by Kitty Kelley
“Do you suppose anyone has ever had the nerve to tell Oprah Winfrey to go soak her head?” wrote The Washington Post’s TV critic, Tom Shales, about her production of David and Lisa, which was directed by Oprah’s first Baltimore boyfriend, Lloyd Kramer. “[H]er evangelistic tendencies are beginning to spin way out of control….She’ll improve and nurture and inspire us even if it kills us.” Shales objected to Oprah’s on-camera introduction: “She tells us what the film is about, what the moral message is and how we should react to it….She also spells out some of the plot, perhaps for people who move their lips when they watch TV….Winfrey playing national nanny is getting to be a drag. ‘It’s a story I wanted to tell to a whole new generation,’ she says grandly into the camera. Oh, Oprah. Give it a rest already.”
She brought the same high moral fervor to the making of Beloved. “It’s my history. It is my legacy. It is the capital WHO of who I am,” she said of the three-hour film that cost $53 million to produce, plus another $30 million to promote. “It’s wonderful to be in the position to finance the movie yourself,” she said. “I don’t care if two people come to see it or two million. This movie will be done and it will be incredible, one of the great statements in my life.”
To prepare for her role she began collecting slave memorabilia, buying at auction ownership papers from various plantations, which listed the names and purchase prices of humans alongside those of mules and pigs under the designation of “property.” She framed the wrenching documents and hung them in her home and in her trailer during filming. Five generations removed from slavery, she lit candles to “the spirits of the ancestors,” said she heard the voices of slaves and prayed aloud to them every day. She bought as her “first very serious art purchase from Sotheby’s” a painting by Harry Roseland titled To the Highest Bidder, which she hung over the fireplace in her Indiana farm. The canvas shows a black slave and her young daughter trembling with fear on the auction block.
Oprah also enrolled in “The Underground Railroad Immersion Experience,” to reenact the emotions of a runaway slave who has been denied free will and independent thinking. For two days she lived as a fugitive, blindfolded, chased by bloodhounds, and spat upon by whiskeyed slave masters on horseback. “I knew I was still Oprah Winfrey, and I could take off the blindfold anytime I wanted, but the reaction to being called a nigger was just visceral for me. I wanted to quit. But I didn’t. I wanted to feel it all. I touched a dark, hollow place of hopelessness that I’ll never forget. It was a transforming experience for me. I came out fearless because I truly learned where I came from.”
Oprah was determined to present a story that exposed how slaves absorbed the abuse of their masters, turning it on their own—physically, sexually, emotionally. The taboo theme of sexual abuse, so frequently left out of slave narratives, drew her because of her own personal experience, and she resolved to show the horror of sexual molestation on-screen. She wanted audiences to experience slavery in a way they never had before: to see a woman lynched, bound with tight leather cords, a metal shiv jammed in her mouth; to hear the rope crack her neck; and to smell her corpse as it is left to rot in the gallows. Oprah wanted people to feel the lash of whips cutting across a bloody black back, leaving a tree of scarred welts. She intended to produce something more memorable than the miniseries Roots, Alex Haley’s sweeping slave epic that transfixed 130 million television viewers in 1977. “While Roots was magnificent and necessary for its time, it showed what slavery looked like, rather than what it felt like,” Oprah said. “You don’t know what the whippings really did to us.”
With Beloved, she planned to recast the story of slavery in America in all its hell and heroism. “We got it all wrong,” she said of the history books. “For years we’ve talked about the physicality of slavery—who did what and who invented that. But the real legacy lies in the strength and courage to survive.”
She wanted nothing less than to change America’s consciousness with her film, and to heal racial wounds. “I understand a lot of what that conflict is about,” she said. “It’s about people truly not understanding one another. Once you understand, come to know people and have a knowledge of their hearts, the color of their skin means nothing to you.”
