by Kitty Kelley
Soon after Oprah moved into her own apartment she called upon Gordon El Greco Brown, a local promoter who had purchased the franchise for Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee in 1972. “Her stepmother, Miss Zelma, had first brought her to meet me for Miss Fire Prevention….When she started at TSU she enrolled in my modeling school near campus. She waltzed in one day and announced, ‘Hi. I’m going to be a big star someday. Where do I sign up, baby?’ She was only 17 and not beautiful. But I could tell she had something. She was very poised and had a great speaking voice.”
The deep timbre of Oprah’s voice never failed to impress. In high school her rich vocal range was compared to that of the American contralto Marian Anderson. For a teenager, Oprah’s commanding voice was always a revelation.
“Miss Black Nashville was the first time there had ever been a beauty pageant for black girls. In the past it was white girls only,” said El Greco Brown. “Oprah [saw] that contest as a stepping stone for the big career she so desperately wanted….I had to practically beg everyone else to participate because there was no cash incentive. No scholarship. No record deal. No Hollywood contract. Just a title, a sash and a bouquet.”
Oprah filled out the pageant application, stating her height: 5′6½″; weight: 135 lbs.; measurements: 36–25–37; shoe size: 8–8½. She listed her hobbies: swimming and people; her talent: dramatic interpretation; and her parents: Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Winfrey, with no mention of her mother, Vernita Lee, in Milwaukee. For “Why are you entering the Miss Black America beauty pageant?” she wrote, “I would like to try to instill a sense of individual (black) pride within our people. Self-dignity.” She stated that she had “never been married, annulled, divorced or separated,” and had “never conceived a child.”
The night of March 10, 1972, there was not an empty seat at the Black Elks lodge on Jefferson Street. “I had managed to get fifteen contestants, and they were judged on beauty in evening gown and swimsuit competitions, plus talent,” said El Greco Brown. “Oprah gave an average showing in the [beauty] competitions but when her talent turn came she did a dramatic reading and sang—and she knocked the audience off their feet. She was so good; it moved her into the top five.
“There was only one girl who out-excelled Oprah in talent. Her name was Maude Mobley and she later worked as a backup singer at the Grand Ole Opry. Not only was Maude talented, she had a beautiful figure and scored top marks in the swimsuit and evening gown competitions. Everyone picked her as the winner as soon as her foot hit the stage.”
The six judges tabulated their scores and the winners were announced from last to first: “I couldn’t believe it when [the MC] read out the name of the fourth runner-up: Maude Mobley. He continued to read the winners, pausing briefly before he called out: ‘The winner, and the first Miss Black Nashville, is Oprah Gail Winfrey.’ ”
Recalling a collective gasp of shock from the audience, the promoter said he was besieged by people who claimed the contest had been fixed. “I was confused myself. So I gathered up all the judges’ scorecards and tallied up the votes. I couldn’t believe what I discovered: the number four runner-up and the winner’s scores had been switched. I’m convinced the scoring switch was an error. The judges were honest men and women.”
The promoter said he went to the Winfreys’ house the next day to explain the mix-up. “I asked Oprah if she would consider giving the crown to…the rightful winner. Oprah stood up and said angrily, ‘No, it’s mine! My name was called and I am Miss Black Nashville.’
“I tried to reason with her. ‘How would you feel if you had been in Maude’s shoes?’
“ ‘I don’t care,’ she said.”
The next week Oprah’s picture appeared in the Nashville newspapers as the winner. Her photograph, with a press release mentioning Patrice Patton as the first runner-up, was sent to black newspapers across the country. There was no mention of Maude Mobley.
“Everyone at TSU talked about the Miss Black Nashville contest,” said Sheryl Atkinson. “We discussed it among ourselves, because Oprah seemed least likely to win. She certainly wasn’t the prettiest, but I’m sure she was the most vocal.”
“I think she got it because she was well known from her radio show,” said Barbara Wright. “She couldn’t have gotten it any other way.”
