by Kitty Kelley
Her comment irked some in the newsroom, particularly Al Sanders, a black reporter who had effectively anchored the news in Turner’s absence and expected to be considered as his coanchor. “For up to three years before we went to the hour format, there had been talk that if a coanchor situation were to come along I would be considered,” he said. “When it did come along, no one at the station was considered. Someone was brought in from the outside.”
Still, the deck was stacked against Oprah. “Even before she hit town, WJZ ran a childish series of promotional spots, asking, ‘Do you know what an Oprah is?’ ” recalled Michael Olesker.
“ ‘Ofrey?’ the people in the commercial would answer.
“ ‘Oprah? What’s an Oprah?’
“In hindsight no one could imagine CBS introducing its anchor years earlier by asking, ‘Do you know what a Cronkite is?’ The spots demeaned Oprah and the entire notion of news anchors as serious figures.”
Oprah saw the promotion as anticlimactic. “The whole thing backfired,” she said. “People were expecting The Second Coming and all they got was me.”
Oprah made her debut on August 16, 1976, but all the hoorahs went to Jerry Turner. “He has managed to become a co-anchor without losing any of his impressive prestige and class,” wrote television critic Bill Carter. “More and more he drives home the point that he is head and shoulders above anyone else as a local newsman, maybe above most of the local newsmen in any market in the country. Which brings up the question of why he was ever given any anchor help at all.”
Oprah was saluted for “flawless” news reading and accorded “some style,” but not much. “It is a subdued kind of style that might be easily forgettable….This is not to demean her on-camera abilities, which are considerable. But…Oprah’s personality is not as strong as some of the other Channel 13 people or else it has not really come through yet….[S]he is not in any way arresting—at least not yet.”
Within weeks it became clear that the chemistry between Oprah and her silver-haired, silver-tongued coanchor was toxic. He saw himself as the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, and to him she looked like an imposter who had no right to serve the sacred host of television news to the community of Baltimore. He was astounded that she allowed others to write her copy and then went on the air without reading it ahead of time. This was incomprehensible to a man who revered writing and always came to the office early to compose his newscast. He was appalled by the arch manner she assumed on the air, which she later mocked herself as her condescending lady-to-the-manor-born tone of voice, saying she thought that was how an anchorwoman was supposed to sound. Turner was flabbergasted when Oprah read the word Canada from the teleprompter as “Ca-NAY-da” three times in one newscast. She later mispronounced Barbados as “Barb-a-DOZE.” She read a report about a vote in absentia in California as if “Inabsentia” were a town near San Francisco. A few nights later she characterized someone as having “a blaze attitude,” not knowing how to pronounce blasé. Then she began editorializing on the news, breaking in at one point to say, “Wow, that’s terrible.” Ratings tanked.
For Turner, though, the capper came when Oprah, twenty-four years his junior, turned to him on the air and quipped, “You’re old enough to be my father.” That ripped it, and unbeknownst to Oprah, her days were numbered.
“From the start I knew it wouldn’t work out,” said Bob Turk. “Oprah was just too inexperienced and limited in her knowledge of world affairs, especially geography, to be placed in [the] position…of anchoring with the dean of Baltimore news.”
When the dean became displeased, Oprah got dumped, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put her back together again. On April Fool’s Day 1977, eight months into her reign, Oprah lost her crown. Toppled from the most prestigious position at the station, anchoring the news, she was tossed into television’s scut bucket, to do early-morning cut-ins. The consensus around the station was that while she may have been a power pitcher in Nashville, she couldn’t get the ball over the plate in Baltimore. A minor leaguer who would never make the majors, Oprah became the baseball goat, shunned by fans and blamed by the team for failure.
Years later she and her best friend, Gayle King, a WJZ production assistant at the time, recalled what happened:
OPRAH: [T]hey decided it wasn’t working because the anchorman—
GAYLE: Didn’t like you.
OPRAH: But I didn’t know it. I was so naive. The day they decided that they were going to take me off the 6 o’clock news, I said to Gayle—
GAYLE: I’m just typing at my desk. She goes, “Get in the bathroom now.”