During his second term in office, President Bill Clinton had called for a “national conversation on race,” and Oprah felt the president would have done well to have chosen her to lead that conversation. “He should’ve,” she told USA Weekend. “I know how to talk to people….Everything is about imagery. We’re people who respond to imagery. You need to see something different so you can feel something different.”
She felt that her production of Beloved would provide the needed differential. “I just want this movie to be received in the way that I truly think it should be,” she said. “I want people to be moved and disturbed by the power of Sethe. If that can happen, I’ll be satisfied for a very long time.”
When the film came out, the critics were moved but, disturbingly to Oprah, in the wrong direction. Most found her film too long, too confusing, and overwrought, and her acting less than star-making. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin said she was not “an intuitive actress”; The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann said she was merely “competent”; and Commonweal’s Richard Alleva dismissed her as “surprisingly dim.” But her good friend Roger Ebert, the film critic, said she gave “a brave deep performance,” and Time’s Richard Corliss agreed. “This isn’t a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting.” Even Toni Morrison, who worried about Oprah’s ability to contain her oozing emotions, was impressed. “As soon as I saw her I smiled to myself, because I did not think of the brand name,” said Morrison. “She looked like Sethe. She inhabited the role.” But the public did not want to see Oprah as Sethe and watch her water breaking, or see her breast milk stolen by “mossy-toothed” white men, or her slitting the throat of her baby girl. In a perceptive column for the Chicago Sun-Times Mary A. Mitchell, herself an African American, summed up why:
Who are these kinds of movies supposed to appeal to anyway? Are black people supposed to enjoy being reminded that they were once chattel and treated like animals? Are whites supposed to empathize with such a fate and leave the theater more sensitive to its legacy? How many of us really, when swept into a sea of guilt, humiliation and anger, call it a good time? A documentary that guides us there is one thing. A star-studded cast is another. Unless you’re a masochist, pain is not entertaining. If only these movies fostered a deeper understanding between the races, they would be worth the agony. But that is hardly the case.
Beloved was released on October 16, 1998, with one of the most expensive ($30 million), media-saturating publicity campaigns ever accorded a film—and perhaps that was part of the problem. To some people Oprah appeared to be promoting herself more than her movie, or the important message behind the movie, especially when she appeared on the cover of Vogue, the bible of fashion elites. The editor, Anna Wintour, who weighed barely one hundred pounds, had flown to Chicago to tell Oprah she had to lose weight before she could be considered for the cover. “It was a very gentle suggestion,” recalled Wintour, who filled her pages with runway whippets. “She knew she had to lose weight….I suggested that it might be an idea….I said simply, ‘You might feel more comfortable.’ ” Then she added, “She promised she would lose twenty pounds by our deadline.”
Later, André Leon Talley, Vogue’s editor at large, and quite sizeable himself, told Oprah, “Most of the Vogue girls are so thin, tremendously thin, because Miss Anna don’t like fat people.”
Like a fashion slave hearing her master’s voice, Oprah rushed off to a weight-loss boot camp and began sipping broth, climbing mountains, and running eight miles a day to get down to 150 pounds. Only then did Ms. Wintour allow her to pose for noted photographer Steven Meisel, a favorite of Diana, Princess of Wales. Oprah’s Vogue cover, in October 1998, sold 900,000 copies and became the top seller in the magazine’s 110-year history. Oprah later told Sheila McLennan fr
om BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that the idea of being on the cover of Vogue wasn’t even a fantasy for a little girl who claimed to have been called “colored,” “ugly,” and “Buckwheat.” Oprah devoted one of her shows to her Vogue makeover and flew to New York when Wintour hosted a cocktail party at Balthazar Restaurant during Fashion Week to unveil the cover.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Stedman Graham when he first saw the photo of Oprah lounging seductively in a black strapless Ralph Lauren gown. “It’s like the culmination of all that she’s worked for….From being overweight to this point is one of the greatest victories a person can have.”
It may have been this kind of thinking—putting the glamour of a weight-loss makeover on an equal footing with overcoming slavery—that caused the publicity and promotion surrounding Beloved to backfire.
