by Kitty Kelley
“I said, ‘When we had our troubles when you were a teenager, I left everyone else out of it, and that’s how it should be between you and me now.’ ”
A proud man, Vernon Winfrey chafed under the yoke of his daughter’s control, and they did not speak again for quite some time. “That all happened in May of 2007,” he said. “I was very upset, and I had a stroke a few months later. Took me three months of physical therapy to recover, and I’ve finally calmed down now, but I still feel the same way about that dirt hog Gayle. She called me back after she spoke to Oprah, but even then she did not apologize. She said she did not think she had been disrespectful to me, but she was not the recipient of her words. I was. And in her words she told me I was not worth anything and that my life counted for nothing.”
After Oprah’s public objection to his book proposal, Oprah’s father said that several potential publishers had backed off. “They now want her permission before they will proceed….” He shook his head at the fear his daughter had instilled. “I’ve put the book aside for the time being because my cowriter is out of the country, but I intend to finish it…despite what Oprah says….
“It disappoints me that she has changed so much over the years. She’s become too close to that woman Gayle, and she no longer believes in Jesus Christ as her savior. That’s just not how I raised her.”
If Oprah had seen her father’s sixty-two-page book proposal, she would have realized that it was, as he said, as much about his life as the sixth of nine children born to Elmore and Ella Winfrey as it was about raising Oprah. What would concern her, though, was what he wrote about her “secrets, dark secrets. Some I didn’t discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late.” He also expressed regret for having to be stern and hard on her during her teenage years and for not expressing his love as effectively as his discipline.
Still, he continued to disapprove of the “dark secrets” he discovered about the little girl he had raised. “She may be admired by the world, but I know the truth. So does God and so does Oprah. Two of us remain ashamed.” He pointed to the sign behind his barber chair as if he were sending his daughter a message: “Live So the Preacher Won’t Have to Tell Lies at Your Funeral.”
The television set in Winfrey’s Barber Shop is no longer tuned to Oprah’s show at 4:00 P.M. on weekdays the way it once was, but one of her early publicity photos, unsigned, remains taped to the mirror behind Vernon’s chair, next to a photograph of his Yorkshire terrier, Fluff. When it was noted that the photo of Fluff gets pride of place over Oprah’s photo, Vernon smiled slyly. “So it does,” he said. “I just love that little dog.”
Vernon’s role as Oprah’s revered father came to an end in the summer of 1963, when he drove her to Milwaukee to spend a few weeks with her mother. “I never saw that sweet little girl again,” he said. “The innocent child that I knew in Nashville disappeared forever when I left her with her mother. I shed tears that day because I knew I was leaving her in a bad environment that was no place for a young child, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
Oprah agreed at the end of the summer to stay with Vernita because her mother said she was going to get married and wanted to have a real family. Besides, Oprah’s life with “Daddy” and “Mama Zelma” in Nashville had been a bit too regimented, with only an hour of television a day, and never on Sundays. Vernita promised Oprah all the television she wanted in Milwaukee, and, ironically, it was that little bribe that led to a life-changing moment for her daughter.
“I stopped wanting to be white when I was ten years old and saw Diana Ross and The Supremes perform on The Ed Sullivan Show,” Oprah said. “I was watching television on the linoleum floor in my mother’s apartment [on a Sunday night]….I’ll never forget it….It was the first time I had ever seen a colored person wearing diamonds that I knew were real….I wanted to be Diana Ross….I had to be Diana Ross.”
The phones had started ringing in the inner cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee a few days before Christmas 1964: The Supremes were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, then the premier showcase for talent in America.
“Colored girls” on prime-time television were like Yankees in Atlanta—enough to give Southerners the vapors and sponsors the bends. But Ed Sullivan, who had an integrationist booking policy, was not to be deterred. He had introduced Elvis Presley to television audiences in 1956, and had launched the Beatles in America earlier in 1964. He was determined to present what he called “three colored gifts” from Motown who had produced three number one hits that year. His decision came five months after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which put the federal government squarely behind the drive for racial equality in the country. Now Ed Sullivan was going to change the national mind-set.
