by Kitty Kelley
Brown’s courtship of the Mandelas stirred controversy in 1988, when he announced he had secured world rights to the family’s name. Mandela supporters saw this as exploitation, but Brown claimed he had contracted to protect the use of the name. From prison, Nelson Mandela renounced Brown’s claim, but Winnie Mandela seemed eager to work with him. With Stedman in tow, Brown mentioned the former’s relationship with the richest television star in America, and soon Oprah began funding hot lunches for seniors in Alexandra, a poor black township outside of Johannesburg, where people lived in tin shacks without water, electricity, or sewage disposal. “We wanted to focus attention on the plight of Alexandra,” Brown told reporters. “This is one of the poorest and most ignored parts of the country.” Newspapers carried photographs of Brown’s two employees, Stedman Graham and Armstrong Williams, distributing hot meals. They later brought a television set to Alexandra and showed tapes of Oprah’s talk show so the two hundred impoverished senior citizens could see their benefactor; photos of this event also appeared in the press heralding Oprah’s generosity and Brown’s goodwill.
Winnie Mandela sent Oprah a note, which she framed and hung in her Chicago condominium: “Oprah, You must keep alive! Your mission is sacramental!! A nation loves you.” Soon Winnie and Oprah were on the phone and Oprah was making arrangements to rent a Gulfstream jet to take the Mandela daughters skiing. Once known as “the Mother of the Revolution,” Winnie Mandela was later reviled by antiapartheid leaders when her bodyguards were convicted of abducting four teenage boys and killing one of them by slitting his throat. She, too, was convicted of kidnapping, and given a suspended sentence of six years in prison.
The mission of mercy in Alexandra showed Stedman and Williams how Brown operated on the international stage, partnering with Oprah’s money and garnering goodwill for her as well as for himself. They learned how publicizing good deeds works to good advantage. The two men later became business partners and formed the Graham Williams Group, a public relations company that Stedman used to promote his self-empowerment books. He made GWG sound as if it fogged mirrors. “The corporation helps people to become all that they can be,” he told one reporter. “[It] maximizes resources and helps small firms become large corporations and large corporations become multi-corporations.”
When asked to explain what he meant by this, his business partner shrugged. “Stedman and I have been close for a long time,” Armstrong Williams said in 2008. “But I’ve had my problems with Oprah over the years so now I just deal with him.” Williams removed from his house the two photos Oprah had inscribed to him (“Armstrong—My buddy, Oprah” and “Armstrong, You did great on the show! Thank you for doing it. Oprah”) and packed them with the papers he donated to the University of South Carolina.
Oprah began pulling away from her friendship with Williams soon after the journalist David Brock wrote in his book Blinded by the Right that Williams had made a homosexual advance toward him. Williams was later sued by a male associate for sexual harassment but settled the case out of court. Oprah completely distanced herself when it became public that Williams, by then a conservative commentator, had been secretly paid $240,000 by the George W. Bush administration to promote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act. The media criticized Williams for unethical behavior and possibly illegal use of taxpayer money. His newspaper syndicate dropped his column, he lost his syndicated television show, and after a yearlong investigation he was asked to return $34,000 to the U.S. Department of Education in overpayment.
What Oprah did not know was that by then Armstrong Williams was also on the payroll of the tabloids, regularly feeding information to the National Enquirer, The Star, and the Globe for exclusives on Oprah. “We had a direct pipeline into her office and knew every move she was making, because she and Stedman exchanged their schedules every two weeks and Armstrong gave us copies,” said a former tabloid editor. “So we knew where they were going and what they were doing, which is why our photographers got the intimate photos we published, especially during their vacations together.”
