by Kitty Kelley
“I remember raving on the elevator about a guy I was dating, and Oprah listened to me carry on for two floors. As she got off, she said, ‘Ooooh, girl. He sounds like Jesus’ brother,’ ” said Patty Outlaw. “In those days Oprah and I talked about boys, diets, and makeup. That’s all we cared about then….Funny, isn’t it, but she’s still talking about the same things on her show three decades later.”
“She was a little heavy then, but nothing like now,” Patty said in 2008. “I had started taking ballet and mentioned my lessons to Jimmy Norton. ‘Ballet must be big,’ he said. ‘Oprah did a little story during the newscast last night. She did it in her tutu or, in her case, her four-four….’ Oprah lived on junk food then, and nobody got between her and her Ding Dongs.”
Harry Chapman, who coanchored the weekend news with Oprah, recalled her fondness for Chicken Shack chicken. “They used cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce—hottest chicken I ever put in my mouth. We’d have that on weekends, in between newscasts.”
As the thirtieth largest television market, Nashville was a training ground for many young broadcasters. “It was a very exciting time to be in TV,” said Elaine Ganick, former news anchor for the NBC affiliate, WSMV, and later a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight. “I started out about the same time as Oprah; Pat Sajak was a weatherman; and John Tesh, our news anchor, hit the big time in New York before his ten years with Entertainment Tonight.”
Tesh, the tall (six foot six), handsome, blond anchorman for WSMV, once described his Nashville days and nights with Pat Sajak, Dan Miller, and Oprah: “We were all single, ran in a pack, and got into a lot of trouble acting like jerks.” Sometime after he became the news anchor for WCBS-TV in New York City, Tesh told a woman he dated seriously that when he was in Nashville he had lived with Oprah for a short time, at her apartment in Hickory Hollow. “He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn’t take it anymore. He walked out in the middle of the night….He told me he later felt very guilty about it.” The social pressure then, in Nashville, Tennessee, concerning an interracial couple was extreme.
Toasting her talk show’s tenth anniversary in 1996, Oprah invited John Tesh to appear with his ET cohost Mary Hart, and reminded him of what she called their “one date—strictly two friends having dinner.” More than three decades later some people who worked with them in Nashville found their intimate relationship hard to believe. “[I would’ve thought] Oprah would’ve been leery about dating a white person…interracial dating was not acceptable then,” said Jimmy Norton. “After all, we were just ninety miles south of Pulaski, home of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Patty Outlaw acknowledged that the coupling of a black woman and a white man was considered “pretty scandalous” at the time, but she remembered a snowy evening when the station put a lot of people up for the night at a Ramada Inn. “I think if you asked Oprah and Vic Mason about that night they might have some fond recollections of each other.”
In 1975, Oprah, who was coanchoring the weeknight news, was recruited by WSB in Atlanta. “It was time for a black anchor on weekday TV,” said former news director Kenneth Tiven. “She came down and was terrific. I remember having her home to dinner….She had even then an extraordinary sense of self-confidence, an eerie comprehension of what was expected of her as an upwardly mobile black woman and budding television star. However, I suddenly bolted Atlanta for Philadelphia KYW as news director, and she said, ‘Without you I am not coming.’ ”
Chris Clark recalled Oprah coming to him with the WSB job offer. “I talked her out of it because she wasn’t ready and we didn’t want to lose her. We were just starting field anchoring and I thought she’d be great. So I gave her a five-thousand-dollar raise, and she stayed with us—for a while. Then, a year or so later, she got an offer from Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. Again, management told me to talk her out of leaving. So I called her in. ‘Oprah, management has told me to talk you out of leaving. Have I tried to talk you out of it? Good. Now I think you should take the job. You’re ready.’ ”
Baltimore was a much larger television market, and the job paid $40,000 a year, but Oprah did not leap at the opportunity to coanchor the news on WJZ. “I hated Baltimore when I first went there,” she told WDCN’s Gail Choice in her “Farewell to Nashville” interview. “But I took the free trip they offered and looked at the Westinghouse-owned station, which I loved. They own[ed] five other stations, and they said, ‘We have big plans for you.’ They wanted me to sign a five-year contract but I said no. ‘I’ll be too old in five years to do what I want to do.’ So I negotiated it down to three years.” Oprah, then twenty-one, said she envisioned herself going from coanchoring the news in Baltimore to transferring to the more glamorous ABC affiliate in San Francisco and finally to becoming “the black Barbara Walters….If she can make $1 million a year, I figure we can make $500,000,” Oprah told her black interviewer.
“I hate to leave but it’s just about necessary for me to do what I want to do later, and that’s to anchor in one of the top 10 markets.” Oprah said she would not have considered moving to Baltimore if WJZ had not been the number one station in its market.
Gail Choice appeared wide-eyed with wonder at her colleague’s strategic vision, and, dripping with admiration, she commended Oprah on her good fortune. “I was lucky, lucky, lucky…in the right place at the right time,” said Oprah. Years later she would say it was all a part of God’s plan for her.