The confusion over tabulating the scores did not become public until Oprah became famous. Then Gordon El Greco Brown wanted to publish a book of photographs. “I had hundreds of pictures of Oprah from those pageants and wrote her to say that I’d like to publish something. Her lawyer Jeff Jacobs wrote me back and said they’d like to see all the pictures. When I saw that he was a lawyer, I said I’d come to Chicago with my lawyer so we could make a deal. But Jacobs said no, I couldn’t bring a lawyer. I had to meet with him and Oprah alone. They flew me to Chicago, put me up in a hotel, and sent a limousine to bring me to the Harpo studios. Oprah met me, hugged me, and was my best friend. Then she handed me off to her lawyer, who really roughed me up.
“ ‘We just want to see what you’ve got,’ said Jacobs. So I showed him all my pictures. I said I had spent three years promoting Oprah [for free] and would now like to do a book.
“Jacobs said, ‘No book. No job. No nothing. We’ll put some money on the table and the pictures stay with us. Take it or leave it.’ I said I wanted to keep my pictures. Jacobs said, ‘So leave, but we don’t want to see those pictures all over the place.’ When I left Harpo, they canceled the limo to the airport, and I had to flag a cab.”
Feeling spurned, the promoter sold his story and some of his photos to the National Enquirer, which ran the headline “Oprah Stole Beauty Contest Crown!” Her publicist denied the story: “Oprah was never told of any alleged problems with any pageants she was in at any time.”
Maude Mobley, described in the 1992 story as the “rightful pageant winner,” sounded fearful. “Oprah’s a rich and powerful woman. I would rather not talk about this. It might anger her.”
Maude’s mother was not so cautious. “I knew something wasn’t right when they called out Oprah as the winner,” she said twenty years after the pageant. “After I talked to Maude, I was so angry that I wrote to everybody I could think of to get the situation righted. But no one was interested. It’s true that Oprah stole that crown.”
Another version of the switched-votes story surfaced when Patrice Patton, the first runner-up for Miss Black Nashville, noticed Gordon El Greco Brown’s tabloid story when she was grocery shopping. “I already knew that the scores had been switched, and that Oprah had not won,” she said in 2008, “but I don’t believe what Gordon is quoted as saying in that story….I don’t believe for one minute that Oprah knew about the switch or that Gordon ever confronted her. I was told by the pageant coordinator that Gordon was the one who switched the votes on Miss Black Nashville. The pageant coordinator said she had confronted him at the time, and when he didn’t step forward to correct the situation, she quit. I ran into her a few years later and she told me the truth: that I had actually won Miss Black Nashville and Oprah had been the runner-up. I never said anything, because it was five years after the fact and I would’ve looked like a sore loser. Besides, I liked Oprah. She was good folks….
“She had a following in Nashville at the time, from all the publicity she got being the first black girl to be Miss Fire Prevention, plus she had her own radio show. It’s my opinion that if Oprah hadn’t been declared the winner of Miss Black Nashville, Gordon wouldn’t have been able to sell tickets to the Miss Black Tennessee pageant. So he made her the winner….
“After the pageant coordinator quit, Gordon gave me the job and we traveled all over Tennessee just trying to get girls to participate. Even then we only got a few. A few days before the pageant, Gordon moved out of his house in Nashville and we moved in so I could get everyone ready to make the rounds of radio stations and churches and department stores. Oprah drove some of us in her father’s pickup truck….I still remember how determined she was to get into shape
for competition. She wanted to be a certain size, so she had started dieting….She was the first black person I ever saw to eat yogurt. We just didn’t eat yogurt in those days. But she did and she lost a bunch of weight.”
