Oprah (34 page)

Bill—I shall never forget that when other people were kicking me in the teeth with that rumor you did the kindest thing. You lifted me up. Seeing you the other night with your dad reminded me of what a gracious thing you did. Again I thank you.

O
NCE OPRAH
became a millionaire, she announced that she was going to become “the richest black woman in the world.” At the time, she publicly restricted herself to her race, as if a black woman could not dream of becoming the richest woman in the world, but that might have been in keeping with her efforts then to be seen as “everywoman,” not to appear, in her words, “uppity,” or “to look grander than anyone else.” As she told Fred Griffith, the host of Cleveland’s
Morning Exchange,
in 1987, she always knew she would be successful, but she tried to sound modest. “Because [otherwise] people say, ‘Look at the cocky Negro.’ ”

To the contrary, people seemed genuinely delighted by Oprah’s success and inspired by her gospel: “If I can do it, you can do it.” She sparked the imagination, especially of women twenty-five to fifty-four years old, television’s most precious demographic. She was heralded for personifying the American Dream with all its honeyed promises of equal opportunity. Yet she told the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison she felt hurt by “negativity from black women,” obviously forgetting that in 1988 she had told Barbara Walters on national television that as a little girl she had always wanted to be white. “[I]t’s the kind of thing
that I hesitate to say because when you say it, all the black groups call and say, ‘How dare you say it?’ But yes, I did [want to be white].”

Understandably some black women felt bruised, but Oprah did not see why. She asked former television correspondent Janet Langhart Cohen if she, too, had the same problem. “Did you have black women calling you up and telling you you weren’t black enough and asking why you don’t have more blacks on the show?”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re having that problem?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Oprah. “I’ve had it in Chicago for two years. It’s a small segment. Once it spreads, though, it becomes an issue. I mean, like on black radio stations—it’s like the nighttime discussion. They call in and ask: ‘Is Oprah Winfrey black enough?’ ”

“It’s just plain jealousy,” said Janet Langhart Cohen.

“That’s what it is,” said Oprah. “The hardest thing to come to terms with has been the jealousy.”

Most of Oprah’s worshipful audiences (predominantly white women) enjoyed her enthusiasm over her new riches and relished her reports of shopping and buying and spending, although on the air she carefully confined herself to girlish confessions about not having to buy panty hose at Walgreens anymore rather than discussing her more extravagant purchases, such as the $470,000 she spent at one furniture auction. “She paid two hundred forty thousand dollars for a little Shaker chest of drawers, and it’s in her kitchen now,” said her decorator Anthony Browne. “Why did she buy it? Because her idol is Bill Cosby [who collects Shaker furniture]. Everything he does, she has to do.”

What many people missed in Oprah’s rags-to-riches story was the towering ambition that motored her. Her drive was insatiable. Fueled by long days of hard work, she never stopped barreling forward—always reaching, stretching, extending. A self-propelled whirlwind of industry, she slept only four or five hours a night and rarely relaxed. During one week in 1988, she flew to Mobile, Alabama, to give a speech, then to Nashville, to give another speech. She returned to Chicago to tape back-to-back shows, flew to Cleveland for another speaking engagement, and then flew to Greensboro, North Carolina, to meet Stedman for dinner. She left the next morning for New York to accept an award, flew
back to Nashville for a charity baseball game with Stedman, and returned to Chicago the next day. She pushed herself constantly, and she pushed everyone around her, which was probably necessary to achieve her kind of stratospheric success.

After filming
The Color Purple
she announced her plan to pursue a movie career in addition to her talk show. “I want it all….I intend to be a great actress,” she told
Ladies’ Home Journal.
“A great actress.”

Having undergone tortuous negotiations with WLS to get her the time off to make her first movie, Jeff Jacobs proposed she take ownership of her talk show so that she, and not WLS, could set her schedule for future films. The station had balked at giving her twelve weeks off, and she had threatened to quit if they didn’t. So Jacobs forfeited all of her paid vacation and sick leave to get her the time, and the station agreed to bring in guest hosts and show reruns until she returned. At that point he told Oprah she had to think about producing her own show and building her own studio so she would have complete control of her professional life. “He allowed me to see that not even the sky was the limit,” she said.

