by Kitty Kelley
Through the pretty broadcaster Robin Robinson, Stedman had been given entrée into the gold coast of Chicago’s black society, which included media stars like Oprah, athletes like Michael Jordan, and publishing mogul Linda Johnson Rice, whose family owned Ebony and Jet. Within this elite circle were Ivy League doctors, lawyers, bankers, and professors, who had achieved the kind of success Stedman never dreamed possible for himself. While he looked like he could belong to the crowd of accomplished professionals—all smooth, smart, and stylish—he knew his degree from the tiny Baptist college Hardin-Simmons in Abilene, Texas, gave him few bragging rights alongside graduates of Harvard.
Flying at that high altitude was transformative for Stedman, and soon he saw that body-searching felons was not going to give him the life he wanted. Prison guards did not get to socialize with Michael Jordan. As a high-school and college basketball star, Stedman wanted nothing more than to play for the NBA, and not being selected had been the biggest disappointment of his life. So when Michael Jordan started doing commercials and needed a stand-in, Stedman leaped, eager to be a part—any part—of Jordan’s world. He idolized the Chicago Bulls forward, not simply for his dazzling athleticism but for turning his success on the court into a lucrative business.
Wanting to associate himself with professional athletes, Stedman devised his plan for the nonprofit organization called Athletes Against Drugs. He enlisted Michael Jordan’s endorsement to get other athletes to join and sign vague statements that they were “drug-free and…positive role models for today’s youth.” The wording of his first mission statement was equally vague: “Educate children to live a better lifestyle.” He then refined it to “Educate youth to make healthy life decisions.” He envisioned arranging public appearances for big-name athletes at sporting events and tournaments, to be underwritten by corporate sponsors, which would enable him to look like he was doing well by doing good while associating with big-time athletes. “Don’t call Stedman a jock sniffer,” warned Armstrong Williams. “He hates that image.”
To start AAD, Stedman sold his Mercedes and cashed in his retirement fund from the corrections system, and used the little he had accumulated from his first job as a police officer in Fort Worth, Texas, followed by three years in the army. Even without an income or a business plan, he finally felt he had a sense of purpose and a little status. He continued runway modeling to pay expenses after resigning from the Bureau of Prisons, where he claimed to have been “on track to one day become a warden in the federal corrections system.”
The tax returns for AAD indicate the organization collects an average of $275,000 a year, most of which is raised from an annual celebrity golf tournament. Contributors to AAD pay for the annual dinner gala that allows Stedman to sit at the head table with professional athletes. Being chairman of Athletes Against Drugs certainly gives him a grand title, but no longer a salary. Sometime before 2002, he had to lend his organization more than $200,000 to keep it afloat. How AAD distributes funds “to educate youth to make healthy life decisions” is not specified.
Oprah, who did not publicly admit her drug use until 1995, told Stedman about it early in their relationship. “I was concerned about how it would affect him, but he knew from the start it was one of the secrets I was having trouble dealing with and he encouraged me not to let it be a big fear,” she said. “He’s never taken a single drug and doesn’t drink alcohol.”
Stedman was intent on improving his lot, but if he needed goading, Oprah certainly provided it when she was asked if she cared what a man did for a living. She did not hesitate.
“I do care about whether or not he’s a ditch digger. I know that sounds elitist. But I have such great aspirations for myself in life—to really fulfill my human potential—that I just don’t understand people who don’t aspire to do or be anything.”
Oprah’s ambitions were gargantuan, and her craving for recognition almost insatiable. Without an Off button, her engine churned constantly as she jammed her days and nights with nonstop activity. “My schedule is very hectic, but it’s exactly the kind of life I’ve always wanted,” she said. “I’ve always said I wanted to be so busy that I wouldn’t have time to breathe.”