Up to that point blacks had seen themselves portrayed on television primarily as scheming scalawags (Amos and Andy), wire-haired scamps (Buckwheat in Little Rascals and Our Gang), or “yes, ma’am” maids and “no, sir” chauffeurs. To see themselves presented with beauty and grace and elegance would be revolutionary, and to be applauded by whites was almost unimaginable.
The Supremes appeared fourteen times on The Ed Sullivan Show between 1964 and 1969, but the impact of their first appearance, on December 27, 1964, cannot be overstated. It was a clarifying moment for the country as both ends of the racial spectrum came together to be entranced and entertained by three exquisite young women singing “Come See About Me.”
“Many felt pride seeing The Supremes [that evening],” recalled Diahann Carroll, the first African American woman to star in her own television series (Julia, 1968–1971). “Young people will have to understand, that period of dreams and civil rights taught all of us in entertainment how to find our stepping-stones. It taught us how to pull others up in a manner that was beneficial to all people.”
As someone who started dreaming that night, Oprah never forgot how she felt watching The Supremes. “In those days, anytime you saw a black person on television, it was so rare that everybody called everybody else, saying: ‘Colored people are on.’ You’d miss the performance because by the time you called everyone, the act was over. I remember saying, ‘What? A colored woman can look like that?’ Another electrifying moment was seeing Sidney Poitier. I was watching the Academy Awards [in 1964] and Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field. That was the first time I ever saw a black man get out of a limousine instead of driving one….I remember thinking, ‘If a colored man could do that, I wonder what I can do.’ He opened the door for me.”
Symbolically, cymbals clashed, drums rolled, and trumpets blew throughout black America that year. It was a new beginning for people of color to see their own portrayed with style and sophistication on television. Motown Music had invested thousands of dollars grooming The Supremes for mainstream stardom—charm school, makeup lessons, splendid wigs, beaded gowns, sparkling jewelry—and the investment paid off. Among the thousands of black children watching Ed Sullivan that evening were a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, both hypnotized by the dazzling style of the lithe lead singer. Each child would grow up to become a reflection of the glamour they saw in her that night. Michael Jackson in Gary, Indiana, and Oprah Winfrey in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wanted nothing more in life than to be Diana Ross. She became their polestar.
The same year that The Supremes electrified America on television, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act as part of the nation’s “War on Poverty.” The legislation was later criticized for inefficiency and waste, but many blacks benefited, especially through the Head Start program for preschool children and the Upward Bound Program for high-school students. One of those kissed by the affirmative action of Upward Bound was Oprah, then a student at Lincoln Middle School, which was considered “the melting pot” of Milwaukee. The program director, Eugene H. Abrams, had noticed her in the school cafeteria reading a book, and recommended her as one of six black students—three girls, three boys—to integrate Nicolet H
igh School in the wealthy country club suburb of Fox Point.
Years later Oprah said that she had been given “a scholarship” to the privileged school, and was the only one in her class selected for that honor. “I was in a situation where I was the only black kid, and I mean the only one, in a school of two thousand upper-middle-class suburban Jewish kids. I would take the bus in the morning to school with the maids who worked in their homes. I had to transfer three times.”
Being one of “the bus kids,” as the other students called them, Oprah was noticed. “She stood out from the crowd,” said Irene Hoe, one of five Asian students at Nicolet and a senior when Oprah was a freshman. “She did not live in the predominantly affluent, mostly white suburban neighborhoods of Milwaukee, which fed their children to our high school….Back in those politically incorrect days…it might have been said that she did not ‘belong.’ ”
No one recognized that displacement more acutely than Oprah, who suddenly saw how poor she was next to wealthy girls who wore different sweater sets every day of the week and had allowances for pizza, records, and milkshakes after school. “For the first time I understood that there was another side,” she said. “All of a sudden the ghetto didn’t look so good anymore.