OPRAH: We’d always meet in the bathroom. We were like, “Oh, my God. Do you think Jerry Turner knows?” Of course, Jerry Turner was the main anchor who was kicking my ass out, but we didn’t know that. Jerry was like, “Babe, I don’t even know what happened, Babe.” You know, “Sorry, Babe.”
GAYLE: I was stunned.
OPRAH: It’s like your life is over.
Al Sanders was immediately promoted to coanchor, and left no doubt that he had been sent in to clean up the mess. “I’ve been in this business seventeen years,” he said, drawing a stark contrast to Oprah’s lack of experience. “Whenever you replace anybody on a job and people think that things weren’t quite right before, there is pressure. But I’m comfortable.”
He and Jerry Turner swiftly resurrected the ratings and then dominated the landscape for the next decade. “They were the best local news team in America,” said William F. Baker. Until their deaths—Turner died of esophageal cancer in 1987, Sanders of lung cancer in 1995—WJZ reigned as the number one station in Baltimore.
At the time of Oprah’s severe demotion, the station tried to counter the obvious. “We can’t account for what people will think,” said the general manager, Steve Kimatian. “But we believe this is an opportunity for her to develop herself, to work more on her own. When people see how Oprah does in the assignments she is given they will be convinced that the profile we have of Oprah is a high one.”
Translation: Oprah was a goner.
For someone who had given herself three years to become television’s black Barbara Walters and anchor the news in a top ten market at a network-owned station, or else to take Joan Lunden’s place as the cohost of Good Morning America, Oprah had been brought low. The self-confidence that had hurtled her upward seeped away like a big hot-air balloon dropping from the sky. She was no longer a star. While her contract guaranteed twenty-five more months of pay, she had no standing at the station. Yet she couldn’t quit, because she needed the money. Promotion to a news job in a larger market was out of the question, and to go to a smaller market would dash all of her exalted dreams. For the first time in her life she had no upward options to dodge the fireball of failure rolling her way. Her father and her friends advised her to stay put and hold on. After all, they said, she was still in television in a large market, and getting paid. So Oprah picked up the only mop and pail available. In addition to doing the local cut-ins for Good Morning America, she became “weekend features reporter,” which, as she said, was the lowest position on the newsroom food chain.
“I did mindless, inane, stupid stories and I hated every minute of it,” she said, “but thought even while I was doing it, ‘Well, it doesn’t make any sense to quit because everyone else thinks this is such a great job.’ ”
No longer a show horse, she trudged into work at six every morning and stayed all day, taking every dreary assignment thrown at her. She covered a cockatoo’s birthday party at the zoo, did live shots of elephants when the circus came to town, and chased fire engines. She also took guff when she interviewed the organizer of the Mr. Black Baltimore contest.
“In the newsroom she was asked, ‘Did you go for the Miss Black America title?’ ” recalled Michael Olesker. “If she boasted about it, she had no sense of nuance. If she joked, she understood she was in a business where everyone had an ego.”
Oprah r
ose to the occasion. “Yeah, honey,” she said, patting her rear end, “but I’ve got the black woman’s behind. It’s a disease God inflicted on the black women of America.”
Open and cheerful, she was eager to please and desperate to be liked. “I’m the kind of person who can get along with anyone,” she said. “I have a fear of being disliked, even by people I dislike.” She made friends with everyone at the station and treated her camera crews well. “In those days when we used film, a film editor could make or break a reporter who was on a tight deadline,” said Gary Elion. “They always busted their backs to help Oprah because she was so nice to them. Some people would try to get their way by being tough and nasty and aggressive. Oprah was just the opposite….She made it a point to get along.”
Most important, she hid her resentment toward Jerry Turner and Al Sanders. That bitterness she confided only to her closest female friends, Gayle King and Maria Broom, who understood the difficulty of dealing with male divas. Oprah’s animus surfaced only after both men had died. She was nowhere to be seen among the thousand mourners who thronged Jerry Turner’s funeral in 1987, nor was she among those who came to Baltimore to say goodbye to Al Sanders eight years later.
