Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  During the November sweeps of 1990, Oprah acknowledged the nightmare of her “Diet Dreams” with a show titled “The Pain of Regain”: she had gained back all of the sixty-seven pounds, plus more. She would not say how much she weighed, but she later confided it was more than Mike Tyson, boxing’s heavyweight champion. “I will never diet again,” she said. “I certainly will never fast again.”

  From her fan mail, Oprah knew her audiences adored her, so she was surprised when most said they preferred the original fat Oprah to the new “lite” version. They said when she was heavy she was more approachable; she laughed easily and hugged everyone. The thin Oprah seemed pinched and strained, as if the effort to diet had sapped her of her cheerfulness. Viewers let her know that they were much more comfortable with hefty Oprah than sylph Oprah, who, they felt, acted a little smug and a trifle self-satisfied. Her bulk had reassured people that looks were superficial, only skin-deep. Now they realized that she never really believed that. Years later she admitted as much. “I do know what it’s like to live inside of a body that’s twice your size….I know that anybody who’s there would want it to be different. Even people who say they’ve made peace with it. You reach a point where you fight it, fight it, fight it, and then you say you don’t want to fight it anymore….

  “I can tell you this, even being a famous person, that people treat you so differently when you’re fat than when you’re thin. It is discrimination that nobody ever talks about.”

  As much as Oprah disliked her heavy self, she, too, seemed more at ease with her corpulence than she did without it. “I always felt safer and more protected when I was heavy,” she said, “although I didn’t really know what I was trying to protect, any more than I knew what I was afraid of.” It seemed that the same limitless ambition that had rocketed her to the top of her career had set her appestat: while gaining weight worked to her professional advantage, making her what Essence described as “the quintessential mammy figure,” her huge size made her absolutely miserable as a person. Ebony suggested that her “touchy-feely” manner toward her predominantly white audiences “is reminiscent of the stereotypical Southern Mammy.” People described her as “the powerful mommy figure,” which she did not accept. “A woman told me recently, ‘I used to think you were more compassionate when you were fat because you were like a mother to me. And now you’re this sex thing,’ ” recalled Oprah. “I said, ‘Is it something I said, something I did? Because I never felt like I was your mother.’ ”

  Some black comedians were mean-spirited, particularly Keenan and Damon Wayans on In Living Color, the comedy show they developed for the Fox Network. In one spoof titled “Oprah on Eating,” the comedians’ sister Kim Wayans imitated Oprah doing an interview: she began eating ferociously until she blew up like a balloon and exploded potato chips all over her audience. Abiola Sinclair pronounced the skit “vicious” in the New York Amsterdam News: “Sensible and genuine Black people never were overly concerned about Oprah’s weight. What was of more concern to many of us was her feeling the need to wear funny colored [green] contact lenses, seemingly indicative of some sort of racial dissatisfaction. At her heaviest Oprah never was a slob, and always looked good. In our opinion…a little weight on her looks better than that unnatural skin and bones body, with that big round head sitting on it. She could be a size 14 and still be fit. The key word is fit.”

  Oprah probably felt more discrimination for being fat than she ever did for being black. The African American community was far more accepting of large-scale women than the white stick world, which prized anorexics as straight as a fork tine.

  As a black woman who broke the tape in her sprint to success, Oprah was universally applauded and rewarded for her professional triumph, but as a fat woman, she felt excluded from the fork-tine world, and the exclusion was painful. “People take you more seriously [when you’re thin],” Oprah said. “You’re more validated as a human being….” “I hate myself fat….It’s made me terribly uncomfortable with men.” “I don’t believe fat people who say they’re happy. They’re not. I don’t care what they say.”

  Over her career she would win seven Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show Host, nine Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show, seven NAACP Image awards, Broadcaster of the Year from the International Radio and Television Society, the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. Yet, sadly, she felt her greatest accomplishment in life was losing sixty-seven pounds, and her biggest failure was regaining it.

