by Kitty Kelley
We had decided it was going to be this fall. I had made an appointment with Oscar de la Renta. I was going to consult with the almanac on what week the leaves would be the best color and all that stuff. And then this whole book thing erupted. So we’re going to resume talking about it, I guess.
The next month (November 1993), she told Chicago magazine:
We are still getting married. But we did not set a date. Never. Let me say it again: We…did…not…set…a date. So how can we put it off? That was a notion concocted out of thin air by the press. It has nothing to do with the truth of Stedman and me….But we will do it [get married]. Does that answer your question? This impression that we’ve broken up and gotten back together and broken up again, it is absolutely, categorically not true. Not true. It’s a media-created story. Let me say again, it is not true…we have never broken up. Not once.
That same month (November 1993) a writer from McCall’s interviewed her and noticed the books sitting on her desk: Martha Stewart’s Weddings, Eleanor Munro’s Wedding Readings, and a paperback titled Wedding Planner. Yet Oprah said, “I have never set a date for the wedding. It’s because of the tabloids that there’s a public perception the wedding has been on and off. I am in no hurry to get married. I dislike this notion of a desperate woman who wants to get married.”
Four months later (February 1994) she told Ladies’ Home Journal:
There was a time in my life when I needed marriage to validate myself. But now I’m very content with what my relationship gives me….I’m very sorry I ever mentioned Stedman’s name to the press. This whole wedding thing might not be such a big issue, if I had never mentioned it.
Then in Vogue (October 1998) she said:
We were supposed to get married September 8, 1993. Because that was my father’s wedding day. My book, the big autobiography thing, was supposed to come out on September 12 and Stedman said, “All of that’s gonna get confused. You can’t do both at the same time. So we should postpone the wedding.” So I said, “OK, fine. We’ll postpone it.” And I will tell you, it has never been discussed again. It is not even an issue. The relationship works.
Perhaps her most telling comment was to the Daily Mail (February 2006):
He proposed about ten years ago, so I called a little gathering of a few friends and I was trembling. Gayle said, “That’s just cold feet.” I said, “This is not just cold feet; it’s two feet in an ice bucket.” At the time we’d been together almost a decade. We’d chosen the date and my autobiography was supposed to be coming out two days after the wedding. Stedman said he did not approve of the book because telling the truth about my life would embarrass my family, and why would I want to do that?
While Stedman was aware of Oprah’s traumatic childhood and the sexual molestation she had endured, her teenage pregnancy, her promiscuity, her disastrous affair with the married man in Baltimore, and even her past drug use, he was not prepared for the jolt of seeing it all laid out so starkly on the page. He objected to her naming the men in her family who had sexually abused her, and he was especially disturbed by the harsh way she had written about her mother.
For years Oprah had been telling viewers and interviewers that her mother had abandoned her shortly after she was born. “I was not wanted,” she had said. “I was born in shame.” Only after her collaborator, Joan Barthel, did some preliminary research did Oprah realize that her mother had been with her in Kosciusko for the first four and a half years of her life before leaving her in the care of her own mother, Hattie Mae Lee, to go “up North” to find a better-paying job. Yet in her autobiography, Oprah blamed her mother for the sexual molestation that befell her after she moved to Milwaukee, and Stedman objected. “Your mother doesn’t need to read that she was not there for you,” he said.
Oprah had also named all her sexual abusers, including her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, who was still alive. In addition, Oprah felt her father had let her down when she tried to tell him what his brother had done to her during the summer of 1968. “I was in a rage about my abusers,” she said. “I went into complete detail of the whole rape scene. How lonely that feels when you’re ten [sic] years old and you’re somebody’s play thing….I was not responsible. No child is. Those men abused me, a baby. And there is nothing more despicable.”
She also wrote about her pregnancy at the age of fourteen. “Where I spent half the time in denial and half trying to hurt myself to lose the child.”