Her demotion, while hellish at the time, proved to be her crucible, forcing her to develop the formula she needed for future success. She learned that flaming ambition combined with grinding hard work and enduring stamina would reap rich rewards. “I’ve kept a diary since I was 15,” she said, “and I remember writing in the diary…‘I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master this so-called success!’ I was always frustrated with myself, thinking I wasn’t doing enough. I just had to achieve.”
In addition to working overtime on her job at WJZ, she also joined the Association of Black Media Workers and gave speeches throughout the city about women in broadcasting. She became active in her church as a member of Bethel A.M.E., and began mentoring young girls, speaking at schools all over the city. She espoused the goals of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had impressed her the first time she heard him speak, in 1969. “He lit a fire in me that changed the way I saw life….He said, ‘Excellence is the best deterrent to racism. Therefore be excellent,’ and ‘If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.’ That was what I lived by.” As a teenager she made a poster out of construction paper with Jackson’s words and taped it to her mirror, where it stayed until she left Nashville. In Baltimore she helped organize a fund-raising rally for Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) at the Civic Center.
She attended Sunday services every week, always sitting in the center of the second row of the sixteen-hundred-seat church, and became a beloved fixture in the black community through her speaking engagements as well as her political support of local politicians such as Kurt Schmoke and Kweisi Mfume.
“Oprah learned about the city’s power structure, who was important and what made them powerful,” recalled Gary Elion. “She learned the names and faces, where the bones were buried, everything about the power structure, and she learned to use that information to her benefit in gathering the news. She became a force in the city very quickly, because she knew how the city worked. She was very bright, and I knew she was going to go far. She wasn’t terribly partisan—at least she never talked about it with me—but she was highly astute politically. She seemed to have a natural instinct for it and used it to her advantage.”
Oprah increased her visibility in Baltimore through Bethel A.M.E. as much as through her job on television. “I met her…through her church,” said Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. “I was contacted to work collaboratively with her on a project that they would then present. I interviewed Oprah and created a script from that interview, [plus] poetry and song by Sweet Honey. The centerpiece was an excerpt she performed from Jubilee by Margaret [Walker] Alexander….We premiered [“To Make a Poet Black and Beautiful and Bid Her Sing”] at Morgan State in Baltimore, and performed in Nashville and in New York City.”
“Oprah wanted to be an actress more than anything else,” said Jane McClary, a former producer at WJZ.
“She used to put on this one-woman show [with] which, through poetry and dramatic reading, she reenacted black history,” recalled WJZ’s Richard Sher. “And she was fabulous. She played to standing ovations.”
Bill Baker also remembered Oprah’s “little recitals…she always invited me and I always made a point of going….She became notable in the black community.”
Years later Oprah’s impact on black women in Baltimore became the subject of an academic book by Johns Hopkins University sociology professor Katrina Bell McDonald, titled Embracing Sisterhood. “These women marvel at Oprah’s staying power—her ability to have survived some of the most difficult struggles black women face and to have won the envy of a world that typically finds little regard for black women.”
Long after she left Baltimore, several women recalled her traumatic breakup with Lloyd Kramer, a Jewish reporter who worked for WBAL-TV. Even in the late 1970s, interracial relationships were rare in Baltimore. At the time Oprah was involved with Kramer, a local (white) radio personality viciously joked that “Omar Sharif is dating Aunt Jemima.”
“But that didn’t faze them,” said Maria Broom. “She really loved him. They were so close. I thought they might get married and have children….[When] Oprah’s confidence was wrecked, that’s when Lloyd really helped her….It was a deep and caring relationship.”