Oprah said she was as surprised as anyone to be crowned Miss Black Tennessee. “I didn’t expect to win, nor did anybody else expect me to, because there were all these vanillas and here I was a fudge child. And Lord, were they upset, and I was upset for them, really, I was. I said, ‘Beats me, girls. I’m as shocked as you are. I don’t know how I won, either.’ ”
As Miss Black Tennessee, Oprah flew to California in August 1972 to compete for the crown of Miss Black America. For the talent portion of the pageant, she sang “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a spiritual dating back to slavery. Her chaperone, Dr. Janet Burch, a Nashville psychologist, recalled for the writer Robert Waldron how focused Oprah was on becoming successful. “I have never seen anybody who wanted to do well as much as Oprah did. She used to talk about things, like how one day she was going to be very, very, very wealthy. The thought always precedes the happening. If you really think you’re going to be very wealthy, and very popular, and prominent, and you sincerely believe it, it’s going to happen. You see, some people say it, but they don’t really believe it. She believed it. People say, ‘I’d like to be wealthy.’ Oprah said, ‘I’m going to be wealthy.’ ”
Oprah did not win, place, or show in the race for Miss Black America. “As district pageant organizer I had access to those final tallies and ascertained that she came in number 34 out of 36 contestants— almost flat bottom,” recalled El Greco Brown. Oprah dismissed her loss by blaming the winner. “The girl from California won because she stripped,” she said. Yet the New York Times coverage makes no mention of the beautiful California singer who won as having performed a striptease.
During the week, Oprah, who had been sponsored by her radio station, told Dr. Burch that she was going “to be a big TV personality.” After the pageant, she returned to Nashville ready to raise her game.
“Our general manager got a call from WVOL that they had a girl who wanted to get into broadcasting,” said Chris Clark, the former anchor, producer, and news director of WLAC, later WTVF-TV. “So I was told that I had to interview her.”
The station had already hired Bill Perkins, the first black face on Nashville television, now deceased, and Ruth Ann Leach, the first woman, who said, “I was the first female fanny to sit on the news desk next to the anchor during a newscast. This was back when NewsChannel 5 was trying desperately to meet its FCC obligation to diversify the on-air talent. So there was Bill Perkins and me. Everyone else on the air was white and male.”
Oprah said she had been pursued by the CBS affiliate for the on-air position, but Clark remembers that WVOL pushed for her hiring, and Joseph Davis, a cameraman, formerly with WDCN-TV, the public education channel, concurred. “There was a small group of young black people in Nashville that the NAACP got behind to place in positions above entry level—in middle management and on-camera,” Davis said. “Oprah was part of that group to come out of WVOL.” In 2008 he produced a photograph of the group taken on the set at WDCN, when they appeared to discuss “Blacks and Their Role in the Media.” “Out of the ten people in this picture, Oprah is the only one who did not get sidetracked by marriage or children. She never let life interfere with her ambition to get to the top.”
Chris Clark was sensitive to the demands for diversity at that time. “I felt we needed to look like the face of Nashville, which was then 80 percent white and 20 percent black. We had a brave mayor [Clifton Beverly Briley] who said that segregation was over and we had to move toward integration….I was responsive to this because when I was coming up in television in the 1960s, it was a white-bread world—no room for blacks, women, Jews, or Greeks like me. My real name is Christopher Botsaris, but I had to change it to get a job on the air. By the time I got to WLAC, Nashville had been through the really rough civil rights battles, but we still needed to show that we were committed to integration.
“As far as I’m concerned, Oprah was not a token. Yeah, she was black and we needed a black face, and she was a woman, so I guess that helped. But she was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “She was drop-dead gorgeous, very well spoken, and known in town from being Miss Black Nashville and Little Miss Spark Plug or whatever she was [Miss Fire Prevention]. So I made her a reporter—we didn’t have correspondents in those days. I sent her out with a Bell and Howell camera to cover city hall. I didn’t find out until later that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.”
Years later Oprah admitted she had lied on her job application and during her job interview about her experience, but she walked into her first assignment with great determination. “I announced to everybody there, ‘This is my first day on the job, and I don’t know anything. Please help me because I have told the news director at Channel 5 that I know what I’m doing. Pleeeeze help me.’ And they did. And from that point on all those councilmen became my friends.”