Stedman felt that such private matters should be discussed within the family and not on the pages of a book for everyone to read. He later flew to Nashville to talk to Vernon Winfrey, who called his daughter and then came to her Indiana farm to say he was sorry about how he had reacted to her story of rape.
“I know she feels that I didn’t handle it well [when she first told us],” Vernon said. “But Trent [who died in 1997] was my closest brother. We were torn.” Vernon later admitted that Trent was probably the father of Oprah’s baby.
Oprah recalled the conversation with her father at the farm as unsatisfactory. He had said, “ ‘Were you raped? Did he rape you?’ What he was saying was, ‘Were you forced against your will? Did you actively participate?’ That’s when I said, ‘You don’t get it. When you’re 13 [sic] years old and in the car and it’s happening, it is rape.’ ”
Oprah had also written about her drug use and smoking crack with her married lover in Baltimore. “I thought he was more open and more loving with me [when we were doing drugs]. I had heard about Richard Pryor freebasing but when it was offered to me, I didn’t know that that’s what it was.” This was a brave admission on Oprah’s part. She later went public about her drug use because, as she said, “There are some people who knew it was in the book and had been threatening to go to the press. So because I am a public person more and more shame became attached to the secret.”
She admitted her foray into smoking crack in the comfortable setting of her own show in 1995, while tearfully empathizing with two recovering female addicts. “I did your drug,” she told a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine, and those four little words made headlines. The British journalist Ginny Dougary found Oprah’s confession oddly so-what-ish. “Sensational revelation, including the host’s own, is the show’s stock in trade,” she wrote. “[But this was] unshocking after all the fuss in the press because Oprah never specified the precise nature of her drug use.” Dougary asked her if she was a cocaine addict. “No, I was not addicted,” Oprah said. Years later Randy Cook, her live-in drug partner for five months in 1985, disputed her statement.
Oprah acknowledged that her fiancé, understandably, was not enthusiastic about what she had written. “He didn’t say anything was too explicit or shouldn’t be said. He said it wasn’t powerful enough.” She felt her book lacked “clarity” and “introspection,” and Stedman, a devotee of self-help and how-to books, said that it lacked “inspiration.” He wanted her book to be more than an autobiography. “My experiences were meant to empower people,” she said, “and make sense of life.”
Yet Stedman’s objections to the tone and content of her book were not the sole justifications for the cancellation. In a private conversation with a man who had received a telephone call from Oprah, she said, “The reason I pulled my book was because Maya Angelou came to me after the big ABA announcement and said, ‘Is there anything in that book that is exaggerated? Is there anything that is not true in that book?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, some things are written to read well. You know that. Some things are, you know…’
“No, baby, I don’t know,” said Maya. “I only know that you cannot have one exaggerated story, one untruth, one embroidered recollection. You cannot. If you do, take that book back. Do not publish it.”
Angelou understood her friend’s tendency to embellish for effect, perhaps pad a story for a laugh or a little sympathy. Angelou, who loved Oprah like a daughter, did not want her to be publicly humiliated by the media, which she said would peck her to death if they found manuf
actured anecdotes.
Interestingly, one of the publishers who read the manuscript, but whose company did not acquire it, was more concerned about Oprah’s hard truths than her soft lies, particularly what she wrote about being a prostitute—the first time she had ever used that word to describe her adolescent promiscuity.
“I told her at the time she didn’t need to tell people about that,” said the publisher. “It was not necessary for everyone to know she had been a prostitute. Besides, I knew that she’d see it in print and pull back, which is exactly what she did. I’ve published enough celebrity memoirs to know what can happen between the initial excitement of selling their story and then actually publishing it. Once they see the seamy stuff down on the page that they left behind in their crawl to the top, they pull back. They either delete it or rewrite it….It’s called revisionist history.”