In addition to Vogue, Oprah promoted her film by posing for the covers of TV Guide, USA Weekend, InStyle, Good Housekeeping, and Time, which heralded her with four articles and eleven pages as “The Beloved Oprah.” Days after the film’s release, she arranged a special showing for New Age guru Marianne Williamson’s Church of Today in Detroit and told the congregation, which included Rosa Parks, sitting in the front row, “Beloved is my gift to you.” On the day the film opened, The Oprah Winfrey Show presented the cast of Beloved and the making of the movie. “I’m having my baby,” she told her audience. That same day launched publication of Journey to Beloved, by Oprah Winfrey, with photographs by Ken Regan—a forty-dollar coffee-table book of the daily diary Oprah kept during the three months of filming, in which she also recorded her shock over the murder of the designer Gianni Versace in Miami and the startling death of the Princess of Wales in a Paris tunnel. But most of her entries concerned filming Beloved, which Oprah said was the only time in her life, other than filming The Color Purple, when she was truly happy. A few excerpts:
Tuesday, June 17, 1997: The tree [prosthetic scars] went on my back. I wept. Could not but tried to stop myself. Couldn’t. There’s a tree on my back. Felt it. I pray to be able to trust to go all the way there. To feel the depth, power of what it all means.
Tuesday, July 1, 1997: The morning was abuzz with talk of a meeting in my trailer. Word was we needed a conference about me looking “too pretty.” This is a first! In all my days I have never been called too pretty or expected this to be a subject of discussion. My teeth are too white. I’m too “luminescent.” I need more sweat….Lord, it is a new day.
Friday, September 12, 1997: It’s a bittersweet time. My final day of shooting in the summer of my dreams. A dream bigger than anything my heart can ever hold. It will be a long time before I can take it all in. I can honestly say I embraced every moment, I did it my way. I have no regrets.
Oprah promoted her movie as medicine that is good for you whether or not you like it, and she sat for hours giving newspaper and television interviews. “The thing about this movie is…you really have to pay attention,” she told one reporter. “And that’s why this is probably my 135th interview….Because I want people to know that there has not been a movie like this before, and you need to be prepared….People need to know that this is a movie that requires your full attention, just as all art does. That it stimulates, is deep, goes down, down, down and comes back up again.”
She gave these interviews under strict control: she could be quoted, but she would not be photographed unless the photographer agreed to sell her the rights to the images, an almost unheard-of request. Otherwise, all pictures of Oprah—airbrushed and stylized—had to be provided by Harpo. Each article had to run in the local newspaper and could not be put on the wire services, where other newspapers might pick it up. She set similar limitations on The Today Show and Good Morning America, stipulating one-time use of her words and images.
During a 20/20 segment on ABC with Diane Sawyer, Oprah held forth on the subject of race, saying the country still shows the wounds of slavery. “It will be all right if [only] we’re willing to have the courage to open up the wound, look at it. That’s the only way it’s going to get all right.”
SAWYER: What do you see in white people today living with slavery?
WINFREY: Denial. Absolute denial.
SAWYER: But for everyone to go back and see it, it’s probably white America saying, “Again? Go back again?”
WINFREY: That is so ridiculous.
SAWYER: What do we gain by going back to it again?
WINFREY: We haven’t even gone there. Going back to it again? We have not even begun to peel back those layers. We haven’t even ever gone there. This is the first time.
The public, black and white, did not want “to peel back those layers” and wallow in murder, rape, and racial mayhem. Despite efforts by Oprah and Disney Studios to sell the movie as a mother’s love story, nobody was buying, not even Oprah’s core audience of middle-aged women. Within six weeks of its release, Beloved was declared a box office flop, lagging behind the universally panned Bride of Chucky. It ultimately had a domestic box office gross of $22,843,047, after costing $83,000,000 to make and market.
