “blindly and without guile their self-absorption leads them to play the jester.”
Later Oprah promised reporters that when she went national she would not say the word
penis
without giving her audience fair warning. “Now I can say
penis
whenever I want. There. I just said it,” she whooped. “Penis, penis, penis.”
By then she had reporters dancing on strings. They loved her colorful copy and could not conjure adjectives fast enough to describe her. “Big, brassy, loud, aggressive, hyper, laughable, lovable, soulful, lowdown, earthy, raw, hungry,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, TV critic for the
Los Angeles Times.
Another critic confessed, “I don’t care if she’s a mile wide and an inch deep, she’s irresistible.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine
dubbed her show the
National Enquirer
of the Air. “It raises the Lowest Common Denominator to new and lower depths. It’s a yeasty mix of sleaze, freaks, pathos, tack, camp, hype, hugs, hollers, gush, fads and tease marinated in tears.”
Her audience was intoxicated by her raunchy brew. Taping bumpers for an upcoming show, she was supposed to read, “Tuesday on
A.M. Chicago:
Couples who suffer from impotency.” After flubbing the line twice, she said, “Next week on
A.M. Chicago:
Couples who can’t get it up.”
Discussing a new diet, she turned to her audience and said, “Oh, yeah. That’s the one that makes your bowel movements smell better.”
During the show on impotence, a solemn middle-aged man said that following his corrective surgery, his testicles had inflated to the size of basketballs. “Wait a minute,” hollered Oprah. “How do you walk with testicles the size of basketballs?”
On another show she interviewed a woman who claimed to have been seduced by seven priests. “What did you do when the priest pulled his pants down?”
“Nothing,” said the woman. “But then he took my hand.” Oprah rolled her eyes, and her audience roared. They loved her irreverence, her inappropriate comments, and her outrageous questions.
“Why did you become a lesbian?” she asked one woman.
On another show, a sociologist described how having a roommate could lead to having a lesbian relationship, and Oprah emphatically announced, “Then I’m never getting a roommate.”
During an interview with a department store official in charge of loss prevention, she asked, “What happens when you catch people stealing? Do they really lose body control? I mean, do they break down and wet themselves?”
Not even celebrities were spared. She questioned Brooke Shields: “Are you really a nice girl?” She asked Sally Field if Burt Reynolds wore his toupee in bed. She blasted Calvin Klein for his advertising. “I hate all those jeans ads. They all have tiny little butts in those ads.” She queried Dudley Moore how a man as short as he was could sleep with women who were so tall. “Luckily,” said the movie star, “most of the extra length seems to be in their legs.” Indeed, she seemed preoccupied with short men in bed. While discussing an appearance by Christie Brinkley, who was soon to marry Billy Joel, Oprah said to her producers, “Who really cares about her acting career? I want to know about her relationship with Billy Joel…[and] what’s it like making love with a short guy? Billy Joel is pretty short, isn’t he?”
Oprah became so popular that WLS extended the morning show to an hour and renamed it in her honor. They also gave her a theme song titled “Everybody Loves Oprah,” which declared, “She’s mod, she’s hip, she’s really got a style.”
Dennis Swanson tried to capitalize on her popularity by putting her on the news. “He wanted to experiment with her as an anchor because her talk show was such a hit,” said Ed Kosowski, a former WLS producer. “She anchored the four
P.M.
news for a week. It didn’t work. It was a risk for the station and a gamble for Oprah. Swanson took her off immediately. She just didn’t have the journalistic chops. Absolutely no authority. She’s great at the girly-girl stuff, but she just can’t do news.”
Undeterred, Swanson sent his $200,000-a-year talk show host to Ethiopia, with anchors Mary Ann Childers and Dick Johnson, to report
on Chicago’s project to ship grain to the African nation in the midst of its famine. A week before she left, Oprah had started a televised diet on Channel 7, to lose fifty pounds, having made a public bet with comedienne Joan Rivers on
The Tonight Show.
The timing seemed awkward to P. J. Bednarski, who commented on the image of an overfed correspondent interviewing victims of starvation. “Isn’t it a problem sending a personality who confesses to such a love for food to a country where there is so little?” he asked.
Oprah agreed. “You’re right. It’s sick, isn’t it?”
F
OR A FEW DAYS
after her sexual abuse show, she tried to placate management by not talking about rape and incest. But when she saw the show’s ratings, the letters that poured in, the calls to the WLS switchboard, and the reactions of women on the street, she knew she had given voice to a taboo torment that many women had suffered. She had found an issue that resonated with her predominantly female audience, so she pushed for more shows on sexual abuse. In the process, she fostered an image of herself as anti-male, because so many of her shows presented men as pigs. However, she became a heroine to women and a champion for children.
With that show, and her confession of what she had endured as a child, Oprah became more than a talk show host who entertained by trolling the raw side of the street. As someone who had suffered and survived and shared her pain, she became an inspiration for victims who felt defeated by adversity.
She was not the first to give voice to the sordid defilement of child abuse. She had been preceded by writers such as Maya Angelou (
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
), Toni Morrison (
The Bluest Eye
), and Alice Walker (
The Color Purple
), but Oprah had the megaphone of television, and she used it to reach women shackled by the shame of what had been done to them as children. “What I think is that sexual abuse of children is more common than uncommon in this country,” she said in 1986. “You get five women in one room, and you can get three of them to admit it.” Her own confession, plus her subsequent shows exploring the devastation of sexual molestation, became the strongest force in society to help women begin to heal and recover their lives.
Some members of Oprah’s family, who denied her own story of sexual abuse, accused her of presenting sensational shows on the subject
simply for high ratings. She countered that their refusal to accept her story indicated their denial, their inability to face their own complicity in the matter, and the depth of shame all families endure because of sexual molestation.
As a champion for victims of child abuse, Oprah spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 to support mandatory sentencing of child abusers. “We have to demonstrate that we value our children enough to say that when you hurt a child, this is what happens to you. It’s not negotiable.” She hosted
Scared Silent: Exposing and Ending Child Abuse,
a 1992 documentary shown on PBS, NBC, CBS, and ABC, which became the most-watched documentary aired on national television to that date. In 1993 she initiated the National Child Protection Act, which established a database of convicted child abusers and became known as the Oprah Bill. Unfortunately, the legislation was not effective. The bill was supposed to provide information gathered from all states concerning sex offenders and violent felons to organizations working with children. Most states did not set up the procedures for the organizations to apply for background checks and, according to a June 2006 report by the U.S. Attorney General, the Oprah Bill did not have the intended impact of broadening background checks.