Every morning after doing her talk show, at least in the early years, she spent time with her audiences—shaking hands, posing for pictures, signing autographs. She met with her producers to discuss the next day’s show, and she scrutinized the overnight ratings. She pushed forward with plans to build her $10 million studio (“I’ve got to move on from millionaire to mogul”); she pursued movie roles (“I’m going to be a great, great actress”); she purchased book rights to produce her own films, the first being the biography of Madame C. J. Walker, who developed cosmetics for black women that were sold door-to-door, making her the first self-made female millionaire in America. Oprah explored developing her own clothing line for “the more substantial woman,” because she couldn’t find designer clothes to fit her. When she did find something she loved, her dresser had to buy two outfits in the largest size available and have them sewn together, which was costly and time-consuming. She met with Chicago’s Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises to discuss opening a restaurant. She agreed to be a partner but would not allow her name to be used, because if it failed, she did not want to be blamed. She wanted to establish an institute for women as “an extension of what we try to do for an hour on the show…I don’t know what to call it other than a center for self-improvement.” She worked with Maya Angelou to write a one-woman show for her to take to Broadway, and she discussed writing her autobiography. Oprah knew 1987 was her time, as blacks stepped to the forefront in politics (Jesse Jackson), movies (Eddie Murphy), music (Whitney Houston), network news (Bryant Gumbel), and prime-time television (Bill Cosby).
Hell-bent on becoming a presence in prime time herself, Oprah wanted to star in her own sitcom, like Bill Cosby. “I will produce it and sell it to the network,” she said, “and it will be a raging success.” Having proved her genius on television, she considered herself a natural for a comedy about what goes on behind the scenes of a television talk show based in Chicago. She sold the idea for Chicago Grapevine and spent weeks in 1987 flying back and forth to Los Angeles to work on the pilot, but in the end Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Entertainment, was unimpressed. He pronounced the concept “misguided,” said the Oprah character was not depicted successfully as “outspoken and realistic,” and canceled the thirteen-week series. Oprah did not see the cancelation as a failure, or even a setback. It was simply another step in her mystical evolution.
After filling her days, she booked her nights and weekends with photo shoots, interviews, speeches, and public appearances. “Even doing the number one talk show isn’t enough—it’s like breathing to me—I need something else to do,” she said. She wanted Stedman to accompany her everywhere, as if to show him off and perhaps prove she could attract a delicious-looking man.
A year into their relationship they got walloped with the first of many tabloid “exclusives,” this one claiming that Stedman had called off their wedding. Oprah, who had never learned to ignore the grocery store press, flew into a smackdown and denounced the story on her show and to every reporter within range.
“It’s outrageous,” she told Bill Carter of The Baltimore Sun. “We were going to sue,” until the paper promised a retraction. “This story said I was jilted, and crying my heart out, thinking of taking a leave of absence from the show. I was shattered and bitter. And that wedding dress I was waiting to lose weight to get into. It was the worst thing I’ve ever [read]. I can’t remember feeling that bad. Because people believed it and because of the kind of image not only that I created, but that I also believe in: Women being responsible for themselves. And so being portrayed as falling apart because I’d been jilted by some man that was just too much. It was even worse than the wedding dress stuff.”
Oprah told the reporter that she had called Jackie Onassis for consolation. “She had called me earlier about possib
ly doing a book,” Oprah said, “and she told me I can’t control [what] other people [write].”
The conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was duly noted in Carter’s story. “There still seems to be a side of Oprah that wants you to know all the amazing people her fame has brought her in touch with,” he wrote. “She is one of the most impressive name-droppers in the U.S.A.:
The call to Jackie O. The show with Eddie (as in Murphy). The dinner in New York at a table next to Cal (as in Klein). The movie rights deal with Quincy (as in Jones).”
Yet Oprah hastened to assure the writer that despite all her new-found riches and fame and celebrity friends, she was just as plain and ordinary as the people who watched her show and loved her with such intensity. “I really do still think I’m just like everybody else,” she said. “I’m just me.”