When she signed her three-year contract with WJZ and prepared to move to Baltimore, she asked her father for a loan until she started getting paid in her new job. “Vernon Winfrey was a good customer of mine at the Third National Bank in East Nashville,” said Janet Wassom. “He took out papers and cosigned with Oprah for a loan to pay her expenses for relocating….He was known in the black community as someone people went to for help, and he helped those who helped themselves. Didn’t believe in handouts. Made everyone pay him back, and I’m sure he did the same with Oprah.”
Oprah repaid her father many times over in the years to come, with luxury cars, fine clothes, gold watches, immense houses, and exotic vacations. She even offered to retire him for life. “She calls this place a crummy old dump,” he said in 2008 of his dilapidated barbershop on Vernon Winfrey Avenue. Yet, even at the age of seventy-five and following a stroke, the man who believed in a hand up ignored his daughter’s offer of a handout.
“I hated to see Oprah leave Nashville, but I wanted to give her a great send-off,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler, “so I threw a big going-away party—made all the arrangements for invitations, food, drinks, and music. I had it at the Gazebo apartments off Thompson Lane, and strange as this may sound, she never even thanked me for it. She left town and basically never came back, except when she returned to promote The Color Purple.…That was the last I saw of Oprah before all those Arnold Schwarzenegger types took over her life and she got all Maria Shrivered up. She divorced herself from Nashville. Probably because it was too painful for her to come back because we knew her when, or else because we’re just too down-country for her now.”
Oprah’s friend, who became president of the League of Women Voters in Nashville, did not try to conceal her disappointment over the lost friendship. “I don’t think Oprah knows how much we admire her for all she’s done, especially for the little girls in South Africa.”
Perhaps for Oprah the price of surviving was to forget, and the down payment on dreams as big as hers meant dropping a guillotine on the past. She did return to Nashville in 2004, for the fiftieth anniversary of WTVF-TV, and appeared on television to congratulate NewsChannel 5, but she did not come back three years later for Chris Clark’s retirement party. “We were all there,” said one former coworker. “Jimmy Norton cut short a church mission in New Orleans to be on hand, and Ruth Ann Leach flew in from New York City. Even the governor was there, but Oprah didn’t show.”
Her absence surprised many. “We have always been a family at the station, and Chris
was on the air there for forty years, probably a record for any anchorman in the country, which is why his retirement party was a big deal,” said Jimmy Norton. “So I think everyone expected Oprah would be there. After all, Chris had given her her big break….But thirty years had passed and…well…Oprah has changed….She’s not the same sweet nineteen-year-old kid we used to know….She did invite Chris to her big splashy fiftieth birthday party earlier that same year, and sent a plane for him and all, so maybe she felt she had done enough for him, I don’t know….I won’t say she wouldn’t come to his retirement party. I’ll just say she didn’t come.”
Five
COUNTEE CULLEN, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote “Incident,” his most famous poem, about what happened to him as a child:
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee.
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me “nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
Baltimore had changed since that poem was published in 1925, but even with a 55 percent black population, its attempts at integration were often hesitant and halting. Situated north of the Confederacy, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the shadow of Washington, D.C., the city produced world-renowned figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Post, Upton Sinclair, H. L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Thurgood Marshall. By the time Oprah Winfrey arrived in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Baltimore was known as “Charm City,” after a gimmick to lure tourists with charm bracelets. The ad campaign was launched ten days into a garbage strike that was exacerbated by a 110-degree heat wave that baked the city in a gagging stench and triggered riots requiring the deployment of state troopers in gas masks.
“It took me a year to become charmed by Baltimore,” Oprah said, unimpressed by the city’s historic row houses. “I didn’t understand why they were all stuck together….[And] the first time I saw the downtown area I got so depressed that I called my daddy in Nashville and burst into tears. In Nashville you had a yard, even if you didn’t have a porch. But the houses on Pennsylvania Avenue [in Baltimore] had neither. I picked Columbia for the grass and trees.”
A lovely verdant suburb, Columbia, Maryland, was designed in 1967 to look like a village spread across fourteen thousand acres and to eliminate subdivisions as well as segregation by race, religion, and income. The neighborhoods contained single-family homes, town houses, condominiums, and apartments like the one Oprah rented. The street names came from famous works of art and literature: Hobbit’s Glen, from J.R.R. Tolkien; Running Brook, from the poetry of Robert Frost; and Clemens Crossing, from Mark Twain. Oprah lived on Windstream Drive near Bryant Woods, where the street names came from the poetry of William Cullen Bryant.
After driving her to Baltimore and helping her unpack, her Nashville boyfriend, William “Bubba” Taylor, was ready to return home. “We agreed she had to make the move and I had to stay,” he said many years later. “It was too small a TV market for her in Nashville, and I had many things to keep me here, such as my family’s funeral home.”
The couple had been dating semi-seriously since Oprah had gotten Taylor a job at WVOL radio. “I hired Billy just to keep Oprah’s sanity,” recalled Clarence Kilcrease, the station manager. “She kept pushing me to do it. She was gaga over him.” They had met at the Progressive Baptist Church when Taylor, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam vet, was attending John A. Gupton Mortuary College.