Inadvertently, Oprah had initiated the double-dealing by hiring Armstrong to be her conduit to the tabloids—to feed them stories about her good works. “I can assure you that Oprah definitely knew Armstrong was working with us for her, but she didn’t know he was also working for us, and dishing her,” said a senior tabloid editor involved with the relationship. “Oprah became so obsessed by our coverage that she had Jeff Jacobs call us to start a dialogue. We did not reach out to her. She reached out to us, to try to get some sort of control on what we were doing. We talked to Jacobs and agreed to give him a comment call within forty-eight hours of publication on any Oprah story. He told us there were hot-button issues, especially about her weight, but he wasn’t crazed on the subject like she was….Jacobs never dished Oprah, but Armstrong did and he was a great source for us for a long, long time….He even put me on the phone with Stedman at one point and we solidified a relationship with him as well.”
Stedman moved to North Carolina in 1988 to work with B&C Associates’ Bob Brown, once a police officer like him, and he easily assumed Brown’s conservative politics. “I can tell you Stedman is a Republican through and through,” said Armstrong Williams. “Oprah is influenced by Hollywood politics. She can’t help it. It’s just the way she is. Stedman isn’t. He’s a very conservative dude.”
Oprah admitted her political differences with Stedman when she was asked whether she would have an abortion if she discovered in pregnancy that her child might be born without arms and legs. “Yes, oh yes,” she said. “I know that will stir a lot of folks up but I am real clear on this. I want my child to come into the world with every possible opportunity that nature can give him. Of course once the child is born you deal with what nature has given you but if I knew ahead of time that my child would be handicapped, I would definitely want an abortion. Stedman, however, does not agree with me at all. It would be a BIG DISCUSSION. It’s terrifying when you think about it, to love somebody that you disagree with on such a pivotal issue.”
As a couple, Oprah and Stedman were melded by their devotion to the gospel of self-help. Both upwardly mobile, they read everything on self-improvement, from Creative Visualization and Psycho-cybernetics to The Nature of Personal Reality and The Road Less Traveled. They shared similar religious beliefs—Oprah claimed they knelt every night to say their prayers before bed—and for eight years they attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church in Chicago. Both had suffered from the insidious demarcations of color within their own culture: Oprah feeling she was too dark, and Stedman envied for being too light. Stedman’s father, a housepainter, and his mother, a housekeeper, were first cousins, according to Carlton Jones, Stedman’s third cousin, who said Stedman’s parents had married each other to preserve the light skin that ran in the family.
“There’s a lot of intermarriage in our family,” Jones said. He later sold a sensational story about Stedman to a tabloid but was accused of lying for the money. “I’m related to Stedman through my mother’s side of the family. She was a Spaulding. The Spauldings, Grahams, Mores, and Boyds from these parts were all light-skinned people. And they’ve been marrying each other for over a hundred years.
“We’ve produced folks who look as white as any white man—even with Caucasian features. But we’ve also produced retarded kids—and they marry, too. That’s why there’s so many retarded people in our family tree. First and second cousins got married to each other because they’ve got this skin thing.”
Stedman said that being called “whitey” forced him to prove himself in his small black community. In addition, he had to cope with the social stigma heaped on the family by the learning disabilities of his two younger brothers, James and Darras. “Back then they were called retarded, though now they are described as developmentally disabled,” he said. “Today there are many support groups and programs to help families deal with mental disabilities, but we didn’t have access to those years
ago.” He refuted Carlton Jones’s claim that his parents were first cousins, which could have contributed to the mental disabilities of his brothers. Stedman said his proof could be found in a family history titled A Story of the Descendants of Benjamin Spaulding.
His cousin Carlton said that while Stedman was growing up his parents would not let him bring black friends home. “His father would tell him, ‘I don’t want you bringing those black bastards into my house!’ and he meant it. Stedman never brought his wife or his daughter home for the same reason.” It took him several years to bring Oprah to Whitesboro, but she took him to Nashville to meet her father soon after they started dating.