Ten
WHEN OPRAH made the cover of People magazine on January 12, 1987, she reached the summit of cynosure status. It was her first of twelve People covers in twenty years, putting her in a league with Princess Diana (fifty-two covers), Julia Roberts (twenty-one covers), Michael Jackson (eighteen covers), and Elizabeth Taylor (fourteen covers). Being crowned by the celebrity chronicle made her an instant pop culture icon, and she was ecstatic. Those around her were not so pleased.
She rankled her family by talking in the article about the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a youngster, something they continued to deny. She upset child abuse victims by saying she’d found the attention pleasurable and that a lot of confusion and guilt over sexual molestation comes because “it does feel good.” She insulted her overweight sisters by saying, “Women, always black women, 300 to 400 pounds, waddle up to me, rolling down the street and say, ‘You know, people are always confusin’ me for you.’ I know when they’re coming. I say, ‘Here comes another one who thinks she looks like me.’ ” She alienated her alma mater by her “hated, hated, hated” line, referring to Tennessee State and her references about her unease when approached by anyone from her college days.
In response to her cutting comments, her family dummied up; child abuse victims fell silent; overweight black women held their tongues; and Tennessee State University rolled over, paws up, and invited her to be their commencement speaker. It was the first glimpse of the empress’s new clothes. As Oprah said years later, “In this society…nobody listens to you unless you have some bling, some money, some clout, some access.” Having acquired all of that and more, she now exerted a dizzying kind of power that compelled many people to be silent, even to genuflect, in the face of insult.
The invitation from TSU was a heavy load of bricks for some to carry. Nashville attorney Renard A. Hirsch, Sr., wrote a letter to the editor of The Tennessean, the city’s largest newspaper, saying he had attended school with Oprah and did not recall the anger that she claimed was rampant there. Other TSU students were also riled. Greg Carr, president of the student government, said Oprah “talked about TSU like a dog.” Roderick McDavis (Class of ’86) wrote a letter to the editor of The Meter, the student newspaper, saying, “Some of us worked too damn hard at TSU to have a ‘drop out’ degrade and discredit our school.” Lacking three credit hours, Oprah had never graduated from TSU.
The Meter’s editor, Jerry Ingram, acknowledged the negative reactions Oprah had stirred. “Some people were shocked….If she said that in People, they wonder what she will say at commencement.”
A few students who felt Oprah was trying to ingratiate herself to white audiences with comments about “angry” blacks predicted hisses and boos when she arrived on campus. The outrage at TSU arose not simply because a black woman had demeaned a historically black college and put students on the defensive, but because it was the most famous black woman in the country reviling them in a national magazine that circulated to twenty million people. Oprah’s words were particularly wounding because TSU, beset by inadequate facilities and poor programs at the time, was undergoing a court-mandated plan to eradicate the pernicious effects of segregation that would not be completed for another nine years.
Interestingly, the university did not offer Oprah an honorary degree, which is customary for a commencement speaker. Instead, they proffered a plaque “in recognition of excellence in television and films.” In return, Oprah asked for the college degree she had been denied in 1975. TSU agreed to give her a diploma and to graduate her with the class of 1987, if she wrote a paper to fulfill her requirements. (Apparently she did, although the university would not confirm the fact and neither would Oprah.)
Graduation day, May 2, 1987, was a dream come true for Vernon Winfrey, who finally had someone in the family with a college degree. “Even though I’ve gone on and done a few things in life,” Oprah teased in her speech, “every time I called home, my father would say, ‘When are you going to get that degree? You’re not going to amount to anything without that degree….’ So this is a special day for my dad.” She waved her diploma at Vernon, who beamed from the front row.