  “I remember [before she went on that fast] being at Oprah’s show in Washington, D.C., when I was the research director for WUSA-TV,” said Candy Miles-Crocker, a beautiful black woman. “Oprah wore a bright yellow knit suit and she must’ve weighed close to 275 pounds then. She was huge, and that knit skirt clung to her like the wrapper on a sausage. It was also slit up the front so that when she sat down the slit spread, as did her fat…and…oh, dear…it was horrible. I felt awful for her. She knew what was happening, so during the break she went off to the side and turned the skirt so the split wouldn’t be in the front. Watching her try to maneuver that skirt over her thunderously fat thighs was like watching a ship try to dock in a slip for a rowboat.”

  Oprah’s weight hung like a harness around her neck, but as beleaguered as she felt, she did not completely give up. She continued going to health spas, where she eventually met Rosie Daley, who became her chef, and later, Bob Greene, who became her trainer. Together, they managed to alter her lifestyle and her size in time for her fortieth birthday, but even then it was not easy.

  “Before Rosie arrived, Mrs. Eddins [Oprah’s honorary godmother from Nashville] did all the cooking, and every lunch was fried chicken, potato salad, heaping bowls of macaroni and cheese with freshly baked pies for dessert—and Oprah ate it all,” recalled her landscape architect James van Sweden. “Rosie introduced her to fresh fruits and vegetables, but it took Oprah a while to make friends with food that wasn’t fried or sauced.” Oprah said herself that Rosie worked with her for two years before she ever lost a pound.

  During the time she was regaining her weight in 1990, she was sledgehammered by her sister, who told the tabloids the long-held family secret of Oprah’s pregnancy at the age of fourteen and of the baby boy she had given birth to. This tell-all came after Oprah had discontinued her sister’s $1,200-a-month allowance because she was using it to buy drugs, so Patricia Lee Lloyd went to the National Enquirer, which paid her $19,000 to reveal details about Oprah’s so-called “wild and promiscuous early years,” when she sneaked older men into the house and did “The Horse” while her mother was at work.

  “She said that’s what she used to do,” Patricia Lee Lloyd told the tabloid, “and I realized that all those afternoons she was making out with her men.”

  Oprah was so humiliated by her sister’s revelations that she took to her bed for three days. “I thought my whole life was over,” she said later. “The world’s going to hate me. They’re all going to say, ‘What a shameful, wicked woman. What a little whore.’ But Stedman…got me through it. He helped me to be brave about it….I cried and cried. I remember him coming into the bedroom that Sunday afternoon, the room darkened from the closed curtains. Standing before me, looking like he, too, had shed tears, he handed me the tabloid and said, ‘I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.’ ” Stedman helped her see that what had happened to her happens to many, but he said that as one of God’s special children, she would survive and thrive and be able to help others do the same. “Stedman thinks I’m one of those chosen people,” Oprah said. “You know, hand-picked by the universe to do great things.”

  A week later she got slammed with the second installment of her “shameful secret past,” in which her sister popped all the bubbles Oprah had blown about her poverty-stricken childhood. Patricia also revealed the “lies Oprah told that made Mom cry,
” and the stories Oprah had never told, about how she “pawned Mom’s ring, stole her money and ran away from home.”

  Suddenly the mythology Oprah had created for herself started to unravel. “She told a hundred reporters about her pet cockroach, Sandy,” recalled the novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, then a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. “She told me the Sandy story, too…back when she was only an upstart young television host giving Phil Donahue a headache….Even back then, there was a drivenness about her that seemed not fully explained even by her towering ambition. She was an enigma, a high-flying solo pilot full of rehearsed one-liners but uncomfortable with too much introspection. And as any therapist can tell you, the people who run hardest usually are trying to outrun something, almost always something that was not their fault, almost always something in the past.” In a sympathetic column titled “Maybe We Know Now What Makes Oprah Run,” Mitchard wrote that if Oprah could embrace the truth of her life she would be able “to caution young girls in tough places to avoid early pregnancy.” Interestingly, Mitchard’s novel The Deep End of the Ocean became the first choice for the book club Oprah started six years later, but Oprah “fortunately” did not make the connection between the columnist and the novelist.