At that point Stedman was still trying to cope with people shoving him aside to get Oprah’s autograph and interrupting their restaurant meals to hug her. He couldn’t understand why she tolerated the intrusions or how she derived any pleasure from the attention of rude strangers. In Nashville he sat slumped in Vernon’s barbershop while people from the neighborhood flocked to see her, touch her, photograph her, and even sing to her. He wondered out loud if she had the ability to differentiate between people who were meaningful and those who just wanted to be around a celebrity. “Who’s here after all these people are gone?” he asked. “Who really cares about her? I don’t think she really understands, or maybe she understands and hasn’t let that understanding affect her. But Oprah has been through so much, a tough childhood, a broken family, that it’s kind of hard to say this is something she shouldn’t enjoy.”
Oprah and Stedman eventually became life partners, but even after living together for more than two decades they have not married. “You know I say all the time, ‘Stedman, if we had married we wouldn’t be together,’ ” she told Jann Carl of ET. “And he says, ‘For sure. For sure we wouldn’t.’ [Ours] is not a traditional relationship, and marriage is a traditional institution, and certain expectations come with marriage. The truth is he has a life…he has his work…and I have mine, and it just wouldn’t work.”
Her father agreed. “Forget about a wedding,” he said in 2008. “It will never happen….She won’t ever marry Stedman because…she’s all for herself and not about to give up anything for anyone….She’s content with who she is. With Oprah it’s root hog or die poor.” Vernon Winfrey, then seventy-five and still working in his barbershop, explained that hogs must root for food or die of starvation, implying that Oprah needed to root for riches more than she needed to nourish a relationship. She seemed to confirm her father’s assessment when she pronounced herself in favor of prenuptial agreements. “[They] imply you’re not stupid,” she said. “If somebody ever even tried to tell me they wanted to come and take half of everything I had—Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh—the thought!” She also told TV Guide, “Marriage to me means offering—sacrificing—yourself to the relationship. To become one with the relationship. I’m not capable of doing that right now.”
“Not now, not ever,” said Vernon, shaking his head. “My wife, Zelma, died in 1996, and a few years later, when I started seeing the woman [Barbara Williams] who became my second wife, Oprah called me. ‘Are you in love?’ she asked.
“ ‘Can you fall in love more than once?’ I asked her.
“ ‘Yeah,’ she said.
“ ‘No, you can’t,’ I told her. ‘But my daddy used to say, “You can marry in like and then grow fonder. It’s either that or you’ll wander and go yonder.” So I’m in like.’
“Oprah said, ‘Daddy, I guess I’m like you. I’m in like, too. Not in love.’
“ ‘So we can have a double wedding then?’ Oprah said no.”
When she first started dating Stedman she burbled to her audiences about her new boyfriend, “Steddie”—how handsome he was, how romantic, how they might eventually marry, even have children. “I guess I’ll spoil any baby Stedman and I have,” she mused. “I already spoil his daughter, Wendy. I say to her and her friends, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a big shopping spree. You can have one hour at the store to buy whatever you want.’ ”
She talked to reporters about her “ticking clock.” “Some days I really want a girl because you can dress her up and she’d be so cute—she’d be like me. Then I think I’d want to have a boy because I’d like to name him Canaan. Canaan Graham is such a strong name.”
Years later she came closer to her own truth in a televised interview for A&E Biography in which she said, “I truly feel that what I went through at fourteen was a sign that children were not supposed to be part of the equation for me. I have conceived, I have given birth—and it didn’t work out for me. I’m comfortable with the decision to move on.”
Oprah said she surprised her best friend when she admitted she never really wanted children. “I said, ‘No, never.’ Even in seventh grade Gayle knew she wanted twins. She says, ‘If I hadn’t gotten married, I would have had a child. I would have felt like my life is not complete without a child.’ I don’t feel that at all.”
Having announced their engagement on television in 1992 and posed for People, Oprah later regretted talking so much about her relationship with Stedman. “Someone once told me, ‘Every time you mention his name, the perception is you’re doing it because you’re longing for something you cannot have.’ And it never occurred to me that that’s how it was being perceived….But if I hadn’t [talked about him] then everybody would be asking, ‘Who’s the Mystery Man?’ ‘Is she a lesbian?’ ”
Years later people did begin to wonder. Some dismissed Oprah’s relationship with Stedman as a convenience for both, whispering about their sexuality and suggesting that each was helping the other hide same-sex preferences, especially Oprah, who was seen in public with Gayle King far more often than she was seen with Stedman. All three of them denied that they were homosexual, and so did their close friends, but the rumors persisted, particularly in Hollywood, where Oprah befriended a few glamorous female stars known as lipstick lesbians.