One of Kramer’s closest friends at the time recalled first meeting Oprah. “Lloyd called me from Baltimore, said he was coming to New York with his new girlfriend and could they stay with me,” said the editor and writer Peter Gethers. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and asked him about her. Lloyd, being Lloyd, hemmed and hawed a bit, then said that she was black and that his parents were really upset that he was dating a black woman. He told me her name was Oprah—which led to a few laughs, because it was not your normal white girlfriend name—and that she was an on-air reporter at a rival station in Baltimore. So a week or two later, Lloyd and Oprah came to New York and stayed with me in my fifth-floor walk-up, West Village, somewhat cockroach-infested apartment. I didn’t have a spare bedroom, or even a spare bed, so they both slept on a pillow couch—which wasn’t really a couch, just a bunch of pillows arranged to be in the shape of a couch—on the living room floor. They spent the weekend, and we had a lot of laughs, hanging out with a few other friends who Lloyd didn’t get to see regularly, having moved to Baltimore.”
The relationship floundered when Kramer left Baltimore for a job at WCBS in New York City and met actress Adrienne Meltzer, whom he married in 1982. “Oprah suffered quietly even though her heart was breaking,” said Maria Broom. “She was hurting, but she moved on with her life.” She also remained grateful and stayed friends with Kramer, later making him a TV director of note. She told Chicago journalist Judy Markey, “Lloyd was wonderful. He stuck with me through the whole demoralizing [Baltimore] experience. That man was the most fun romance I ever had.”
When Oprah joined Bethel A.M.E. in 1976, she arrived with the biblical precepts of a young country girl who had been called “Preacher Woman” by her classmates. A deeply religious Christian who quoted Genesis and Leviticus, she believed that homosexuality was wrong. She was ashamed of her gay brother, Jeffrey, and a year before he died of AIDS she told him he would not go to Heaven because he was a homosexual. In the next seven years she would travel far from the doctrinaire concepts of her Baptist childhood. “I was raised to not question God. It’s a sin,” she said. “[But] I started to think for myself…and that’s when I really started, in my mid-twenties, my own journey towards my spirituality, my spiritual self.”
The journey began when her pastor, Rev. John Richard Bryant, gave a sermon about God being a jealous God. “I was just sitting there thinking for the first time after being raised Baptist…church, church, church, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday…I thought, ‘Now why would God, who is om
nipotent, who has everything, who was able to create me and raise the sun every morning, why would that God be jealous of anything that I have to say? Or be threatened by a question that I would have to ask?’ ”
Even bolstered by religion, she found her public humiliation taking its toll, physically and emotionally. “Reporters leaving the building would find her sitting in her car weeping, unable to summon energy to start the engine,” said Michael Olesker.
“The stress was so bad that her hair started falling out,” recalled Jane McClary. “She said later that she had had a bad perm, but it was definitely stress.”
Oprah consoled herself with food, eating around the clock. “I still have the check I wrote to my first diet doctor—Baltimore 1977,” she said years later. “I was 23 years old, 148 pounds, a size 8, and I thought I was fat. The doctor put me on a 1,200 calorie regimen, and in less than two weeks I had lost ten pounds….Two months later, I’d regained 12. Thus began the cycle of discontent, the struggle with my body. With myself.”
The stories that Oprah and others tell of her battle with food are sometimes comical, but more often sad. “I first met her at Overeaters Anonymous,” said Hilda Ford, the former secretary of human resources for the state of Maryland. “We became close friends, despite our thirty-year age difference….We were both heavy black women who were outsiders to Baltimore at the time….We attended OA meetings, worked out at the gym together, and then went to Oprah’s favorite deli in Cross Keys and—can you believe it?—we gorged on fried chicken.”
People from WJZ recall a party thrown by Pat Wheeler, the station’s director of community services. “At the end of the evening Pat was ushering everyone out, but she couldn’t get Oprah to leave because there was a huge platter of salmon on the dining room table that hadn’t been touched,” said a reporter. “Oprah, an enormous eater, wouldn’t go until she devoured the whole thing. It was quite an amazing display of gluttony.” Oprah freely admitted to compulsive eating. She said her addiction to chocolate chip cookies frequently led her out of her apartment at night in boots and a coat on top of her pajamas for trips to the bakery. Most people understood that her eating was a substitute for something else. “I would hear stories about how she would have binges of eating when she was lonely,” said Bill Carter.