Chris Clark, who retired in 2007, does not claim a medal for hiring Oprah, but he does acknowledge “getting the fisheye from management….You have to remember it was a very racially tense time in Nashville, and she was the first black woman on television.” He admitted that the front office was not enthusiastic. “I could make the decision because, as anchor, I was also director and producer of news, but they made it quite clear that if Oprah didn’t work out—if the audience did not accept her—it would be on me.”
Others recall the hire as very courageous. “No question,” said Patty Outlaw, who did traffic ads for the station. “It was a big risk for Chris.”
“He went out on a limb when he brought Oprah in,” said Jimmy Norton, who worked in production, “especially when he promoted her to coanchor….There was grumbling in the back of the newsroom….It bothered some to see Oprah on the air doing news, but you have to remember what Nashville was like in those days….The N word was still being used freely.”
Ruth Ann Leach recalled her first encounter with the word when Oprah started doing the news. “I accompanied a family member to a pleasant suburban home….I sat with the…wife. She greeted me warmly and told me she used to enjoy watching me on television.
“What do you mean ‘used to?’ I asked.
“ ‘Well, I cain’t watch your station anymore, now that you have a nigger reading the news.’ ”
Oprah herself got walloped with the hateful word when she went on assignment in a segregated area of Nashville. She introduced herself to a shop owner and extended her hand.
“We don’t shake hands with niggers down here,” he said.
She shot back, “I’ll bet the niggers are glad.”
At TSU her classmates considered her television job nothing but a big wet kiss from the affirmative action fairy. They dismissed her as a “two-fer,” a mere token, and she agreed. “No way did I deserve the job,” she said later. “I was a classic token, but I sure was one happy token.”
“She was so excited to be on television,” recalled the makeup artist Joyce Daniel Hill. “I was with the Joe Colter Agency and had been hired by the station to teach the news team to do makeup and get supplies for them every month. We were just getting used to color cameras in those days and had only a few shades of pancake makeup available….I blended a special shade for Oprah….She’s considerably lighter now than she was thirty-four years ago. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just better makeup artists or some kind of skin bleaching….She took me with her to cover the Ebony fashion fair because we both loved clothes….She was a joy to work with.”
Hired at $150 a week, Oprah made her television debut in Nashville in January 1974. By the following year she had received several awards as the city’s first black female on television. She was named National Executive Woman of the Year by the National Association of Women Executives. The Middle Tennessee Business Association named her Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year, and she won
the Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club award as Woman of the Year in 1975. “She was terrific,” said Chris Clark, “although she wasn’t a great reporter. Couldn’t write. Never could.” In fact, she had so much trouble writing she caused the station to go black for two minutes of a five-minute cut-in one morning because she had not finished typing. “Chris should have fired me that day,” Oprah said.
Instead, Clark concentrated on her other gifts. “She was wonderful with people,” he recalled. “And that was her downfall as a journalist, because she could not be detached. She’d be sent to cover a fire, come back to the station, and work the phones trying to get help for the burnt-out family instead of writing the story for the evening news.”
Easy and casual at work, Oprah kicked off her shoes and padded around the newsroom in bare feet. “She was as country as cornbread in those days,” said one former coworker.
“I think people expected her to be a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ type, you know—very grateful—but she wasn’t that way at all,” said Jimmy Norton. “She was driven. I saw it shortly after she started, when we were doing a public service spot for Black History Week. The producer was not very good, so Oprah stepped in and completely took over. She shoved the producer aside, told the cameraman what to do, and directed the segment herself. That was an eye-opener for me. This girl knew what she wanted and was willing to do whatever she had to do to accomplish her goals.”
Patty Outlaw agreed. “She was real confident for her young self—ambitious, yes, but not a backstabber. I liked her a lot….I saw her every day in those years, because I worked on the floor above the newsroom. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time—drugs all over the place. They were even selling ‘windowpanes’ [LSD] in the hall.” Drugs were so prevalent that the news staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah’s coanchor, a coke spoon as a gift. “Chris and I looked the other way,” said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana. Years later Oprah indicated that her own drug use started in Nashville, with cocaine, and continued during her years in Baltimore and later in Chicago.