Oprah arrived in Nashville like a movie star. She told reporters she had flown in on a chartered jet with her entourage and was met at the airport by two gray limousines. She walked onto campus in bright yellow patent leather high heels to match the bright yellow sash on her black graduation gown. She charmed the audience with her speech—a mixture of high religious fervor and rollicking good humor. She mitigated the sting of her People comments by announcing plans to fund ten scholarships in her father’s name. Three months later, when she wrote the first check ($50,000), she asked the university to fly someone to Chicago to pick it up and pose with her for photographs, which she released to the Associated Press. “This donation is certainly historical for us because we haven’t had this kind of support in the past,” said Dr. Calvin O. Atchison, executive director of the TSU Foundation, acknowledging that Oprah’s donation was the largest the university had ever received.
For the next eight years she committed herself to funding the scholarships, which covered everything—room, board, books, and tuition, plus a spending allowance. She selected the scholarship winners from a list of incoming students and made sure each knew of the requirement to maintain a B average. When a couple of them let their grades slip, she wrote to them: “I understand that the first year is really difficult and there were a lot of adjustments to be made. I believe in you. We all made an agreement that it would be a three-point average, not a 2.483 and I know you want to uphold your end of the agreement, because I intend to uphold mine.”
Her good intentions crashed in 1995 when one of the scholarship students alleged sexual harassment by Vernon Winfrey after seeking his help for additional funds. “I needed the money to take a summer microbiology class,” said Pamela D. Kennedy. “Mr. Winfrey [was] a family friend and asked me to meet him at his barbershop. I expected it to be a short meeting.”
After twenty-five minutes, she said, Vernon, sixty-two, excused himself to go to the bathroom. She claimed that when he returned he exposed himself and made an obscene gesture before grabbing her, kissing her, and begging her to touch him. “ ‘I’m doing you a favor,’ he said. ‘You need to do me a favor. Tomorrow’s my birthday and you could really make an old man happy. Come on, honey.’
“At that moment, I knew I had been set up,” she said. “He purposely had me come down to the shop when it was closed so we would be alone. Other girls might fall for his act, but I wouldn’t think of prostituting myself. I told him, ‘How dare you! I don’t care if you are Oprah’s father and can help me. I refuse to have sex with you.’ ” She said she ran from the barbershop and Vernon chased her down the street, trying to make amends. “ ‘Honey, I hope this doesn’t ruin our friendship,’ ” he said.
That same day, January 30, 1995, the twenty-eight-year-old student filed a complaint with Nashville police against Vernon, a former member of the Metro Council. The crime of indecent exposure carried a fine of up to $2,500 and a jail sentence of several months. Vernon denied the charge. “I regret the day I ever let this girl
set foot in my barbershop,” he said. “Obviously she has dollar signs in her eyes.”
When the sex scandal hit the press, Oprah was silent for a day or so. Then she issued a statement, standing foursquare behind her father. “He is one of the most honorable men I know,” she said. “In his professional and personal life he has always tried to do what is right and help people.”
When the police began investigating her father, she sent lawyers to Nashville to help him. His accuser passed a lie detector test, which was made public, but weeks later prosecutors determined there was not sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped the charges against Vernon, in large part because Ms. Kennedy’s lawyer, Frank Thompson-McLeod, had solicited a bribe, saying the charges would disappear if Vernon paid a certain amount of money. The attorney was arrested and lost his license to practice. Ms. Kennedy was not charged. “Greed is the only reason I can conclude that he did this,” said the circuit court judge after sentencing the lawyer to thirty days in jail.
“I knew, knowing God as I do, that that would happen,” Oprah said, “but I kept asking, ‘Why has this happened and what am I supposed to learn from it?’ ” The answer, she believed, was what she had been telling her father: that her wealth and fame were so immense that people would try to use him to get to her. “My father still doesn’t know who I am,” she told Ebony, saying Vernon did not grasp the enormity of her celebrity. “So I think something had to happen for him to see he can’t continue to be Mr. Friendly-Friendly.” She said she felt guilty “because if he didn’t have me for a daughter that could not have happened to him.” But more than guilt was her fear of what the allegation might do to him. “I was really worried about him for a while, because I thought it was going to break his spirit.”