The story of Oprah’s days as an adolescent prostitute had been partially disclosed by her sister in the National Enquirer in 1990, but the tabloid revelation was ignored by the mainstream media, so those who did not read the grocery store press had no idea about Oprah’s sordid past beyond what she chose to share on her show. For her now to admit in her autobiography that she had once been a prostitute—that was the hard truth; the unvarnished version of what her sister had described as Oprah making money by sneaking men into the house to do “The Horse”—was guaranteed to be headline-making news. Such an admission would be particularly difficult for her father, who still could not bring himself to use the word prostitute to describe his teenage daughter. To this day he cannot face that truth. Instead, he characterizes that troubled period of Oprah’s life as one of her “dark secrets.”
Oprah was so concerned about Angelou’s warning that she summoned her and six other equally close friends to her farm in Indiana for the weekend after ABA. She gave all seven, including Stedman and Gayle, copies of the manuscript and asked for their honest assessment of whether she should go forward with publication. To a person, each recommended she cancel. During that weekend she was made to see that some people might not react kindly to finding out that what she had always called her “adolescent sexual promiscuity” was actually prostitution. Having been sexually abused as a child, she had garnered great sympathy from her audiences, who saw her as a victim of vicious predators and someone who had gone on to do great things to help other victims. Why mar that now? Why put forward something that could obliterate all the goodwill she had accumulated? Viewers might not be prepared to accept their heroine as a former hooker, or overlook the gulf between adolescent promiscuity and selling yourself for money. No one wanted Oprah to chip away at the pedestal on which she stood. “Why give them a club?” was the general reaction of those who wanted to protect her. She had constructed a revered public image as someone who had triumphed over racism, poverty, and sexual abuse, and to now admit to something like this might diminish all that. Her enemies would pounce, her fans could feel betrayed, and her sponsors might withdraw. It was simply too big a risk.
In the past Oprah controlled the release of information about herself, except for her sister’s tabloid revelations about her teenage pregnancy. Her sister had alluded to her prostitution, but even in that case Oprah had issued a carefully worded statement about her pregnancy and been allowed to retreat into silence without being subjected to the probing questions of reporters. She would not be given the luxury of that kind of control on a thirty-city book promotional tour during which she could be asked the kinds of questions she frequently asked of others, especially young women, who had sold themselves for money.
A reading of a few of Oprah’s past shows indicates how she attempted to explore the subject of the world’s oldest profession, prostitution:
“Profiling Prostitutes” (11/6/86)
“Call Girls and Madams” (10/29/87)
“Housewife Prostitutes” (9/5/88)
“Suburban Teens: The New Prostitutes” (9/25/88)
“Who Really Goes to Prostitutes?” (10/31/96)
“Living a Secret Life” (9/21/04)
“Children Being Sold into Sexual Slavery” (11/2/05)
“Inside the Lives of Young Prostitutes” (5/8/06)
“Inside the Notorious Bunny Ranch Brothel” (4/29/09)
Oprah wanted to play a prostitute on-screen after hearing Gloria Steinem’s true story about a woman who had been jailed for prostitution and wondered why her pimps and her customers weren’t in jail with her. The woman went to the prison library for law books, and upon her release continued studying until she finished high school, attended college at night, and finally became a lawyer. “I’m definitely going to do a lusty romantic role,” said Oprah, “based on that true story….I’ll get to be a hooker and have a pimp. Can’t wait for that.”
After reading Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s autobiographical script about her childhood as a prostitute and her eventual involvement in the civil rights movement, Oprah joined four other women in 1991 to finance a production of From the Mississippi Delta at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre.
Years later she returned to the subject of prostitution in one of her After the Show segments, which she taped for the Oxygen network. She interviewed the writer Jeannette Angell, who received a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School and later wrote a book titled Callgirl, chronicling her three years as a prostitute. The book is blunt and unapologetic about what she did to pay for her education. “It’s really the ideal college job,” Angell told the Yale Daily News. “I hate to say this but it’s true. It’s the perfect way to get through school because you have a minimum of time commitment for a maximum of money.”