  Pressed by her sister’s tabloid revelations, Oprah issued a public statement: “It is true that when I was 14 years old I became pregnant. The baby was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. I had hoped this matter could stay private until I was fully able to deal with my own deep emotions and feelings. It saddens me deeply that a publication would pay large sums of money to a drug-dependent, deeply disturbed individual and then publish her remarks. My heart goes out to my half sister.” Oprah later told reporters that she had paid for her sister’s drug treatment at the Hazelden clinic. “[I told her] I’m going to spend whatever it costs. But if you blow it, you can die a junkie on the street. And I mean that with all my heart.” Oprah did not speak to Patricia for two years after her tabloid revelations, but she generously paid for the education of her sister’s two daughters, Alisha and Chrishaunda.

  “[That article] was the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. The hurt, the feeling of betrayal was as bad as it gets,” said Oprah. “But I kept reminding myself to look for the lesson—and all of a sudden something clicked for the first time. I connected my own sexual promiscuity as a teenager with the sexual abuse I had suffered as a child. Strange as it many seem, I had never seen the connection between the two before. It took that terrible article in the tabloids to make me realize I was still carrying that guilt around with me. I know that there are other lessons for me to learn, but the first one was that I was not responsible for the abuse and that I had to get rid of the shame I was carrying.”

  Finally, Oprah invited her sister to her farm in Indiana to try to make amends. “We spent the whole weekend talking,” Patricia said later. “Oprah let me have it. She said I was a letdown, she was disappointed in me and I hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. I had no degree, no career, no nothing.”

  A few years later Oprah again cut off all communication with her sister. “I told her in the last conversation we had that we don’t share the same moral code, so there’s no reason to pretend in ‘sisterhood,’ ” she told reporters. “I bought her a home and provided her with hundreds of thousands of dollars to get set up, but she said she didn’t need to work.” Oprah disagreed—strongly. “I think people need to [work].”

  Patricia continued to bounce in and out of rehab until 2003 when, at the age of forty-two, she died of an accidental drug overdose. “I had just put her through rehab [again],” Oprah told reporters, “and what happens is, if you’ve been used to taking a certain amount of a drug and then you go back to taking that same amount after you’ve been off it for a bit, it’s too much.”

  Oprah had expected to be shunned after her sister’s tabloid revelations. “I imagined that every person on the street was going to point their finger at me and scream, ‘Pregnant at fourteen, you wicked girl….’ No one said a word, though—not strangers, not even people I knew. I was shocked. Nobody treated me differently.”

  It’s impossible to estimate how many women Oprah helped with the story of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but she must have been a beacon to those who had endured similar sadness and shame. Because of her reach and visibility, her words carried weight with her audiences, who saw her as a woman of courage and determination. Having refused to be defeated by her searing childhood, she inspired hope, and women everywhere could look at the success she had made of her life and believe in a similar salvation for themselves. In sharing her own shame, Oprah inevitably touched thousands and helped them release their guilt by showing them they were not alone. In that sense her show became the healing ministry she had always claimed it to be.

  The public humiliation she endured during this time seemed to lead to a more empathetic Oprah, one who showed a new sensitivity to the exploitation of some of her “conflict” programs. “The day I felt clearly the worst I’ve ever felt on television was in 1989, when we were still live and we had the wife, the girlfriend, and the husband, and on the air the husband [unexpectedly] announced to the wife the girlfriend was pregnant. And the expression on her face…I looked at her and felt horrible for myself and felt horrible for her. So I turned to her and said, ‘I’m really sorry you had to be put in this position and you had to hear this on television. This never should have happened.’ ” Still, Oprah would continue her “conflict” programming for another five years of rocketing ratings.