People were astonished that the media Midas had produced and promoted something that had not turned to gold. Oprah, too, was shocked, although to the press she remained defiantly proud, and when promoting the film abroad, she blamed its failure on U.S. audiences. She told the The Times of London, “I think the reason why the film has not been received as well in America as I expected is because people in America are afraid of race and any discussion about race. I don’t think it has anything to do with me in the role. I think for a lot of Americans the issue of race is so volatile that to bring it out front makes people embarrassed.”
She told the Sunday Express that U.S. audiences stayed away because of their guilt over slavery. “The whole country was in denial,” she said. Years later the comedian Jackie Mason rapped Oprah for saying that America was racist. “Please!” he said to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. “There’s very little bigotry against Jews in this country anymore or racism against blacks. Oprah Winfrey stands up and says, ‘This is a racist society.’ She’s got billions. You’ve got a dollar and a quarter, but it’s a racist society. She’s a sick yenta.”
The next day Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column that she did not agree that there was no anti-Semitism or racism in America, “but you’ve got to hand it to Jackie Mason. There aren’t too many people in showbiz who are brave enough to call Oprah a ‘sick yenta.’ ”
At the time Beloved was dying at the box office, Oprah’s friends ached for her. “That film was the dearest thing to her heart,” said Gayle King. “She felt more passionate about it than anything I’ve ever seen her do.” Acknowledging Oprah’s distress, Maya Angelou said, “I don’t know if Beloved is a commercial failure. It’s not the commercial hit that Oprah and others wanted, but it’s a majestic film and a great film. It will have its own life.” The director, Jonathan Demme, said, “I’d love to make another movie with Oprah…I’d like to find her a comedy. And we wouldn’t hype it as much as Beloved.”
When Whoopi Goldberg appeared at Harvard for a campus event a few weeks after the film was released, she was asked whether Oprah represented all of black womanhood. Goldberg giggled, wrinkled her face, and joked that something “flew up my nose.” The crowd in Sanders Theatre laughed.
“It’s great to see that someone can create a frenzy the way Oprah has,” Whoopi said, “but it’s unfortunate it sort of backfired on the movie.”
Sitting in the front row that day, Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr., asked Goldberg why she thought Beloved had failed at the box office.
“I don’t think people are there yet. I believe you have to be very careful when you’re as big as Oprah that your audience doesn’t get lost.” Then she said, “I know if I answer you truthfully I’ll have to answer for it [later] and I don’t want to get into that with her.”
Unfortunately, Whoopi’s remarks were reported in 1998, and seven years later Oprah was still so angry she would not in
vite Whoopi to the “Legends Weekend” she hosted in 2005 to celebrate the accomplishments of African American women. The rebuke was stunning, considering that few African American women had won more artistic awards than Whoopi Goldberg. She is one of only ten artists to receive the five major entertainment awards: an Academy Award (Ghost), two Golden Globes (The Color Purple and Ghost), an Emmy (Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel), a Tony for producer (Thoroughly Modern Millie), and a Grammy (Whoopi Goldberg Direct from Broadway). In addition, she has won a BAFTA award and four People’s Choice Awards, and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her exclusion from Oprah’s Legends Weekend seemed petty.
After the debacle of Beloved and the collapse of her dream to become a grand movie star, Oprah fell into a deep depression. “I was beyond hurt. I was stunned. I was devastated by the reaction….I’ve been so in synch with the way people think and I’ve never been wrong. This was a first. The first time in my life…I felt rejected and it was a public rejection….” She vowed: “I will never do another film about slavery. I won’t try to touch race again in this form.” She said she turned to food for comfort. “Like a heroin addict goes to heroin, I went to carbs,” she said, explaining her macaroni and cheese binges. “I tried praying about it and I gave myself a 30-day limit: If I didn’t feel better, I was heading to a psychiatrist. I asked God what this experience was supposed to teach me. Eventually I realized I was allowing myself to feel bad because of my attachment to an expectation that 60 million people would see the film. When I let go of that, I was healed.”