“In 1968 it was real hip to know a black person, so I was very popular. The kids would all bring me back to their houses, pull out their Pearl Bailey albums, bring out their maid from the back and say, ‘Oprah, do you know Mabel?’ They figured all blacks knew each other. It was real strange and real tough.”
Mothers encouraged their daughters to invite “Opie” home after school. “Like I was a toy,” she said. “They’d all sit around talking about Sammy Davis, Jr., like I knew him.”
Oprah wanted to have money like the other kids, but her mother, working two jobs at the time, had none to spare. So Oprah began stealing from Vernita. “I started having some real problems,” she said later. “I guess you could call me troubled—to put it mildly.”
Her sister, Patricia, remembered Oprah stealing $200 from their mother, which was an entire week’s pay. Another time she stole one of her mother’s rings and pawned it. “Oprah said she’d taken the ring to have it cleaned. But Mom found the pawn ticket in a pillowcase and made Oprah get the ring back.”
Her relatives recall Oprah as an out-of-control teenager who would do anything for money. At one point she wanted to get rid of her “ugly butterfly bifocals.” She asked her mother to buy her a new pair of octagonal glasses like the kids at Nicolet wore. Vernita said she could not afford the expense. Oprah was determined to get the new glasses.
“I staged a robbery, broke my glasses and pretended I was unconscious and feigned amnesia. I stayed home from school one day and stomped the glasses on the floor into a million pieces. I pulled down the curtains, knocked over the lamps, and cut my left cheek enough to draw blood. I called the police, laid myself down on the floor, and waited for them to arrive.”
Then, exactly as she had seen on an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., she feigned amnesia. She showed the police a bump on her head but said she did not remember what had happened. The police called her mother, but Oprah pretended not to recognize Vernita, who was shaken until the police mentioned that the only thing broken during the robbery was a pair of glasses.
“Oprah was always a big actress,” said her sister. “She had a wild imagination.”
After becoming sexually promiscuous, Oprah devised another way to make money. “She invited men over during the day while my mother was working,” said Patricia. “Her boyfriends were all much older than her, about 19 or in their early 20s. Whenever a guy arrived at our door, Oprah would give Popsicles to me and our younger brother Jeffrey and say, ‘You two go out on the porch and play now.’ Oprah then would go inside with her boyfriend….I didn’t find out what Oprah was doing until I was older and she showed me how she did ‘The Horse’—which is what she called the sex act.”
It took Patricia many years to realize that Oprah was selling “The Horse”—trading sexual favors for money. Patricia’s awareness of this information and willingness to turn it over to the media eventually led to a rift between the two sisters that would never fully heal, and in 1993 it would lead to one of Oprah’s more momentous decisions when dealing with the publication of her autobiography.
Oprah has admitted to promiscuity during her adolescent years, saying she ran the streets and had sex with any man who would have her because she wanted attention. She also said that she was continually molested by the men in her mother’s house. “I was 36-23-36 at age thirteen, which created a few problems. I was not allowed to talk to boys and they were everywhere….This happens in a lot of families where there’s a single parent and the mother runs the family: there are boyfriends going in and out of the house and daughters particularly see this. Mothers say, ‘Don’t let some man do this. You keep your dress down! You do what I say!’ When what the child sees is entirely different from what the mother is saying. I had that when I was a kid. ‘Do as I say, not what I do.’ But that doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.”
Her family saw only a promiscuous teenager who threw herself at men, which is why they did not believe her when she finally told them about being sexually molested. They could not see her as a victim.
“I don’t believe a bit of it,” said her “aunt” Katharine many years later. “Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days, and not accepting discipline from her mother. She shames herself and her family to now suggest otherwise.” Mrs. Esters pointed to the timing of Oprah’s revelation of sexual abuse and suggested that she simply wanted publicity when she was taking her show national. “That story helped launch Oprah and make her what she is today,” she said. “I don’t hold with telling lies, but in this case I forgive Oprah because she has done so much for other people. Maybe this was the only way for a poor child to succeed and become rich. Now she does her good works to make her amends….No one in the family believes her stories [of sexual abuse] but now that she’s so rich and powerful everyone is afraid to contradict her. I’m not afraid because I’m not financially dependent on Oprah….Her audiences may believe her stories. Her family does not….Let’s leave it at that.”
