by Kitty Kelley
“After her string of successes, Oprah was ‘devastated’ by [her] demotion,” Gerri Kobren wrote in The Baltimore Sun. “She feared her career was grinding to a halt, and thought briefly about leaving town. Her hair fell out, leaving great bald patches; she had to keep her head wrapped in scarves while working.”
Later, in the first flush of national success, Oprah would put an entirely different spin on losing her hair. Rather than admit to ravaged nerves, she blamed the assistant news director at WJZ, claiming he had sent her to New York City for a makeover after telling her, “ ‘Your hair is too thick, your eyes are too far apart, your nose is too wide, your chin is too long and you need to do something about it.’ ” She said they wanted to perform plastic surgery on her. In her confabulated tales, delivered with gusto to gullible feature writers and adoring audiences, she said the assistant news director came to her one day to announce, “We’re having problems with the way you look. We’re going to send you to New York. They have people there who can help you.” She claimed she was sent to “a very chi chi poo poo lah dee dah salon. The kind that serves you wine, so that when you leave it does not matter what you look like. So…I said, ‘Do you all know how to do black hair?’ And the response was, ‘Oui, madame, we do black hair, we do red hair, we do blonde hair and we do your hair.’ So this French man put a French perm on my black hair. And I was the kind of woman at the time—this was 1977—that I sat there and let this French perm burn through my cerebral cortex rather than tell this man, ‘It’s hurting.’…He left this perm on my head to the point when I got up out of the chair, the only thing holding my hair follicles in were scabs.”
More amusing than accurate, her exaggerated yarn about getting her head fried until she was “as bald as a billiard ball” was all part of a buoyant performance that took her audiences on a happy ride, but something her “aunt” Katharine Esters might have called another one of “Oprah’s lies.” Truth to tell, she had gone to a high-end beauty salon in Manhattan, but she had not been sent by the station. “We didn’t have the budget for that sort of thing,” said the news producer Larry Singer.
“I have no recollection of her being sent to New York City to have her hair redone by a French hairdresser,” said the news director Gary Elion. “I don’t know where that [story] came from.”
Being hell-bent on cosmetic self-improvement, Oprah had taken herself to New York City, but in her mythology of the makeover supposedly mandated by dunderheaded male management, she wailed, “They wanted to make me a Puerto Rican….They wanted me to bleach my skin, change my nose.” At this point in her speeches she usually took a swipe at the news director who had hired and fired her. She claimed he had also wanted her to change her name. Sometimes she said he wanted her to call herself Suzie. Putting a hand on her hip, she would grin and ask her audience, “Do I look like a Suzie to you?” Other times she said he wanted her to be called Cathy.
The only reporter who ever questioned Oprah on her fabulist tales was the television critic for The Baltimore Sun, Bill Carter, later with The New York Times. After interviewing her in 1986, when she insisted that Gary Elion had wanted her to change her name, Carter called the former news director, then a practicing lawyer.
“I’m flattered that Oprah even remembers me,” Elion said ten years after leaving the station, “but I never asked anyone to change her name, except my wife when I asked her to marry me.” Remaining gracious as Oprah pounded away at him in interviews and speeches, Elion simply resigned himself to Winston Churchill’s observation that a lie flies halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on.
In the spring of 1977, William F. Baker arrived to become general manager of WJZ, and was soon promoted to president of Westinghouse Television and Group W Satellite Communications. “We all called him Dr. Baker because he had a PhD,” said Jane McClary, who had been hired by Baker in Cleveland. “I got my job right out of college because my brother-in-law was press secretary to Senator John Glenn of Ohio. Bill Baker was so smart that way. He hired Arleen Weiner, whose husband was a big-time lawyer in Baltimore, and he also hired Maria Shriver. He saw the advantage of hiring people with those kind of connections….Maria wanted to be on the air, but she was too heavy and unattractive then, so Dr. Baker put her in as an associate producer on the Evening Exchange.”