When she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress, followed by the Academy Award nomination in 1986, she was unstoppable. “I’ve got to act,” she told
Good Housekeeping.
“I’m a good interviewer largely because I taught myself how. But I was
born
to act.” She told Larry King on CNN that she was at her “out of my mind happiest” when performing. “I hear people say this about having children. When their babies just come out of the womb and stuff, but I have those moments when I am acting.”

She said she intended to make at least one film a year. In March 1988 she started her second movie, costarring with Geraldine Page, Elizabeth McGovern, and Matt Dillon in
Native Son,
based on the Richard Wright novel about a black man’s murderous rage. Oprah was cast as the mother who begs for mercy from the parents of the white girl her son has murdered. Her performance failed to impress critics. “She weighs in with an overload of bathos,” Julie Salamon wrote in
The Wall Street Journal.
Hal Erickson, in the online database AMG (All-Movie Guide), concurred: “Oprah’s excessive histrionics pale in comparison to her brilliant, well-modulated performance in
The Color Purple.
” Vincent Canby wrote in
The New York Times
that “the film only seems dated when the performers, especially Oprah Winfrey, play for sentiment.”

Native Son
flopped at the box office and was pulled two weeks after release, but Oprah rose above the withering reviews. “I should do a comedy,” she told the
Chicago Tribune.
When she was offered the role of the Manhattan cleaning lady in the film version of Truman Capote’s short story “A Day’s Work,” she decided she was becoming typecast as the heavy-set, woebegone woman with a gray bun on her head and support hose rolled down her legs. She told the writer Robert Waldron she was offended by those who accused her of playing only Aunt Jemima characters. “At first I would be very kind,” she said. “Now I just want to slap them!” She told
AdWeek,
“I would like to do a character that has some sexuality. Like Dinah Washington, who was a great black singer who had seven different husbands and used to sexually exhaust her men.” Oprah didn’t want to play only black women who had problems. “It’s important for me to tell our stories, but I refuse to be limited to just that.”

Hearing her declarations about becoming a movie star, many assumed that King World would lose
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
its third biggest moneymaker after
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy!,
but the distributor was not worried. “Oprah is very ambitious,” said the chief financial officer, Jeffrey Epstein. “She wants to act in movies and TV shows, [but] there are not many great parts for black women. So she needs to produce shows herself, which cost a lot of money, and the best way to finance all that is to stick with her daytime job.” Oprah had recently paid Toni Morrison $1 million for the rights to film her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,
Beloved.
“I didn’t even try to negotiate….I just said, ‘Name your price,’ and I paid it.” She believed she had made a $1 million investment in putting her name in lights.

Except for rock stars, movie stars, professional athletes, and Wall Street marauders, few people make more money than a syndicated television talk show host with a number one–rated show carried in two hundred U.S. cities and sixty-four international markets. In her first year of syndication, Oprah made $31 million; in her second year she made $37 million; three years later, she made $55 million and landed
in
Forbes
as the ninth highest paid entertainer in the world. The talk show was the major source of her wealth, and she had no intention of ever giving it up. “It’s my bosom, my root, and my foundation,” she said. “Without it, nothing else could happen.” Nor did she consider moving from Chicago to pursue films. While most of the acting jobs were in New York and Los Angeles, Oprah knew her show could not thrive in either city.

“I think that in the Midwest you can have people who are surprised by some of the experiences that are exhibited on our show,” she told Fred Griffith. “If you have someone on my show who says, ‘My father was dating a duck for many years,’ in the Midwest people say, ‘Oh, God, his father was dating a duck!’ In New York they say, ‘Oh, my cousin was dating a duck, too.’ ” Referring to the impressionable studio audiences she could assemble from the area that writer Calvin Trillin once described as a milieu in which “culture did not hang heavily in the air,” Oprah told
Electronic Media,
“People can still be shocked here.”

Her executive producer elaborated. “Our audience definitely takes on the personality of the city,” said Debra DiMaio. “They reflect Midwestern values. They are outgoing. And nothing against Los Angeles or New York—their lifestyle is more human.”

“It’s true that Oprah couldn’t do her show anyplace else,” said Cheryl L. Reed, former editor of the editorial page of the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“People are too sophisticated and cynical in New York and Los Angeles, but Chicago is perfect for her kind of television.”

