Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  Having been sold out to the tabloids by money-hungry relatives and friends in the past, she now decided to take control. Meeting with her staff at the end of 1994, she discussed presenting a show on drug abuse so that she could allude (generally, with no specifics) to her own drug experience. The show would feature mothers, because women look more sympathetic than men do talking about dealing with their addictions. The hour would be taped—not live—so the show could be edited, if necessary. By then Oprah’s ratings had fallen off by 13 percent in the last two seasons, but she remained high in public esteem, and some on her staff worried about the possible backlash from such an admission. But she felt she had no choice.

  The show, taped on January 11, 1995, was heavily promoted. During the taping, Oprah broke down and made her tearful admission: “I did your drug,” she told a mother who was talking about her addiction to crack cocaine. “It’s my life’s great big secret that has always been held over my head.” Beyond that she offered no specifics as to where, when, or with whom she had done drugs, but her public admission now insulated her from anyone from her past stepping forward.

  Oprah’s revelation made national news, and her spokeswoman, Deborah Johns, told reporters that it was “totally spontaneous.” Tim Bennett, president of Harpo Productions, concurred. “[P]urely spontaneous,” he said. “From her heart, from Oprah.” But Chicago columnists Bill Zwecker and Robert Feder, with sources deep inside Harpo, knew better; they reported that Oprah’s admission was a premeditated ploy to boost her ratings and came about because unnamed others had threatened to reveal her secret themselves.

  “Nothing is spontaneous with Oprah,” said a former employee in 2007. “It may seem spontaneous, but it’s all as carefully choreographed as Kabuki. She’s fabulous on television—no one’s better—but nothing is left to chance….She’s like Ronald Reagan. In Hollywood he was considered a B actor, not one of the greats. Not even close. But he was a magnificent communicator on television, with just enough acting ability to appear sincere. Oprah is the same way. She knows how to cry on cue. She once told me that every tear is worth half a ratings point, and she can cry on a dime.” The former employee noted that Oprah’s biggest revelations came during or right before sweeps weeks (February, May, July, and November). “Ratings are everything to Oprah.”

  Whether her drug-use admission was designed to fuel her ratings or to defuse the tabloids, Oprah had been able to reveal her secret in a soft and sympathetic setting, and felt a great weight lifted. “I no longer have to worry about that now,” she said. “I understand the shame. I understand the guilt. I understand the secrecy.”

  Following Oprah’s public drug admission, Randy Cook filed a $20 million lawsuit against her for slander and emotional distress, but she was racked and ready. “I will fight this suit until I am bankrupt before I give even a penny to this liar,” she was quoted as saying. In court documents, she later denied making the “liar” statement. By then Cook, with no visible means of employment, looked like a desperate man trying to feed off a former relationship with a famous woman who was now worth millions. His lawsuit was dismissed by the U.S. District Court of Illinois, but he appealed, and the U.S. Seventh Circuit reinstated several counts of his complaint. After two years of legal skirmishes, Oprah was forced to respond to his interrogatories. In her answers, she finally admitted what she had so long denied: That she and Cook had had sexual relations, and that she and Cook had used cocaine on a regular and consistent basis.

  Cook won the right to a jury trial, but before a date could be set, he dismissed his suit “at the behest of [my] dying mother.” He said his family and friends begged him not to go to court against Oprah Winfrey, but as late as 2007 he was still looking to be paid for his story of the five-month affair he had had more than two decades earlier, and he was still trying—unsuccessfully—to peddle his tell-all book. He claimed that he and Oprah were addicts when they lived together in 1985, but he did not know how she got off drugs. “On a few occasions, Oprah and I would be up all night getting high. Gayle King was set to arrive at the condo those same mornings….We would clean up all the evidence and act like nothing happened moments before Gayle walked through the door. It wasn’t until Oprah and I broke up that Gayle found out [about the drugs]. But when she did, she intervened and very well could have been the one who got Oprah off drugs for good,” he said. “The last time I saw Oprah was in 1985 before she left to film The Color Purple.”