Soon she and Gayle and Stedman became fodder for comedians. Kathy Griffin, who won an Emmy in 2008 for her reality show, regaled a largely gay audience at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., by asking why Oprah had taken Gayle to the Emmys that year. “Can’t she go down in the basement and unleash Stedman? Just for one night?” The audience roared. “Oh, c’mon,” Griffin said. “You know I’m supportive of Oprah and her boyfriend, Gayle.”
On David Steinberg’s television show Robin Williams imitated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talking to Oprah on the phone. Williams crossed his legs, daintily pointed his toes, and put his hand to his ear. “Oh, dear. You say Stedman is wearing your clothes again? Not good. Not good at all.” The audience laughed at the send-up of Oprah’s partner as a cross-dresser.
By then the couple was almost inured to public derision. They felt they had faced the worst when News Extra, a Canadian tabloid, published a story titled “New Oprah Shocker! Fiancé Stedman Had Gay Sex with Cousin.” “That was the most difficult time for me,” Oprah told Laura Randolph of Ebony, sobbing as she recounted the story of Stedman’s gay cousin saying he had slept with Stedman at a local motel in Whitesboro, New Jersey. She said the rumor about Stedman’s sexuality “hurt him, hurt him bad,” and she blamed herself. “If I were lean and pretty, nobody would ever say that. What people were really saying is why would a straight, good-looking guy be with her?”
Oprah had brought the tabloid home to show Stedman. “He was so brave,” she said, “and I have never loved him more. He taught me so much during that period. When I handed it to him, he looked at it and said, ‘This is not my life. I don’t have anything to do with this. God obviously has something he wants me to learn.’ Now I’m standing in the middle of the floor and I’m crying, I’m hysterical, and you know what he started doing? He started looking in the closet and talking about resoling his shoes. And I’m, like, resoling your shoes! I have never seen greater manhood in my life.”
Within days Oprah and Stedman filed a $300 million lawsuit against the tabloid for defamation, invasion of privacy, and
intended infliction of emotional distress. Their attorney told reporters that Carlton Jones had sold his story nine months earlier to a U.S. tabloid but the tabloid had not published it because Oprah’s attorneys convinced them the story was not true. Now, the attorney said, Jones said he had lied to the tabloid for money. News Extra chose not to answer the complaint. “I believe the publishers decided that they weren’t going to defend that action,” said the editor. Thirty-five days later, U.S. District Judge Marvin E. Aspen entered a default judgment against the Montreal-based tabloid, which had vacated its offices and gone out of business. Oprah and Stedman felt vindicated by the next day’s headlines: “Oprah Winfrey Wins Suit by Default.”
Stedman still had to steel himself against the derision of being tagged “Mr. Oprah,” “The Little Mister,” or, as the National Review put it, “the terminally affianced Stedman Graham, Miss Adelaide to Oprah’s Nathan Detroit.” In the early days he occasionally lashed out when he was referred to as “Oprah’s boyfriend,” but seven years into the relationship, Oprah told him to get over it. “It’s the thing that bothers him most,” she said, “but I told him if he dies, if he leaves, if he ends up owning Chicago, people are still going to say, ‘That’s Oprah Winfrey’s boyfriend.’ ”
Stedman continued chafing at the description. “There’s no respect in it,” he said. “Although there is credibility in being able to hang with one of the most powerful women in the world, no one respects you for that.” Respect was paramount to this proud man, who was working in a prison when he first met Oprah. During the day he wore the starched blue uniform of a corrections employee whose job was to pat down prisoners; at night he slipped into tasseled loafers, drove a Mercedes, and lived what he later called “a false life.”