Oprah was less than hospitable to Angell, and from her facial expressions and cold tone of voice, she appeared to look down on her. “Boy, was your high school shocked,” Oprah said. “Did you feel bad…did you feel high about it? Is it like a blind date? I’m just curious how do you do that? Do you get more [money] for…um…other things? Is there at least a pretense?…Do you have a conversation first?”
The writer soldiered through the segment and tried to laugh off what was a contentious examination by America’s most beloved talk show host. When asked how she felt about getting fricasseed by Oprah Winfrey on national television after being promised a supportive environment in which to tell her story, Jeannette Angell responded by email: “Unfortunately, I am contractually prohibited from speaking or writing about my experience with anyone at Harpo. The company has far more and far better attorneys than I can afford. You may find that this is true of many people—even people who were with me, but not actually on the show, were obliged to sign contracts. With hindsight that should have raised a red flag right there. I wish I had seen it then.”
Oprah reconsidered going public with her youthful tiptoe into prostitution, and after listening to her closest friends, she decided to cancel publication of her memoir. She later said it was the smartest thing she ever did, and from her point of view, she was absolutely right, although the writer Gretchen Reynolds said she “called down upon herself the worst publicity of her career.” That characterization seemed a bit overblown for the relatively mild press reaction to Oprah’s announcement, but it certainly captured Oprah’s own excessive descriptions of her personal experiences, which were always “the most devastating,” “the most difficult,” “the worst,” “the most painful,” “the most awful.”
Yet, while she always seemed to reach for the superlative to describe her feelings as a victim, she felt her book lacked the emotional insight to make it resonate with readers. She was unable to convey the beguiling contradictions that made her so fascinating, particularly the intriguing composition of a deeply secretive woman whose universal appeal sprang from her openness and her supposed spontaneity. It’s part of the human condition to have two selves in the same psyche, but Oprah felt she could not chance exposing her dark self and possibly diminish the luminosity of her bright self.
She also worried that canceling the book would make “al
l the people at Knopf hate me,” so the following year she gave the publisher her chef’s book of low-fat recipes and wrote the foreword for In the Kitchen with Rosie. Oprah’s newly slimmed body was the book’s best advertisement, but she also invited Rosie onto the show on the day of publication. As a result, the book sold more than a million copies within the first three weeks. A year later it was in its thirty-sixth printing, with 5.9 million copies sold.
“I told Knopf, ‘I think this is going to be big.’ They were only printing about 400,000 copies,” said Oprah. “I called Sonny Mehta and said, ‘I don’t think that’s going to be enough.’ He said, ‘Oprah, you don’t understand. We’ve done Julia Child, all the great cookbooks, and I’m telling you, 400,000 is an extraordinary amount for a cookbook. It’s unheard of.’ And I go, ‘OK. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.’ I had been dieting ten years straight on TV. People saw this book as the answer….It [became] the fastest selling book in the history of publishing. I can’t resist an I-Told-You-So. That’s really a character flaw. Wooo, I can’t resist. Kinda live for that moment when an I-Told-You-So has to come up. So when you couldn’t find the book in the stores, and there were waiting lists everywhere, I couldn’t resist calling up Sonny Mehta, who’s operating presses 24 hours a day, and saying, ‘Sonny, I recall telling you…’ And he said…‘Never in the history of publishing have we seen anything like it. Never. It’s a phenomenon. No one could have predicted it.’ [I said,] ‘I tried to tell you.’ ”
With her own book canceled and her wedding now on hold, Oprah said she needed a grand Hollywood party to celebrate her fortieth birthday on January 29, 1994. She turned the planning over to Debra DiMaio, a maniac for detail, with only one request: that the weekend include a slumber party. This childhood ritual had been a surprise gift for her birthday the year before. “We even had her favorite Dr. Denton’s footie pajamas waiting for her,” recalled Gayle King. “As a kid, she never had sleepovers. She never even had a bicycle.”