Having created Morning Exchange in Cleveland, Ohio, the highest-rated local morning program in the country and the template for ABC’s Good Morning America, Baker’s mandate was to do the same in Baltimore.
“Daytime television was then an untapped audience of stay-at-home moms, who were completely underestimated,” he said. “All they had were soap operas and game shows. I wanted to give them something more, and after my wife and I had gone to a few parties and gotten to know people at the station, she suggested I consider Oprah. ‘You want to do another Morning Exchange here, and you need a female cohost. I think you should look at Oprah. She wears her heart on her sleeve. Talks all the time, and relates well to people. I think she’d do well for you.’ ”
By then Oprah had worked herself back into news and was anchoring weekdays at noon. She wasn’t permanent and she wasn’t prime time, but she was back in the game. The last thing she wanted to do was to start Dialing for Dollars on a daytime talk show.
“Oh, please, no,” she begged Baker when told that he was buying the popular franchise, and that her new job as cohost of People Are Talking would include giving the Dialing for Dollars password at the start of the program; at the end of the hour she would randomly select a phone number from a bowl of phone numbers previously submitted by viewers. If the selected viewer was watching the show and answered the phone with the correct password, he or she would win money. If the phone was not answered, the money would be added to the jackpot for the next day’s call. It was a forty-five-second device producers used to keep viewers tuned in.
Suddenly cockatoos, circus elephants, and fire engines looked substantive. “The truth is that Oprah was on her way out,” Baker said many years later. “She was simply serving out her contract until she could be let go….I knew she couldn’t read a [news] script very well, but that’s not using the medium to its fullest potential, and it’s not what I had in mind for a morning talk show. I needed someone good at ad-libbing, interested in people, who could handle viewer call-ins and all manner of guests. I thought Oprah would be good at fluff, too, so I suggested her to the program director, Alan Frank, and he recommended we pair her with Richard Sher, a solid news guy who had been at the station since 1975.”
Frank said, “If we do this show right, it should have a white guy and a black woman. It crosses all lines then.”
Baker agreed. “Then came the hard part,” he said. “I had to talk Oprah into it.”
Even at the end of her rope, she would have preferred being let go to doing daytime television. “She really wanted to be a news person,” Baker said. “She knew that news was all that mattered in television at the time. She saw daytime as a real come-down, a failure. She started crying. ‘Please don’t do this to me,’ she begged. ‘It’s the lowest of the low.’ I told her, ‘If you can become a success in daytime, Oprah, I promise that you can have a more profound effect on Baltimore than you can as a news anchor.’ What I was offering her was a real job and, quite frankly, she had no other option.”
Rather than play his take-it-or-leave-it card, Baker promised to help. “I told her I’d open my Rolodex. ‘I’ll do the booking, if need be,’ I said. ‘I’ll make the calls. I’ll oversee the producers. I’ll be there every step of the way, because I’ve got my career riding on this morning talk show as much as you do. We’ll make it a success together.’ ”
What Bill Baker told Oprah he also told reporters. “This show will be the ultimate refinement of every morning talk show that has ever been presented….Housewives are bright, intelligent people. They are deep-thinking people.” He promised to give them shows of substance, which he defined at the time as dealing with Valium abuse,
special diets, male sexuality, fashion, and cooking. “People Are Talking will be the biggest studio morning show this city—or any city—has ever done.” He also wanted to create a talk show to compete with The Phil Donahue Show, which was getting astounding ratings all over the country, including in Baltimore.
Baker promised Oprah a big production budget, a raise in salary, an elaborate new set, a sophisticated telephone hookup, wardrobe consultants, and lighting and makeup specialists, plus the booking office of Westinghouse, which he said would ensure better guests because they would be offered the opportunity of appearing on all five Westinghouse stations around the country.
“Oprah finally agreed to do it,” Baker recalled years later, “but she left my office with tears in her eyes.”