  Eight

  AN IMMUTABLE bond exists among black women born in the South and rocked in the arms of grandmothers who wore Sunday church hats, swayed to spirituals, and instilled reverence for “the ancestors.” When these women meet as strangers they embrace as sisters because they are connected to the soil of country roads in Arkansas, bayous in Louisiana, backwoods in Georgia, and swamps of Mississippi. They know each other before they are introduced.

  “It was that connection to the goodness and strength of southern women that bound me to Oprah,” recalled Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. “I wrote the role of Sofia based on my mother and gave Quincy Jones [producer] and Steven Spielberg [director] a picture of her when she was Oprah’s age. So when Quincy saw Oprah on television he was looking at my mother….When I met Oprah, I, too, saw my mother. That’s the root of my affection for her, and despite the distance she’s put between us since we made the film in 1985, I still feel grateful to her. She arrived to carry the spirit of my mother and she did it really, really well.”

  Oprah credited her self-confidence to her Southern roots. “I’m very blessed because I was raised in the South in Nashville and Mississippi,” she said. “The whole Southern upbringing left me feeling I can do anything. It didn’t do to me what it does to a lot of people. I never in my life felt oppressed.”

  Almost all the women who worked on The Color Purple had some connection to the South, and that sensibility of sisterhood contributed to what Alice Walker called the “holy experience” of making the movie. Before she sold the film rights, she insisted that the producer and director commit themselves to a diverse cast and crew. “I got it in writing that at least fifty percent of those hired had to be black, female or other minority,” she said. “It was a happy set because we all came together in a blessed way to tell the story.”

  The director, Steven Spielberg, did not want a cast of unknowns for what he called his first serious film. After signing Whoopi Goldberg, then unknown, for the lead of Celie, he hoped to sign Tina Turner for the singing role of Shug Avery. He planned to eliminate the lesbianism in the novel and film only one sweet kiss between Celie and Shug, but he wanted Whoopi Goldberg to feel comfortable. “If I’m going to kiss a woman, please let it be Tina,” Whoopi said. Turner was also the first choice of the writer, the producer, and the casting director. Assuming she was on board, Quincy Jones scheduled her meeting with the director, but, as he said later, she flipped on him.

  “I wouldn’t do a black picture if I was dying,” Turner said. “It took me twenty years to get out of that black shit and I ain’t going back.”

  Jones said he was so shocked he couldn’t open his mouth. “But I certainly understood her feelings about not wanting to play an abused woman.” He knew about the years of beatings she had endured from her former husband. So the role went to the actress Margaret Avery, who performed brilliantly and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. But Tina’s rejection left the cast with no known stars and a soupçon of bile. “She turns down The Color Purple and she does Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. All the while saying that she’s seeking credibility as an actress,” said Whoopi Goldberg. “Give me a break.”

  Quincy Jones wrote in his autobiography that Tina Turner’s reaction reflected the attitude of Hollywood at the time. “Nobody wanted to make a black movie,” he said, explaining the resistance he had to overcome to get the film made in 1985. Statistics backed him up. During that summer’s release of teenage films, there had not been one black f
emale face on-screen. So Jones decided to pursue the popular mainstream director of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, whose magic made millions believe in the humanity of a wrinkled rubber alien who looked like Elmer Fudd. The producer then had to convince Alice Walker that Steven Spielberg was the right person to make her book into a major motion picture. Reluctant at first, Walker finally came around. “I guess if he can make people believe in Martians, he can do the same for our folks,” she said.

  Decades after writing the novel that brought her wealth, acclaim, and international recognition, Alice Walker maintained that The Color Purple was a gift given to her to give to others. Her lack of ego about writing the saga of a poor country girl’s life of physical and sexual abuse by men elevated the process of filming for everyone. “We all wanted to make Alice proud,” said Margaret Avery.

  Oprah said that being chosen for the role of Sofia was the single happiest day of her life, and filming the movie was “the only time I ever felt part of a family surrounded by unconditional love.” She recalled the experience with near-worshipful awe. “It was a spiritual evolvement for me,” she said. “I learned to love people doing that film.”