  Months earlier, the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Tom Shales had sounded the first knell against the “talk rot” infecting airwaves and polluting the atmosphere. “Hours and hours are frittered away on shock, schlock and folly,” he wrote in The Washington Post. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader singled out The Oprah Winfrey Show as the number one polluter. “They get all their ideas from the National Enquirer,” Nader said. As an example of the shows Shales said Oprah was spoon-feeding “boob tube boobs,” he cited a few weeks of her topics: subservient women, paternity fights, infidelity, man-hunting, threesomes, wife beaters, and shopaholics.

  Even Erma Bombeck took a soft swipe at Oprah in her syndicated column. “I find myself grabbing for the listing every day to see what will come up next,” she wrote. “Recently Oprah had a panel of men who thought their aunts were their mothers. Where do they find these people? Do individuals with unusual circumstances write the producers of the show and say: ‘Hey, if you ever do something on spaceship babies trying to find their mother, I’m living in Chicago and would love to talk about it’? Or does a call go out for ‘Women Who Raise Their Husbands as an Only Child,’ encouraging them to submit résumés?” The beloved humorist may have thought she was poking gentle fun, but Oprah’s producers do maintain a huge computerized retrieval system from on-air solicitations, plus the two to four thousand letters they receive every week, many of which run to several pages of intimate revelations. There are also several separate databases for potential interviewees, guests, and experts on every subject imaginable. Erma Bombeck did not live long enough to see Oprah’s show of April 3, 2008, in which Oprah interviewed a transgender man who became pregnant so he and his wife could raise a child. He explained that he had taken male hormones, had his breasts removed, and legally changed his gender to male, but he decided not to have his female reproductive organs removed. He subsequently gave birth to a girl. That show provided Oprah with a 45 percent ratings increase over the previous week of shows.

  Normally, she shrugged off her critics by citing her huge ratings; only occasionally did she admit to being “galled” by their criticism. “My answer to those who say [my] show is exploitative is that life is exploitative, sensational, bizarre, filled with trash and weird things. Television is where these subjects should be discussed.” After all, she added, she didn’t do bigots, racists, and sadomasochists anymore. “And I’ll never do devil-worship again,” she said. It would take her a fe
w more years to acknowledge her embarrassing contributions to trash television. At the time, she maintained that her tabloid shows were educational.

  But it wasn’t all squalor all the time on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Though never as substantive as Donahue, she still presented a few serious subjects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the escalating crisis in American education and declining literacy among the young. (She promoted that show by looking into the camera and asking, “How dumb are we?”) She explored drunk driving in a show with offenders and victims who had been catastrophically injured by intoxicated motorists. Later she said if she had a twenty-year-old son who got drunk, got in a car, and killed a pedestrian, she would testify against him in court. “I would put his ass in jail. I would say ‘I love you, but your ass is going to jail.’ I haven’t even lost anybody in this way, but the soft laws on this make me crazy. I think when someone is a drunk driver, he should hang. And since I don’t believe in capital punishment, that means you just hang him till he turns blue, then revive him for a while, and then put him back up to hang some more. Then you tie a knot around his privates….I have no tolerance on this issue.”

  She was one of the first to examine sexual abuse of children by the clergy, and she told the story of AIDS in several different shows, including one about whether networks should run commercials advertising the use of a certain brand of condom as protection against AIDS. Despite those in her audience vehemently opposed to such advertising, Oprah announced that she was handing out free samples of “safe-sex kits” that included condoms. She even ventured into public service with shows such as “What to Do in an Emergency,” demonstrating artificial respiration and the Heimlich maneuver. She raised more than $1 million in credit-card donations for Hurricane Hugo victims during a show from Charleston, South Carolina. “This is the quickest response from individuals that we have ever seen in a fund-raising effort,” said James Krueger of the Red Cross.