Six
RICHARD SHER cringed as he recalled the August 14, 1978, debut of People Are Talking. “I still remember the headline in The Baltimore Sun,” he said decades later: “ ‘A Breath of Hot Stale Air.’ ”
Television critics shredded the new morning talk show. They blasted Bill Baker for promising intelligent fare for stay-at-home moms and then delivering a “mindless” show about soap operas. They blasted Richard Sher for hogging air time with an ego that “swallow[ed] up the co-host, the guests and most of the furniture.” They slammed the producers for a herky-jerky pace: “People Are Talking sputtered into life yesterday like some sort of souped-up car with a rookie driver who had never used a clutch before.”
Only Oprah escaped the damning reviews. She was commended for a “well polished” smile and handling the Dialing for Dollars segment “with unusual grace, giving this tacky little gimmick about as much class as is possible.” Still, Bill Carter issued a warning in The Baltimore Sun: “A long run at this and Oprah’s image as a news reporter is not going to be helped.”
Oprah continued anchoring the news at noon, but she was no longer driven to become “the black Barbara Walters.” She had been so nervous the day before her talk show debut that she ate three Payday candy bars and five chocolate chip cookies the size of pancakes. But after interviewing two actors from her favorite soap opera, All My Children, she said she felt like she had finally found her place in television. She loved the talk show format—“I used to watch Donahue to figure out how to do it”—and she could hardly wait for the next show to interview men who had had plastic surgery to look like Elvis Presley. Obsessed with the concept of fame as a reflection of greatness, and having worshipped Diana Ross since she was ten years old, Oprah saw People Are Talking as a gateway to celebrities, even lunatic Elvis wannabes.
“She used to come into the makeup room like a little girl and sit down on a stool while I was being made up and ask questions about people she was interested in,” said Dick Maurice, the entertainment editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a frequent guest. “She had this quest for information about stars.”
After the debut show, Oprah was the only one to walk off the set giddy with delight. “We live,” she yelled as she grabbed a glass of champagne and hugged Richard Sher, who was reeling with misgivings. The producers were also a little shaky, but Oprah was soaring. “I came off the air, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do….This is it. This is what I was born to do….It just felt like breathing. It was the most natural process for me.”
Within a week, The Baltimore Sun agreed. “Oprah is rapidly proving that she was an excellent selection for a morning talk show host,” wrote Bill Carter. “She simply looks very good in the morning talk format. She is low key but bright and attractive, and that combination works well over a morning cup of coffee.”
“It took us two or three years to jell,” said Richard Sher, the dominant partner to Oprah’s second banana. “My Afro was as big as hers.” Quick and witty, Sher had been selected because he resembled Phil Donahue and might appeal to Donahue’s female audience, which Sher never disputed, even given a chance. “He was the talent,” joked Oprah. “Just ask him.” As a Southern black woman who shrank from confrontation and described herself as a “people pleaser,” she accommodated her cocky cohost, and gave his ego a wide berth. She had learned from her bruising debacle with Jerry Turner and was determined to make this partnership work.
“We were very close,” recalled Sher. “I’ll never work with anyone again like that. We knew what each other was thinking….I once took her to the hospital because she had chest pains and she put me down as next of kin. She had her own pretzel and potato chip drawer in our house. She’d jog up, we’d hear the door open, and the drawer open and we’d know Ope was there. She was real close to my wife, Annabelle, and the kids. She used to call me her best girlfriend.”
“He taught me how to be Jewish,” said Oprah. “He also taught me to swear.”
“Oprah and Richard had a very close relationship,” said Barbara Hamm, an associate producer for People Are Talking. “They were like brother and sister, although they had creative disagreements about what guests should be on the show and the line of questioning.” She preferred movie stars, rock stars, and soap opera stars; he wanted government officials and corporate moguls. She asked questions that made him squirm.
“Oprah liked to have fun,” Hamm said, “get the audience into the show. Richard wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to lose control. During one show she got the audience literally dancing in the aisles. It was wild and it worked.”