  She forged strong friendships on the set, but few survived the passage of time. She fell out with Whoopi Goldberg, who would later compare her to Lonesome Rhodes, the power-hungry monster in A Face in the Crowd; she tangled with Akosua Busia, who also appeared with her in Native Son and wrote the first screenplay for Beloved, the movie Oprah felt would make her a film legend. She pulled away from Alice Walker and offended Steven Spielberg, but she held tight to Quincy Jones. “I love him more than any human being in the world,” she once said. Revered for his musical genius, “Q,” as his friends call him, opened his influential Hollywood circle to Oprah and made her part of his celebrity world. She once sent him a T-shirt that read: “Oprah Loves Me Unconditionally. I Can Never Fuck Up.”

  Later she would say that it was divine destiny that she got the role of Sofia in The Color Purple. “I wasn’t really, really, really surprised,” she said. “It’s exactly what was supposed to happen. To me.”

  Whether from God or good luck, her casting could definitely be credited to her girth. In the spring of 1985 she had gone to a fat farm to try to lose weight and win the bet she had made with Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show. While pounding the track, she received a call from the casting director, Reuben Cannon, who warned, “If you lose one pound, you lose the part.” She immediately packed her bags and hightailed it to the nearest Dairy Queen.

  At that point, the thirty-one-year-old talk show host was riding a comet of local fame across Chicago: “I could practically do no wrong,” she said. She knew that a major role in a Steven Spielberg film could throw her star into the stratosphere. “I wanted that role more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life,” she said. When she found out she was in the running, she begged her lawyer not to negotiate too hard. “He was pushing, pushing, pushing. I said, ‘Jeff, I’d do it for nothing—please, please don’t ask for any money money.’ He said, ‘You’re not doing it for free.’ ” Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg had already accepted scale ($84,000 apiece), and so had the rest of the cast ($35,000 apiece). “It was a labor of love for everyone,” said Oprah.

  She auditioned on April Fool’s Day of 1985, with Willard Pugh, who was to play her husband, Harpo, in the film. “After we were through, Steven said he’d like to see us upstairs in his office,” she said. “He then told us he wanted us for the roles. I went nuts. I jumped on Steven’s sofa, knocking over his NASA space shuttle model in the process, and that was nothin’—Willard passed out.”

  The director had occasion to recall that moment twenty years later, when his friend Tom Cruise, promoting Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, jumped on Oprah’s couch to demonstrate his love for Katie Holmes, soon to be his wife. There had been rumors in the tabloids about Cruise possibly being homosexual, and Oprah seemed to fan that speculation by telling reporters she was not convinced of the star’s heterosexual enthusiasm. “I just didn’t buy it,” she said. “Didn’t buy it.” Following Cruise’s appearance on her show, the phrase “jump the couch,” meaning “strange or frenetic behavior,” jumped into A Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Spielberg was upset by the criticism his friend received and publicly defended him. “Working with Tom is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given by this business,” he said. He did not mention the time Oprah had exhibited similar exuberance by jumping on his couch in 1985, but by 2005, their twenty-year friendship had frayed. Months after the Cruise couch-jumping, Spielberg stayed away from the Broadway premiere of Oprah’s production of The Color Purple—The Musical, and she ignored the presentation of his lifetime achievement award at the Chicago Film Festival.

  In the beginning, Oprah had been in awe of Steven Spielberg. “He’s the most wonderful human being I’ve ever met,” she told reporters in 1985, adding that everyone in the cast and crew was “awed out of our brains” to be working for him. “Oh, dear Gawd,” she drawled, “I cans believe we is workin’ for Mr. Steven.” When she saw Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment empire, she elevated him to godlike status. He was the movie mogul she aspired to be. “That’s when I wanted my own production company,” she said. Until then, Harpo, Inc., was simply the corporate entity she needed for tax purposes—to answer her fan mail—but after seeing Spielberg’s operation, she and Jeff Jacobs set about making Oprah the first black woman to own her own studio.