For Oprah, like other victims of sexual abuse, the burden of not being believed weighs as heavily as the shame of being molested. Most families cannot or will not face the defilement caused by a loved one or by their own complicity—intentional or unintentional—in the violation of a child they did not protect. Sadly, like her relatives, Oprah blamed herself, even as she was counseling others not to accept condemnation. “All the years that I convinced myself I was healed, I wasn’t. I still carried the shame and I unconsciously blamed myself for those men’s acts. Something deep within me felt I must have been a bad little girl for those men to have abused me.”
When school let out in the summer of 1968, Oprah went to Nashville to visit Vernon and Zelma, and was driven there by her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, her father’s closest brother. During the drive Trenton asked her if she had been dating boys.
“I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s really hard because all the boys want to do is French kiss.’ And immediately after the conversation about French kissing, he asked me to pull over to the side and take off my panties….All those years I thought that if I hadn’t brought up the subject of French kissing, he wouldn’t have done that, because he was my favorite uncle.”
Oprah complained to her father and stepmother about her uncle, but they did not believe her then, and Trenton denied her story. Years later Vernon still seemed conflicted. “I know she feels that I didn’t handle it well,” he said, “[but] Trent was my closest brother. We were torn.”
When Oprah returned to Milwaukee, she ran away from home and stayed on the streets for a week. “Mom was frantic and called all her friends looking for her,” said her sister. “Mom didn’t know if she was dead or alive.”
Oprah joked about the incident years later as she recalled hustling Aretha F
ranklin, who was appearing in Milwaukee. When she saw the singer sitting in a limousine, Oprah threw herself into another drama. “I rushed up to her, started crying, said I was an abandoned child and needed money to return to Ohio. I liked the sound of Ohio. She gave me $100.” Oprah, then fourteen years old, claims she went to a nearby hotel, took a room by herself, and spent the money drinking wine and ordering room service. Then she called the pastor of her mother’s church and begged him to help her get back home.
“After I ran out of money I told the late Reverend Tully everything that was going on in my house and how bad I felt. So he took me back to my house and gave my mother a lecture, which really pleased me.”
Her sister was ecstatic to see her, but Vernita was furious. After the pastor left, she picked up a small chair to beat Oprah, who, according to Patricia, “was crying and cowering. I was screaming and begging Mom, ‘Please don’t kill Oprah!’ ” Vernita finally put the chair down, but she insisted Oprah accompany her to the juvenile detention center.
“I remember going to the interview process where they treat you like you’re already a known convict and thinking to myself, ‘How in the world is this happening to me?’ I was fourteen and I knew that I was a smart person; I knew I wasn’t a bad person, and I remember thinking, ‘How did this happen? How did I get here?’ ”
Vernita was told she would have to wait two weeks before Oprah could be processed. “I can’t wait two weeks,” said her mother.
“She wanted me out of the house that minute,” said Oprah.
Back in the apartment, Vernita called Vernon in Nashville and told him he had to take over, but by then Vernon had realized he was not Oprah’s birth father. Nine months before Oprah’s birth in January 1954 he was in the service.
Knowing that Vernon and Zelma were unable to have children, Katharine Carr Esters called and urged Vernon to take Oprah. “I knew he wasn’t her father but I told him, ‘Claim her as your own. You and Zelma want a child, and Oprah needs help. Her mother can’t handle her.’…I told him everything that Oprah had done, and he finally agreed to take her, but under strict conditions of discipline that she no longer go back and forth to Vernita and that he would be in charge. Vernita agreed….We were all there when Oprah left—her mother, her sister and brother and all of her cousins.”