Unlike her cohost, Oprah was not overly concerned about her professional image. Nor was she afraid to ask naive questions and look silly, even undignified, on occasion. She exercised with manic fitness guru Richard Simmons, danced with ethnic dancers, and interviewed a prostitute who had killed a client. She also decorated cakes, basted turkeys, and bobbed for apples. When Richard Sher entered into a ponderous discussion about television journalism with Frank Reynolds, the network anchor for ABC-TV, Oprah sat on the couch listening quietly.
“Her cohost was asking all these serious, boring questions,” recalled Kelly Craig, a nineteen-year-old college student who later became a reporter on WTVJ in Miami. “When it was Oprah’s turn, she asked, ‘So what does Frank Reynolds eat for dinner?’ ” The young woman was impressed by Oprah’s off-the-wall query because she felt this was what the audience really wanted to know. Craig decided if she ever got the chance to interview celebrities, she’d ask questions like Oprah’s.
“Oprah had to be taught how to ask those questions,” recalled Jane McClary, “and you have to give the producer Sherry Burns credit for training Oprah to be Oprah….I can remember Sherry screaming and yelling and swearing at Oprah day after day. ‘Oprah, what the hell were you thinking? What was in your head? Why didn’t you ask that obvious question? You should always ask the first thing that comes to mind. Just say it. Say it. Say it. Put your gut out there, girl. Don’t be afraid. Just do it.’ ”
One morning People Are Talking booked conjoined twins as guests, thirty-two-year-old women attached at the tops of their heads. They talked about going through life sharing everything. Oprah was intrigued. “When one of you has to go to the bathroom at night, does the other one have to go with her?” she asked. Richard Sher nearly fell off his perch.
Oprah soon saw herself as the audience’s back-fence neighbor. “I was dishing the dirt and meddling in other folks’ business which is what I do best. My acting came in handy. In acting you lose your personality in favor of the character you’re playing but you use it to provide energy for your character. The same way on [a talk show]. I…use it to concentrate on bringing the most out of my guests.”
She certainly did that with the poultry mogul Frank Perdue. “He was a difficult guest, almost surly,” recalled Barbara Hamm. “Toward the end of the show, Oprah asked if it bothered him when people said he looked like a chicken. He took offense and asked if she minded people saying she looked like a baboon. Oprah couldn’t believe…that he would make such a racist remark. Her chicken comment may have been a little rude, but to come back with that…We cut to a commercial. Oprah took it graciously and let it go. I
t was a stunning moment.”
Years later, when she became overly concerned about her public image and did not want to be seen as a victim of racism, Oprah denied the exchange had ever taken place. “Frank Perdue did not call me a baboon,” she told Vibe magazine in 1997, dismissing the story as an urban myth. Those at WJZ who saw the show, such as Barbara Hamm and Marty Bass, could not explain her denial. Bob Leffler, a public relations executive in Baltimore, said, “I forget now whether Frank Perdue called her a gorilla or a monkey or a baboon. But it was some kind of primate….I saw the show and have never forgotten it.” The incident was not covered in the Baltimore papers, and few tapes of People Are Talking exist. “We used two-inch tapes then,” said Bill Baker. “They were very expensive, so we reused them and recorded over [everything].”
WJZ’s essayist, Mike Olesker, mentioned the Frank Perdue show in his book about television news, but the most indelible show was the one on which Oprah and Richard interviewed the famous fashion model Beverly Johnson.
“I like handsome, sexy men,” she said.
“What’s your ideal first date?” Oprah asked.
“To be taken to a nice restaurant and to be wined and dined. And then have the man take me home…”
“Yes?”
“And give me an enema,” she said.
Richard Sher immediately broke for a commercial. “He and Oprah hooted about the remark for years,” said Olesker. “But at that moment, it was another reminder for Sher: Could he talk to fashion models in the morning, risking diarrheic confessions, and maintain credibility in the evening [reporting the news]?”