The city was grateful to Oprah for staying because she brought international acclaim to Chicago and drew hordes of tourists, filling hotels and restaurants with those who attended her shows every year. They are such a draw that the Chicago Office of Tourism added a special listing of “talk show ticket information” to the brochure it mails out to prospective visitors. Oprah also annually contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars to local organizations, including a children’s hospital, educational programs, schools, shelters, and literacy programs. In addition, she’s given generously to various museums and arts organizations across the city, including the Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago Academy for the Arts, the Children’s Museum in Oak Lawn, and the DuSable Museum of African American History.

A review of Oprah’s tax returns for all her charities, plus statements she has made to the press, indicate that from 1987 through 2009 she contributed more than $30 million to various Chicago organizations. Some of these funds came from viewers’ contributions to Oprah’s Angel Network—money that Oprah collected from others and donated in her name.

By August 1988, Jeff Jacobs had completed negotiating the deal with Capital Cities/ABC to give Oprah total control of her weekday show. In addition, he hammered out a new contract with King World to renew her contract for five years, through 1993, and all seven Capital Cities/ABC stations agreed to carry her through that time. In addition, ABC gave her three network specials. Industry analysts estimated the deals to be worth more than $500 million for Oprah and King World. Twenty years later, they estimated that
The Oprah Winfrey Show
made $150 million a year, of which Oprah kept $100 million. In contrast, Ellen DeGeneres, another popular talk show host with high ratings, made $25 million a year, an impressive amount, but one quarter of what Oprah made. The considerable difference is because Oprah owns and produces her show, although she also benefits from having more profitable time slots, when TV viewership is greater. Oprah’s show runs at 4:00
P.M.
in all cities (except Chicago, where it runs at 9:00
A.M.
) and leads in to the news, which makes it more valuable to a station than Ellen’s show, which airs in the morning.

After the ownership news was announced in 1988, Oprah sat down with Robert Feder of the
Chicago Sun-Times:

“I had been looking at pictures of Rosa Parks and Leontyne Price,” she said, “and I believe I am the resurrection of a lot of my ancestors. I am the resurrected life for them. I am living the dream. Please, please quote me correctly, ’cause I don’t want people thinkin’ I’m Jesus….

“All my life, I have done dramatic interpretations of black women. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer are all a part of me. I’ve always felt that my life is their life fulfilled, that they are bridges that I crossed over on. They never dreamed it could be this good. I still feel that they’re all with me, going, ‘Go, girl. Go for it.’ ”

A week later the
Sun-Times
columnist Daniel Ruth was still sputtering. Declaring that Oprah’s ego had gone on “a Falstaffian, gluttonous
binge,” he wrote, “Don’t worry, Oprah. Just because you can turn pap into cash, you needn’t fret too much about comparisons to Christ….I have a hard time believing Sojourner Truth spent a lot of time wrestling with subjects like ‘Victims of Freeloaders’ (Oprah show: July 5, 1988), ‘Soap Opera Stars and Their Fans’ (Oprah show: June 29, 1988) or ‘Dressing Sexy’ (Oprah show: July 28, 1988).” To be fair, Ruth gave Oprah credit for covering a few substantial subjects, such as “Race Relations” (August 4, 1988), the controversy over the film
The Last Temptation of Christ
(August 16, 1988), and a debate on AIDS (July 15, 1988). But then he lambasted her: “Please, dearest Oprah, don’t presume to place yourself in a class with genuine intellects, leaders, and such pioneering black women as Sojouner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Leontyne Price, and especially Rosa Parks, who earned their rightful acclaim through commitment, quality, and courage.”

Once Oprah owned her own show, Jeff Jacobs began looking for a production studio, and within months he found a $4 million property (one hundred thousand square feet) on the Near West Side of the city, then a rundown area of scabby storefronts and vacant lots. Realizing that downtown Chicago could expand only in that direction, he advised Oprah to make the investment. He told her it would be her field of dreams. If she built it, they would come. She could produce her talk show there, as well as make movies for herself and others. “It’s security,” he said. “It’s control of our destiny.” He told reporters, “Harpo will be the studio between the coasts and enable Oprah to do whatever it is she wants to do, economically and under her own control.” Jacobs and King World put up 20 percent of the purchase price, giving Oprah 80 percent ownership. She became chairman of Harpo Productions, Inc., and Jacobs became president and chief operating officer.