  She claimed that as the only non-actor in the cast she was terrified during filming, but her costars laughed at the suggestion that she was intimidated by anybody or anything. Akosua Busia and Margaret Avery jokingly imitated her husky voice to mock her so-called fears: “ ‘I’m so terrified. Look out, everybody, here I come, and I’m scared out of my wits.’ ”

  Oprah later criticized the casting of people of different skin tones as family. “[That] was one of the things that bothered me about The Color Purple.” On the set she did not hesitate to tell the director he was making some of her scenes look too slapsticky. He barred her from watching the dailies. In one memorable scene, where her character wallops the white mayor of the town, Oprah admitted she was not acting. Her response was real and visceral. “Steven had told the white actors to call me ‘nigger,’ but he didn’t tell me what he was going to do. ‘You big fat nigger bitch,’ they said….Nobody had ever called me that, or anything close to it, and I didn’t need to be a method actor to react….I was so shaken and angry that I…really decked the mayor.” Her character pays with years in jail for assaulting a white man. She emerges broken, empty, and blind in one eye to become a maid for the mayor’s wife. “I’m not a subservient person,” said Oprah, “so playing that part of Sofia was hard for me.”

  Spielberg was so impressed by Oprah’s talent for improvisation that he enlarged her part during filming, and drew a magnificent performance out of her that, sadly, she never equaled in subsequent films. But in The Color Purple she was superb. “Unforgettable,” said the Los Angeles Times. “A brazen delight,” said Newsweek. “Outstanding,” agreed The Washington Post. Critics predicted her nomination for a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. The only lackluster review came from her father: “I think I’d put Whoopi Goldberg first, Margaret Avery second, and maybe Oprah was third,” said Vernon Winfrey.

  In the middle of filming, Oprah flew to Chicago to sign contracts with King World to syndicate The Oprah Winfrey Show in the fall of 1986. At the press conference afterward she told reporters, “I’m thrilled at the prospect of beating Phil [Donahue] throughout the country.” With more than one hundred stations committed to carrying her show, she received a $1 million signing bonus. She called her father, then a councilman in Nashville. “Daddy, I’m a millionaire,” she shouted. “I’m a millionaire.” She returned to North Carolina and told Steven Spielberg that he should reconsider putting her name on the movie’s posters, which he did not.

  “I think that hurt Oprah deeply,” said Al
ice Walker, “and may have been the reason why she took over the theater marquee for the musical of The Color Purple twenty years later.” The theater marquee did indeed read, “Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple.”

  Being a part of the film changed Oprah’s life forever. The confluence of her Oscar nomination with the syndication of her talk show produced a perfect storm for star-making, and Jeff Jacobs, in conjunction with King World, mounted what Quincy Jones described as “an unprecedented promotional blitz that started her on the path to where she is now.” Oprah began a round of radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews that lasted for months, making her name known from the cornfields of Kansas to the penthouses of Manhattan. She was profiled by Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, Elle, Interview, Newsweek, Ebony, The Wall Street Journal, and People. She was interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, Good Morning America, a Barbara Walters Special, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and hosted Saturday Night Live. “Seldom before in the history of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has one Academy Award nominee received so much publicity,” wrote Lou Cedrone in the Baltimore Evening Sun. “Since the day she won the nomination, it has almost been impossible to pick up a newspaper, a magazine or a trade publication without coming face to face with the Winfrey image and attendant stories.”

  Oprah’s movie debut had launched her beyond the realm of daytime television, and she could not help but enjoy her elevated status. TV critics who had characterized her as a big, brassy, tabloid talker now treated her with a newfound respect. She was no longer relegated to the entertainment sections of their newspapers; her picture now appeared on the front pages with glowing tributes. She became a full-fledged household name as she crisscrossed the country promoting herself, her movie, and her talk show. She readily acknowledged her new fame—“Ain’t I something, child?”—but she refused to act as though she had been blessed by good luck.