“She was just nineteen but she was driven even back then,” Taylor said. “She’d tell me: ‘Someday, I’m going to be famous!’ You could see that she meant it.” So he was not surprised to see Oprah on 60 Minutes a decade later, but he was floored by her melodramatic recollection of their parting in Baltimore.
“Lord, I wanted him,” Oprah told Mike Wallace. “I threw his keys down the toilet, stood in front of the door and threatened to jump off the balcony if he didn’t stay. I was on my knees begging him, ‘Please don’t go, please don’t go.’ ”
Bubba Taylor chuckled, knowing he had not been the man who had sparked those theatrics. “When she took me to the airport for my flight back to Nashville, her eyes glistened and she squeezed my hand before kissing me goodbye. We promised to stay in touch, of course, but I guess we both knew it was over.” Oprah later fell in love with a married disc jockey in Baltimore who would bring her to her knees, and it was her desperation over losing him that she recounted on 60 Minutes, to illustrate how far she had traveled from her doormat days. Some might consider that recollection an example of what Oprah’s “aunt” Katharine Esters called another one of “Oprah’s lies,” while others would accept her tendency to rearrange the truth as her way of telling a good, if inconsistent, story. Or perhaps the only way Oprah can deal with a painful truth is by attributing it to a situation that doesn’t hurt (Bubba) rather than to one that still pains (the Baltimore disc jockey).
In the 1970s, local news became a real moneymaker for television, especially in Baltimore, where Jerry Turner anchored on WJZ-TV every night, and consistently outdrew Walter Cronkite, then the Brahmin of broadcasting.
“You cannot overstate the stature of Jerry Turner in this town at that time,” said WJZ’s weatherman, Bob Turk. “He simply had no peers.”
The former general manager of WJZ concurred. “Jerry Turner was as superb an anchor as you could find anywhere in the business,” said William F. Baker. “He was appealing, authoritative, and, most importantly, he was adored by the Baltimore community. Absolutely worshipped. He was the reason WJZ ranked number one in the market for years, and as you know, news is the jewel of the crown in television, and determines how a station fares in terms of money and prestige.”
In 1976 the station decided to go to an hour news format, which was too much for one person to anchor. So they announced they were launching an “intensive search” for a coanchor to share Turner’s throne. This was tantamount to a trumpet throughout the kingdom: the forty-six-year-old prince is looking for a princess to wear the glass slipper. (The assumption then was that since Turner was a white male, his coanchor had to be a black female.) Seven months later the so-called search team announced they had found their princess. They paid her $40,000 a year ($150,816.87 in 2009 dollars).
“I was news director at WJZ and I hired Oprah after seeing a demo tape that she had sent,” Gary Elion said in 2007. “It was very impressive; she had a compelling delivery, and we hired her on the basis of that tape.”
The newsroom was aghast. “It did not matter that Oprah Winfrey from Nashville, Tennessee, knew nothing about Baltimore, or that she was twenty-two years old, or that she had almost no reporting experience,” recalled Michael Olesker, a former print journalist who became WJZ’s on-air essayist. “For television news Oprah was perfect….Why? Because in television news, journalism has always been considered optional.”
At the time there were only two black women on television in Baltimore, despite the city’s large black population. Maria Broom, a dancer with little experience in journalism, had been hired by WJZ to be the consumer reporter before Oprah arrived. “I was black, and I had a nice bush,” said Broom, who achieved national recognition in the (2000–2008) HBO hit series The Wire. “It was a time of big Afros. I was a picture of the modern black woman. So it was like a movie. They said, ‘We’re going to make you a star,’ and then they did….I was what they gave the black people.”
Sue Simmons had arrived in 1974 to work at WBAL. She stayed two years before moving to Washington, D.C., and then to New York City, where she has anchored the news at WNBC for more than two decades. Upon leaving Baltimore, a reporter asked what her strengths were. Simmons replied, �
��I’m pretty and I can read.”
In 1976, for any woman—black, white, yellow, or brown—to share the throne of Jerry Turner was to receive a crown never before bestowed.
“Getting that…news coanchor job at twenty-two was such a big deal,” Oprah said many years later. “It felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time.”
When it was announced that a young black woman from Nashville had been anointed, even Baltimore’s major television critic was taken aback. “That they have this much confidence in a new face for Baltimore is interesting,” Bill Carter wrote in The Baltimore Sun. “It must be considered a risk anytime the news is handled by anyone other than Turner at Channel 13.
“But if Winfrey can be established as a popular news person, the station will have a big leg up when it finally does get its act together and puts the full hour news on the air.”
WJZ immediately began working with Mayor William D. Shaefer’s office to develop a series of feature stories about Baltimore neighborhoods that Oprah could present each night during the forty-five-day City Fair between July and September.
“It’s good P.R. for me,” she told reporters, admitting she did no research or reporting for the series. She simply showed up at a different neighborhood each day with a camera crew to interview whomever had been selected by the community association. “It was a great way of introducing me to the city. I probably know more about the neighborhoods now than anybody else at the station.”